Falling Into Life: A Gay Exmormon’s Journey

Chapter Six – The Disintegrating Gospel: Behold the International House of Handshakes

Oh God, hear the words of my mouth, please tell me this is a mistake. Heavenly Father can’t see  my faithful heart without a sign?

Pay Lay Ale? How loud is “loud laughter”? How much time is “all your time”? How many talents in “all your talents”? How much energy in “all your energy”? If I’m supposed to be taking all of this literally, then I need some literal guidelines please. God’s acceptance of me is hanging in the balance.

Why would an Omniscient God ask me to give signs of faithfulness when I had been taught my entire life that it was a wicked generation that asked for signs?

The House of the Lord is another way of saying Mormon Temple. Mormon Temples are not where Mormons go on Sundays for church. They are a different place where Mormons go to perform religious rituals to save the world, literally. They are supposed to be the pinnacle of spiritual learning and teaching. They are the only locations where Jesus Christ can visit the earth, he walks the halls of the sacred Holy Temples, even today. He visits with the Mormon prophets there, he visits the worthy ones.

Sadly, after much consideration I have concluded that the Mormon temple ceremonies are nothing but busy work and that certainly Jesus has better things to do! The Mormon temple ceremonies are a repetitive, vicious mental cycle that starts when you’re a young child in Primary as you’re convinced and/or brainwashed that you *must* be married in the temple. So you grow up thinking that the temple is going to be this wonderful, amazing thing, that the buildings themselves are holy and that the “work” done inside them is going to be so stunning.

And the guilt for *not* getting married in the temple is tremendous, as if marrying in the temple increases your odds for a happy marriage, a *blessed* marriage. The Eternal Marriage Ceremony_© can only be performed inside the walls of the sacred Holy Temple. By the time you get there, it’s a total mystery because *no one* tells you what goes on in there. You just get photos, graphic visuals of the rooms, the physical spaces, and it is gorgeous. There’s no doubt about it. But lemme tell ya, if these blushing new brides knew how disappointing it would be to be separated from your partner by an altar, kneeling and gripping their hands in a funky secret handshake with Eternity Mirrors_© behind them, they’d be more than a bit disturbed. The last thing you want to remember for eternity is how weird that moment looks. The poor brides must wear their temple clothes *over the top* of their wedding dresses. Nothing says “bizarre-o cult” better than that moment.

I was told when I was about to go to the temple for the first time that one would experience something new and amazing each time one visited, but truthfully, I experienced something entirely different. I found the same trite and repetitive nonsense. And if *any* Mormon were to tell the truth, they’d admit the same thing. It vacillates somewhere between really bizarre, and really boring, depending on the day.

The church offers “Temple Preparation” classes, I’ve even taught them. Taking these classes will never prepare one for that ridiculousness. There’s the sense of fragility about the first time a young LDS person goes to the temple for their own endowment. It’s always important to make sure this young LDS person, aged nineteen or older, going through the Endowment Ceremony is flanked with family, otherwise, upon hindsight, that young person might bolt. It’s *that* crazy. I’m not kidding. And when I say *crazy*, I mean crazy at a stupidity level that defies belief. Your entire life built for that one most amazing, most important, most desperate moment only to have your mind blown by something you could *never* have anticipated. Something amazingly archaic and antiquated that makes you just feel personal sadness so profound that you resign yourself to it.

Members who never go through the temple only have to deal with tithing. They have no idea how insane it gets, or how bizarre their beliefs really are. It’s pitched as beauty and love but in my reality it translates into pressure, loss of self, and an undercurrent of unsettling thoughts, most of which deal with losing and trying to reclaim the self. For a group of people who tout “family” so much, they really are missing the entire point. Family shouldn’t be about creating a structure that suffocates its own members, or strong-arms every member, no matter how unique or different, into complying with stringent rules that suck the money, time and fun out of everything.

