Becoming Mormon

Most compicated religions have extensive training programs that begin practically at birth.  Consider the Jewish ritual of the bris.  A male becomes a Jew at eight days of life.  A Catholic is inducted in an elaborate ceremony involving a priest, a church, holy water, a name, godparents, and a public celebration.  The Mormon indoctrination really does begin very early, but there is an alternate path for those who wish to self-adopt the faith, and in a way, those who do so are celebrated as being more "special" than the ones who lazily plopped into the faith from their mothers' wombs because they had to search and recognize and work for it.  It was into this that I, and later my sister, willingly placed our hearts and minds. 

In retrospect, I wish we had had the internet, because my mother would have googled "Mormon," read up about the religion, and said "No!" to our request to participate.  She never joined because the Mormons put their men in charge, and she couldn't see taking that oath, and I don't blame her.  My father never joined, because the tithing would require him to figure out exactly how much is ten percent, making him thus accountable, and he didn't want to be accountable with his money.  He wanted to not know how much money he had.  I respect his utter honesty.  I would have figured it out, but what a great man to tell his fourteen-year-old child the truth about himself. 

The first step is the lessons, laid out like a legal interrogation wherein the obvious answer to each question, "Yes," lead inexorably to the next question, whose "Yes" would result in the obvious, logical conclusion that the Mormon Church is the One True Church on the Face of the Earth, and it is only reasonable to join up with the great enterprise.  It is reason, not emotion, that is supposed to lead one into the Mormon Church, and the final act of the lessons is an assignment to "pray" for revelation to confirm what Reason has taught.

I admit that I prayed for revelation on the subject of whether the church was true, and got NOTHING.  Zip.  Nada.  No answer.  Throughout my twenty years in Mormonism, I received many revelations--spiritual intuitions--that a particular course of action was appropriate with respect to serving the needs of the community.  The Mormon God does want his children cared for appropriately in the organization, and I respect that.  But I never got the green light from God in general that the Mormon church was the real deal for me. 

But I wanted it.  I was impetuous.  I had an alcoholic father and a mother who smoked, both of which were affecting me adversely, and I wanted a world where the grownups didn't smoke and drink.  I didn't really know that this entire superstructure of world view, thought, gender roles, politics, life plans, and hierarchy were part of the whole ball of wax, and that I was embarking on a path that was ultimately not going to serve me as well as something I put together myself, but I couldn't see that.  All I saw was a very nice structure that I could use to get out of the house.

His Banner Over Me Is Love

While I was still shopping for churches in the Protestant world, I made friends with a girl named Connie, and for the life of me I don't know why she decided I would be a good Rainbow Girl, but she did.  

The Rainbow Girls is one of the girls' auxiliaries of the Masons.  Connie's father was a Mason, and got her in.  She asked if I wanted to join.  I didn't really know what it was, but I was new to the rural scene, and figured I needed something to belong to, mostly in order to meet people and get involved.  So I responded in the affirmative.  I floated the idea with my parents, and since my father was a Mason, the answer was in the affirmative.  He took me down to the Masonic lodge for an initial interview with the old Cajun, Jacques, who was the head of the group, despite not being a girl.  

Jacques was square.  About seventy and very tall, he had an imposing presence.  Being a Cajun and a Southerner, he was genteel, polite, and gallant.  He offered to sponsor me, since my father's bona fides could not be ascertained by that immediate group, a fact that neither surprised nor offended any of us.  My father was a member of the Spanish-speaking group out of Mexico, probably Derecho Humano, which was technically a Co-Masonic group and therefore at sixes and sevens with the Free and Accepted Masons.  The truth is, they didn't initiate Mexicans into the Masons in the 1970s; there was a separate branch of the organization for African-Americans, to which Mexicans weren't any more welcome than they were to the Anglo set.  Today, of course, that is all different, and many Hispanics are becoming Masons, but back then, racism was a lot more defined and virulent than it is today.  

