Milk Before Meat

I’ve always been a big fan of meat.  My lifelong favorite is beef but I’ve recently acquired an affinity for some types of fish, especially in the form of ahi tuna and sushi rolls.  Life experience has taught me that I am most definitely the type of girl that would like to just eat the meat and avoid the milk altogether.

Since hearing that HBO’s Big Love will air some parts of the mormon temple endowment ceremony, I have been giving some heavy thought to this milk-meat concept.  I know I have not talked much about my ex-mormon-ness on this site.  Etienne has done a wonderful job of showcasing the myriad of fucked-upedness that can occur with membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, as well as the life-affirming redemption that can come from leaving it.  But, see, as a convert to the church at the ripe-old age of eighteen, I have my own fucked-upednesses to discuss.  One of the primary of these is the milk-before-meat theory.

They tell you, when you are meeting those really hot missionaries in a park without the permission and quite much to the objection of your parents, that the church is this beautiful thing.  You learn of eternal families, “The Spirit” and of keeping your body clean by steering yourself away from the evil drugs and alcohol.  This all sounds so beautiful, especially when your first true love tells you that he will only marry a woman, some day, that is worthy of a temple marriage.  Well, since you marry who you date, I took the very important hint that it was time for me to get right on that.  After all, I would need a date to the prom.

Fast forward a couple of years to my temple day.  THIS was the day I was waiting for…I would get. the. MEAT (no, not that kind of meat, you pervs).  I was shocked at my carnivorous experience.  It was WEIRD!  The temple ceremony was filled with hand-raising, hand-lowering, hand-touching, sheet-wearing, password-memorizing, weird-clothes-wearing, old-lady-stinky-breath-smelling, old-lady-new-name-getting, video-watching, sheet-hole-finding, bloomer-buying and just plain weirdness.  I can’t help but now think that this may have been something that I would have wanted to know before buying into this whole shebang.  I WOULD HAVE LIKED TO TASTE THE MEAT!

In my previous “state of mind” I would have been very disturbed by HBO’s decision to air the meat.  It would have broken my heart.  It would have been something that I would not have been able to understand.  Now, I can only applaud HBO’s massive set of balls.  I think back to the time when I made the life-altering decision to convert to mormonism:  the resources were very limited in the eighties and I relied on my heart to guide me.  I used very little brain (which they will tell you is the exactly perfect thing to do).  I asked a lot of questions and was told that I would need to digest the milk before the meat.

Today’s idealistic, stupid teen (or anyone else investigating mormonism) most definitely has the benefit of the internet.  One can find the entire temple ceremony, the historical inconsistencies, the painful “testimonies”, and the truth about polygamy within fifteen minutes.  I’d imagine that has done a nice bit of damage to your run-of-the-mill investigative process.  I do feel sorry for those hot missionaries, in a way.  But Big Love is something different altogether.  You get to see the stories of this family.  You get to see how the “fundamentalists” are intertwined with the mainstream church.  There is Barb, who is so “normal” next to Nikki who so wants to be “normal”, next to Margene who so could have been “normal”.  All of them stand so steadfastly next to Bill, the patriarchal, condescending dufus who really is just trying to rule his family with righteous dominion while he holds it all together.  You get involved with these characters before you get to see the insidious way the church messes with their lives.  And now next week we get to see the start of it all for Barb.  Perhaps the first moment she ever thought, “What the FUCK have I gotten myself into?”.

Oh, Barb, I can SO relate.  I ate the meat, I married and stayed with an asshole, I dedicated my sense of self-esteem, for a time, to a ridiculous religion and I took a tenth-grader to the prom after my mormon boyfriend, again, decided that he could not possibly date someone who was so worldly.

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