It’s a strange thing that happens as you’re sitting there wearing the oddest clothes awaiting the start of your first endowment ceremony, and you hear a tape recorded warning, *a warning*, come over the speakers giving you your last chance to *leave*… at the beginning of the ceremony. At the beginning. You have no idea what you’re about to be exposed to, so why would you want to bolt? Why should you be warned? A mental trick because once you resign yourself to that warning and stay seated for something you could never imagine, you tend to stick.

I mean, your mind says, “This simply cannot be it!” But you look around and you see your family, your mom sitting face-veiled across the gender-segregated room, your grandmother, and they have led you’re here and you think, “This just *can’t* be wrong because my grandma certainly wouldn’t be doing something wrong.” But you have this deep ache inside your gut that you’ve just been hornswaggled. A hornswaggling of magnanimously gigantic proportions, one that spans your entire life up to that moment. And your mind is reeling because you *want* this to match your ideas, your life-long fantasies of wonderment. And it’s like you can almost hear the creaking of your mental scaffolding, it’s slightly crushing and breaking, but you hold on to it, you prop it up in your head, you mentally hold it up.

The strangest part of it is that you are *told* to do everything, like you’re a child. It’s archaic and demeaning. You’re not in a situation, as you might have anticipated, where your own ideas and thoughts are valued, you’re being *told* what to do. Your ideas aren’t joining a larger, wonderful group of ideas as if you had finally been accepted as a thoughtful, vital, valuable participant in God’s Plan. At one moment, you are even told to bow your head and say, “Yes.” It’s not a choice. And it’s eerie, this whole huge group of people all say, “Yes!” loudly, like automatons.

The “Five Points of Fellowship” (pre-1990) where you literally matched certain body parts with another man through the hanging sheet-like veil is another such moment; it was like a standing version of Twister without the color or merriment, typically just a bad case of halitosis waiting for you in the Celestial Kingdom.

It’s hard to keep it going because as you sit there rearranging strange clothing, and learning handshakes, and then accompanying passwords, and then accompanying threats of suicidal throat-slashing and gut debowelment with hand held out to catch your own entrails, you wonder what in the world you’ve been doing all this time? You think to yourself, “This isn’t the church I grew up in!” And you’re sitting there wearing this new underwear that you’ll be sporting for life with these symbols sewn into them and you are just barely holding it together. You expected something loving, something amazing, and something wonderful. And you get *this*. Love doesn’t start with a warning. Love doesn’t contain threats. Love isn’t supposed to be segregating.

Even after they got rid of the death oaths in 1990, it still didn’t get any better. It’s a bunch of standing and sitting and standing (although I hear much of that’s been changed, too). A lot of memorization of phrases and movements that your soul relies on to get to the highest level of heaven. It’s nothing but a glorified fraternity and sorority meeting, and a jumble of pseudo-religious blathering. And *all* stolen from the Freemasons. OK, not *all* of it, the handshakes, the passwords are, but the remaining temple content has replaced the original allegorical freemasonry Hiram Abiff content, or is that Abraham Abiff? I dunno, ask the Blue Lodge guys like I did. Anyway, then Joseph Smith turned around and called the Mason’s “fallen”. How do ya like them apples? Talk about stealing someone’s intellectual property and getting away with it.

It’s just a huge guilt trip, but a very complicated one. Here’s the never-ending Mormon Temple Cycle:

1. Work to be “worthy” to go to the temple because the temple is the pinnacle of learning, the completion of a mandatory step for imprisoned spirits, and the place where you find the highest level of God’s Love_©. It’s part of a mandatory step for your own “exaltation” so you can be the God, too.
2. Get a temple recommend. Make sure you get that recommend, it’s a card you actually physically *carry* with you so you can get in. Think of it as a heavenly driver’s license. The invasive questions probe without boundaries into your sexuality and your bank account, answer them, lie if you have to, your entire family is counting on it.
3. Take your worthiness-proving card to the front door of a Mormon Temple, get your temples clothes on and do a *lot* of really goofy stuff. Somewhat like an updated Holy Hokey Pokey. Act out Hara-kiri (pre-1990) and get threatened by Satan if you ever divulge what you’ve learned. After 2-3 hours, leave temple wearing your street clothes and sporting a line across your forehead where your baker’s cap fit snugly on your noggin.
4. Start again with Step 1, repeat cycle endlessly.