Jacques always smiled at me and took particular care, I think, because I seemed to be something of an "orphan," as the child of a Mexican.  It wasn't that he looked down on us, but that he felt we somehow didn't have the advantages that the rest of the girls had.  I was invited to start moving up the chairs, and to everyone's surprised, memorized the pretty little speeches quickly and well.  I went to the summer conference in Dallas with the group.  I remember because we took the train up there.  In the snack car, I was offered a dish called "yogurt," which I accepted as a new experience.  I heard it was something they had in Europe, and being interested in learning about this thing, this authoritative thing called Europe, I tried it, the blueberry variety.  I first scooped into this incredibly sour stuff, and was told to spoon up the blueberries from the bottom of the cup.  I was hooked.  Dannon blueberry yogurt.  Back in the 1970s, yogurt in the United States was mostly sour and mostly made of whole milk.  It wasn't until the mid-1980s that the Dannon yogurt company decided to make it unbearably sweet.  The first time I tried the new super-sweet "New Coke" variety, I had the shock of my life and wrote to the Dannon company to complain.  They wrote back and said that most people in their focus groups liked it sweeter than I did, and recommended that I mix one regular with one sweet.  I abandoned prepackaged yogurt altogether.  

The conference was held in a lovely downtown hotel, and we attended classes on general moral education and service to freemasonry and the community.  It really is a feeder organization to the Order of the Eastern Star, the wifely auxiliary to freemasonry, and a secret backbone to middle-class Southern culture and community.  

Now that was an education.  

I spent about a year and a half with the organization, and only quit because the Mormons considered the Masons a cult.  

I still remember the initiation, with its hoodwinks and knocks, its ritualized little playlet about faith, hope, and charity, and the various trials the girls had to go through to get to the East.  It was gorgeous, and it was only in my late thirties that I finally let go of the small booklet that contained the ritual, not by giving it to the unwashed, but by decently disposing of it where no human eye could peep.  There are times I wish I could go back "home," but that home doesn't fit me any more.  I could not be a second class member as women are required to be, and don't currently have time for Co-Masonry.  But it was a glowing interval between the wilds of paganism and the even wilder currents of Mormonism.     

Those Clean-Cut Boys

The Mormons were very welcoming to me, and for a person who is hungering after righteousness, a user-friendly marketing program can make the difference between making the sale or not.

Sandra's parents asked my parents if I could receive the marketing spiel, called the "lessons," at their home.  My father was so focused on education, that he saw it as an opportunity for me to learn.  My mother saw it as me pursuing one of my innocent interests, so she agreed.

Little did we know the effect that this decision would have on our family for generations to come.

My mother and I have thought about that moment, and agreed that if there had been a Google, she would have simply Googled Mormon, read the first ten articles, and said "NO!"  I would never have asked to hear the lessons--I would have already known more about the Church than the missionaries, at least from a scholarly perspective.

But there was no significant historical information about the Mormons in the public library in that small East Texas town, even if we had driven thirty miles to do the research.  Sandra and her parents seemed nice enough, so we just went ahead with the lessons.

The lessons of 1977 were cleverly constructed, such that naive and undereducated Utah boys could read them like a checklist, ask the questions like lawyers, and yes/no their investigator into a rational acceptance of church doctrine.

At one point I asked, "How do you know what the doctrine is supposed to be?"  They replied, "The prophet tells us."  I continued, "How does the prophet know?"  They said, "God tells him."

Certainty.

They had me.

I have joined several cults since then, and am aware of the limitations of letting someone else say what God wants you to do.  But like Anne Hutchinson, I am still searching for individual connection to God, the revelation, the true certainty that comes--for one individual--from within.

Joining the true church was very "me" and it still is.  Only now, I know the true church is a one-up deal.  I have my own true church, and you have yours.

That's the only way to assure quality control.

Pioneer Day

Also down the street lived a girl from Utah.  Her mother was a Catholic, but her father was a Mormon, and it was decided somehow that her sister would be a Catholic but she would be a Mormon.  I guess the parents just went fifty-fifty on their children's religion.  The older sister looked like her mother, and the young one looked like the father.  It made sense that each child should take the religion of the parent they resembled.

She was a nice girl, a youngest child of older parents who spoiled her rotten while still instilling social graces.  Like me, she knew how to work her devoted father to get what she wanted.  At the age of fourteen, she had a car.

We were friends, so she invited me to go to church with her.  The rest of us in the neighborhood considered the Mormon church an essentially Utah experience, and at that point, it mostly was.  Most of the people at the church were from Utah, and those that weren't looked to Utah as some sort of mecca toward which the faithful faced when they pray.  We often heard the words, "In Utah . . . . "  People from Utah or those who had lived in Utah for a long period of time were seen as authorities on how to live.  The special Utah holiday Pioneer Day was celebrated in East Texas, even though none of our ancestors had crossed the planes in handcarts or starved in the snow.  My ancestors were Mexican cowboys who probably never saw snow, and if they had, would have had the sense not to walk through it more than absolutely necessary, risking their lives for the sake of a charismatic religion.  For this reason, they were not Pioneers, and not celebrated on July 24, not celebrated at all in the Mormon faith because they weren't Mormon ancestors, at least not yet.

