Mormonism & Me #3

Let me first say that my son was offended by the Al Queda video. He said, “Did you forget I spent two years doing that?” Of course he said that to his mom not me. I was so surprized because I certainly did remember paying a few hundred dollars every month for two years for him to be on his LDS mission but I never suspected that he was also recruiting for a facist, terrorist, Islamic regime as well! Life is full of surprizes!

And as far as his two years goes; I spent two years on an LDS mission also, but somehow I didn’t lose my sense of humor!

So, back to 1958, Cedar Falls, Iowa, Mormon missionaries and their flannel board discussions. My dad was rarely home in those days as he traveled all of Iowa and all of Nebraska as an insurance property inspector. Somehow though he seemed to nearly always be home when the missionaries came. Dad was agnostic at the time, but he still took us to the local Methodist church every Sunday. He didn’t really like the missionaries and didn’t appreciate their visits, but he wouldn’t deny my mom the opportunity to learn from them if she wanted to. Dad would go to the basement where he could do stuff at his workbench and listen to the lessons going on directly above him.

I don’t remember all that much about all that though. I was only four after all. I do remember I didn’t like the Methodist church. The minister talked really loud and after his sermon (which I never understood a word of) I would be taken away from my family to a dark little classroom in the back of the church. I really didn’t like it. It was creepy.

But after the missionaries had visited us for a time, we started going to their church. My dad didn’t go, but my mom and my two older sisters and I did. The Mormon’s didn’t have a church in our town so the meetings were held at the YMCA and I was treated to yet another dark and creepy classroom full of strangers I didn’t understand.

I got to sit in the bleachers at the YMCA swimming pool when my mom and sisters were baptised. I have a vivid memory of that.

Very shortly thereafter, the church built a new chapel just a couple blocks down the street from my house, and we went to church there, but my dad no longer went to church with us.

The classrooms weren’t dark and scary, but my teacher didn’t shave her legs which were very hairy and lots of the hair stuck through her nylon stockings though most of it was in big black clumps all matted in there. This really disturbed me and is one of my few memories about sunday school class in Cedar Falls.

The big meeting that I went to with my mom since my sisters were in Jr. Sunday School I guess, was held in a big gym where we all sat on hard, cold folding metal chairs. I was still four and the meetings were much longer than at the Methodist church so it was uncomfortable for me. I remember how unfair I thought it was that everyone got to eat little bits of bread and water during the meeting but I was denied that snack. My mom said I wasn’t old enough, but that didn’t make much sense to me. I felt quite slighted.

As an adult, I guess the one thing that really impresses me is that my dad no longer attended church. That was a new thing not only for our family but even in our extended family, everyone went to church together. But no more. Mormonism had already driven a wedge into our family life.

Not only had my dad been alienated and separated from his wife and children in this way, but during our regular visits with relatives, my aunts, in all other ways very fine people, but in religion one was a (may I say rabid) Baptist and the other an “any church will do but yours”, know it all, church on the cornerist – would engage my mom in horrible and loud arguments about how evil our new church was and how they prayed for our poor degenerate family every day that we would be saved from Mormonism and come back to the true fold of “their” Jesus.

This became a constant feature of our visits and permanantly marked my family as somehow spiritually and morally corrupt and less intelligent than my relatives. My cousins took their parents lead in all this and so it was for two weeks every summer and one week every Thanksgiving and two weeks every Christmas when all my aunts and uncles and their kids, and my family descended on my Mom’s parents home, I was treated to the pity of my relations due to the evil they felt had seduced my mom. It was also very hard on my dad who was seen as less of a man because he would allow his wife and children to be so taken in by the devil. It was hard in his family also and in spite of being looked up to in other regards, his wife and childrens decsent into the evils of Mormonism laid quite a severe blow to his family esteem and pretty much killed the intimacy in his sibling relationships for the rest of his life. His siblings don’t associate with any of my dad’s family now that he’s dead. There is a lot of resentment still – all of it centered around Mormonism. What a sad legacy.

I never got to talk to my dad about how he felt during these times, but I can easily imagine how difficult and painful it was for him. He was a child of the Depression who often had a single mom and was very poor. He delivered papers and his mom worked in a soap factory to make ends meet. He remembered often seeing my mothers family drive through town (my Grandfather was able to get gas rations because he was a doctor) and he thought even then that not only was he going to have a car someday, but he was going to be in that family. He finally did get to be in that family, by stealing his best friends girlfriend but an early business failure hurt his standing and my mother’s involvement in Mormonism pretty much sealed his fate to being seen as kind of a loser to his in-laws I think.

~ by Dr. Lowrey on October 22, 2006.