It’s not so much the actual temple that’s the most daunting thing; it’s the life in-between that gets hijacked. But don’t misunderstand me; the temple is where the crazy definitely lives. The “Holy Garment” is how you take the crazy with you. Working to stay “temple worthy” is how you stay mind-melded to the doctrine with the single thought of getting back to the temple as if the temple would save you or make you feel like all the rigmarole was worth it. This is the cycle, the never-ending cycle of entrapment. It’s where your time is stolen, your money is taken, and your brain checks out.

It’s where you give up on normal underwear and dive headfirst into buying extremely expensive holy underwear (jokingly called Jesus Jammies, although I am sure Jesus would never have worn them, nor did he) that you’ll never really take off or feel free again. These garments with the sewn-in sacred markings will serve as a “constant reminder” of your promises to God. My experience is that they created a mental prison from which I would never be released.

Take them off for sex? Yeah right, nothing says “natural man, enemy to God” like a garment-free temple-worthy Mormon. Take them off for sports? Sure, just make sure you get right back into them ASAP. You sleep in them, you eat in them, you live your entire life in them. They’re hard to keep clean and white, and they’re ugly. My mom said they should never be allowed to touch the floor, and mine never did, until they hit the dumpster. The directives are never-ending.

The garment routine actually started with only a very select group of people, only those who were in Joseph Smith’s super-secret initial chosen polygamy club before he was belting out Freemasonry Distress Calls from a jail cell window. It was Brigham Young who instigated, by “revelation” of course, the wearing of garments and temple attendance by *all* members. They never addressed, before or since, why the secret temple ceremony was never part of the bible, the Book of Mormon, or The Pearl of Great Price. You’d think it’d rank up there as an eternal principle but was somehow a stepped part of the Restored Gospel, arriving after new Mormon scripture and other such restorative actions.

After I went through the Salt Lake Temple Endowment Ceremony my first time shortly before my mission back in 1984, back when a few of the temples were still using live actors for the ceremony, a Great Uncle of mine played the role of Satan. I’ll never forget this old guy leaning forward and with a long black cane tapping the Adam character on the shoulder and saying, “Have you any money? You can buy anything with money.” It would be the first and only time I would see Satan’s “apron of power”, too, a prop not used in current temple films that indicated other organizations by icon, clearly indicating other “fallen” organizations and tying them to Satanic connection. I can imagine that might be a litigation nightmare.

My parents saw a high level of value in having me there with him as Satan. I also believe that my parents thought that going to Zion, or Salt Lake City where it all began, was also a better environment to deflower me with that religious rite of passage. My parents were there, my oldest brother I think, and my Grandmother, perhaps even a great Aunt. Live ceremonies were almost 3 hours long, perhaps longer, and I was completely freaked out by the whole thing. The scenery was interesting, but the play was weird as hell.

My psyche was bursting with disorientation and I had an experience so odd that to this day it seems more poignant that the ceremony itself. The first night I wore the holy garments to bed, the first night after I was “endowed” we stayed at the Little America in Salt Lake City, a terribly decorated nightmare of a hotel where entire buildings were decorated with a single color. There was a blue building, a red building, a gold building, you get the idea. I’m unsure of the color we were in that night, but it was garish and altogether non-restful. Sometime in the middle of the night, I woke up with a startled jolt and tried to make my way to the bathroom in the pitch darkness.

I knew the bathroom was to my right from where I was lying, and so I stood up, with my arms straight ahead of me and walked to the wall at the end of my bed with the desire to make a few right turns and be relieved. I somehow ended up getting lost in that dark room with my parents sleeping in there. I didn’t just turn the light on; I meandered about tripping on things and turning around repeatedly for what seemed like an eternity. When I finally got to the bathroom, I turned on the lights and was very startled at what I saw: Me… but glowing bright white in the overlighted fluorescent space. I literally jumped at the sight of myself. I actually thought, “What have you done?” I felt lost, and definitely on the wrong path. It seemed that I had been kidnapped by a group of wild gypsies that used to be parental units.