Finding a Church

My brief encounter with the Baptists didn't make a Baptist, but it did show me that attending church was possible.  Now, to find a church that fit my taste.

My next door neighbors were Catholic.  Actually, the mother was.  The father converted to Catholicism I suspect because he knew it was more trouble than it was worth not to.  Their children were kinda sorta Catholic.  The older daughter was mostly interested in pissing off her mother, and church being her mother's thing, she broke all the rules as a point of honor.  The younger daughter went along with it, especially since the swag was so nice.  She was Catholic in the way that most white Americans are, a family habit, like eating turkey on Thanksgiving.  When she married, her mother made sure it was to a good Catholic boy with a big church wedding in a Southern belle-esque dress made by Mom.  I think after that, the Catholic dragon-mother could draw a quavering breath and die having accomplished her essential life's work of organizing the perfect Catholic wedding.

The mother spoke sweetly and lovingly of her faith.  Pictures of Jesus and Mary, with their tender hearts exposed, had pride of place in the spotless mobile home.  I was invited to attend church one fine day, and while there, asked the priest what was necessary to join the church.

He gave me a look of utter consternation.  In orthodox Judaism, a rabbi has a duty to make three vigorous attempts to dissuade anyone who seeks conversion.  I think this priest had the same mandate, because he informed me of the many obstacles to membership, and concluded with, "Do your parents know about this?"

I was too embarrassed to tell my parents about this fiasco.  There was no way they were going to attend that many meetings with the priest, bring me to catechism, and sign off on the arduous process of me becoming a Catholic, a faith that my mother considered as alien as Mars and my father considered a silly superstition of his youth.  So I signed off on the idea of being Catholic, though I liked the stateliness of it, the claims to ecclesiastical authority, the authenticity of the first church, the one the others came from.

Country Life

My mother had had it with the barrio.  She gave my father an ultimatum, and we moved to the 'burbs.

These were not the 'burbs of clean, cookie cutter houses, at least not completely.  Those are the planned development suburbs.  We moved to the exurbs, rightly speaking, what used to be rural.  Developers had built some subdivisions, but there were swaths of land with either nothing on them, or small, rural homes or mobiles.  We moved into a small house a man had built for himself and his family that had odd dimensions and crooked stuff, a house that was an admirable first effort at building a house by a person who never had and never would again.  I got the unfinished attic, with nothing between me and the ground but some boards so flimsily applied to the framing that I could have easily fallen out of the house.  My father had it jacked up three feet and had us shoveling dirt underneath for a quarter a load.  That's how my ambitious, athletic sister got her allowance.  I merely skipped lunch and used my lunch money for my own affairs.

I had reached puberty, the time when young people strive to do something.  As I mentioned before, my longings went in the direction of religion, and I began to look around for some kind of instruction.  This being the rural southeast, there was a church on about every other corner:  an Assembly of God, a Pentacostal church, several Baptist churches, a Methodist church.  The biggest, most luxurious church in our town was called the First Baptist Church, situated near the corner of a farm-to-market road and the highway, walking distance from Dairy Queen.  This was the first church I attended as a youth.

I had all but forgotten the bible school mandate to find a church.  What I found was that on Sunday morning, a church bus drove throughout out neighborhood picking up whatever kid wanted to get on it.  One day I got on the church bus and went to church.

It was a nice, big church, with nice pews and a lot of people.  There were a lot of lights and windows, so it was bright inside.  The preacher gave a noisy but kind-hearted sermon, at the conclusion of which he asked if anyone wanted to be saved.  I was the first one up.  I'm not sure I wanted to be saved so much as I wanted to belong to something in this new town, but saved I was.  They all welcomed me into the church and took my picture, which hung on the bulletin board for some weeks.  I was wearing a dark paisley dress with a large white pointy collar and had my long hair pulled back in a ponytail.  I looked not so much happy as eager.

I think I might have gone back twice.  Other than talking about Jesus, the church didn't seem to *do* anything.  Today I would say that it lacked a sense of cohesion.  In the 1970s, the culture wars had not heated up to the extent that the Baptist church was punching social issues--that has a lot of energy, and cohesion, though of a kind I am glad I got to avoid.  In the 1970s, the Southern Baptist Church was mostly a large, nice church of the Southern variety.  After church, we ate fried chicken after church, drank iced tea, and gossiped about the townspeople.  It was mostly just a Sunday go to meeting social event.

I was too Hispanic and too educated to feel that comfortable at the First Baptist Church.  My friends from school who were in this church were the pillars of society, the solid, reliable sorts, people who were acquaintances but with whom I did not have any real connection.

It just wasn't for me.

Bible School

Three blocks from my home was a Baptist Mission, set as a light to the moral darkness of the Mexican neighborhood.  It was run and, I suspect, largely financed by a family that owned a bakery.  The treats they gave out were whole cakes and packages of sweet rolls.  I suspect some of the kids came expressly for the pastry.  I know I enjoyed taking home those pink, coconut-covered confections, tasteless but for sugar.

The meetings were twice weekly, I think, after school on Wednesdays and on Saturdays.  First a preacher, Brother Something or Other, would give a sermon about accepting Jesus into your heart.  We would sing some Baptist songs, often with hand movements.  I remember "His Banner Over Me Is Love," our hands making a banner over us.  There were some good songs, and unlike the Catholic church, these were meant to be sung with gusto by the congregation.  I liked that.

After the initial program, there would be some classes.  We would be taught things I can't remember about Jesus and stuff.  I do remember the crafts: God's eyes, plaques, various flowery things.  We got to use glue and fire and scissors.  We took things home.

One day, frustrated that no one was accepting Jesus into their heart, Mrs. McQuorter reminded us of a boy who had been hit by a car and died.  To her knowledge, he, too, had not accepted Jesus into his heart.  He was in hell now, we were told, sadly.  I thought that wasn't fair.  I didn't know if he was in hell.  I kind of doubted it.  But I didn't like the idea that she would know the eternal destiny of a nine-year-old boy simply because he didn't do what she said, or what the Baptist Mission into the Mexican neighborhood said.  I wasn't sure I believed in hell anyway, or heaven, though I kind of did believe in Jesus.  Pictures of him were so compelling.

I remember sitting on the stairs next to a girl from around.  One of the boys stopped by and reminded her of what the group of boys had done to her.  She just nodded and looked away passively.  One afternoon as I was walking home, a boy named Tony tried to grab me for a gang rape.  I kicked him in the groin and ran.  The older boys laughed at this.  None of the others pursued, and Tony was doubled over in pain.  I forgot to tell my mother, who was lost in her depression anyway.  The incident didn't seem particularly noteworthy, since girls were raped all the time in the barrio.  Escaping rape was something you did, until your ticket got punched.

Summer brought vacation bible school.  We were bussed out to a camp near Katy.  The girls stayed in girl shacks and the boys in boy shacks.  There was a swimming pool where we spent much of the day.  In the mornings and evenings there were sermons and crafts, and after dinner a G-rated movie.  It was at vacation bible school that I had my first kiss.  Victor.  He was a perfect son of Aztlan, with the noble profile, long black hair, and the body of a young warrior.  He was sixteen--I was twelve at best.  I was honored that he chose me when there were so many other prettier girls who would have liked to kiss him.  I was later told that Victor wanted my virginity.  He was too nice to break me without my consent, and it never occurred to me to have sex at the age of twelve.  My father had already explained to me that sex was something you did after you graduated from college, so naturally, in my mind, my sex life would begin once I had a college degree, a professional job, and my own apartment.  I saw myself taking a lover in my own apartment, not in the woods at vacation bible school.

I was a suckup and accepted Jesus into my heart.  I've done it several times.  The whole thing is set up that way, with the sermon, the songs, and the big lead up to the popcorn explosion of on-the-spot conversion.  The Protestants have got this thing down to a fine art.  In the Chicano mindset, this was not a big deal, and it wasn't expected to last beyond vacation bible school.  My special spiritual counselor was named Gail.  She was unusual in my world in that she had short hair.  Plus, she was in college, which would be a selling feature with my father, who was always talking about college.  The next step after vacation bible school was to find a Protestant church you felt comfortable in.  Gail was a Methodist, so I thought I'd be a Methodist, too, except there was no Methodist church in the Mexican neighborhood, and I didn't feel particularly inclined to spend all day some Sunday on the 20 Canal city bus looking for a Methodist church that I knew didn't exist.

I just went to the Baptist Mission, and got free cake.