One of the most unsettling aspects of the temple ceremony is when Satan actually threatens you with complete ownership and damnation if you ever disclose what I’m telling you right now. Mormons believe vehemently, and with complete certainty that there is a *literal* Satan, and he if after you and he wants to do nothing more than destroy you personally! He has two-thirds of the “host of heaven”, meaning two-thirds of every spirit child ever born to this earth’s God, on his side all gunning for your failure.

So entrenched into Mormonism is the idea of a literal Satan who is going to get you, that small children are taught to fear Satan from the age of eight, and perhaps younger. Once during a Sunday School class we memorized some very unsettling verses from the D&C, a detailed tome describing Joseph Smith’s seemingly endless conversations with God, the earth’s only true conduit at that time. It described dark angels and Satan, and how you could decipher if they were so they said they were. You requested a handshake with them, seriously, you were supposed to *shake their hands*! WTF? Like some eight year old child really needs to be brainwashed with something so horrific and terrifying? And what eight year old would stand there brave enough to request a handshake, let alone a high five with Satan?

A few weeks later, my parents left for the evening and put my brothers in charge, this was typically when I was tortured with dryer rides, etc. My oldest brother put me to sleep in his bed for some reason, and when my parents came home they were locked out without keys. So they stepped to the left of the front door and knocked on the window to awaken my brother to get in, whispering his name increasingly louder to rouse him. It was at that point that I deslumbered in a panic knowing full well that Satan came-a-callin’. I was so panicked, in fact, that I ran round and round our small brick ranch house like lightening screaming my head off with Satan on my heels! No one could stop me; I was running for *my life*. This is both hilarious and tragic. Would you take your child to a church where they indoctrinated kids with processes in order to decipher and expel Satan…at the age of eight years old?

Some people believe that the Mormon temple ceremony is Satanic. I would say that it uses the concept of Satan as a fear tactic, but one never worships Satan, one is just scared into repeat doses. There is one step where Satan does give the audience a command that they follow, putting on a small green apron symbolizing the recognition of nakedness. But mostly he’s used as a way to threaten the audience into submission. And it’s very effective for a person who takes it literally.

Ever wonder how much the Mormon Church is worth? It wouldn’t have nearly the income if the temple ceremony cycle wasn’t in place, it nearly guarantees endless residual income based on endless guilt and fear. The inextricably tied “commandment” of doing temple work is tied directly to your bank account in the form of tithing on your gross income. It’s a total racket, a lifelong cycle of you parting ways with your time and cash.

The Endowment Ceremony is required for “Exaltation” or Personal Planet Ownership, and therefore it is mandated that every single human that has ever lived or who will ever live on earth must either receive their own endowment or must have their own endowment performed for them via proxy after they die. So it is a duty that falls on all faithful Latter-day Saints, otherwise known as Mormons, to perform as many proxy endowment ceremonies for deceased humans as one can during their lifetime.

Given the fact that this commandment wasn’t received until the mid 1800’s, one might imagine that the previous backlog of imprisoned human spirits (including Jesus Christ himself and all other previous saints, and disciples and every single dead human up until that point) waiting for a proxy endowment ceremony is quite staggering. The inextricably tied “commandment” of doing temple work is tied directly to your bank account in the form of tithing on your gross income. It’s a total racket, a never-ending cycle of you parting ways with your time and cash.

There’s no way in hell any church membership with only four million active members (purported to have as high as thirteen million “members” and losing 80-90 thousand of them annually through resignation) with real jobs can possibly complete the Endowment Ceremony for anyone who’s ever been born on this earth, or who will ever be born. That’s why the “millennium” was invented, a thousand year period where Mormonism’s Satan will be bound so that the remaining amount of endowment ceremonies for all the humans can be finished. I’m not kidding. Joseph Smith has already told us what the earth will look like as an “exalted planet”: it’s smooth and perfectly round, and appears as crystal, and we live on it. Doing endless temple work.

Doesn’t *that* sound like fun? I will *never* waste my time or money on something so ridiculous again.

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