LEAP YEAR by Holly Welker
I doubt I ever would have gone rappelling or learned to water ski if I hadn’t grown up Mormon. Bookish, a poor swimmer, not at all fond of having water forced up my nose, and afraid of impact with a canyon floor, I don’t gravitate to people who take a lot of physical risks. But outdoorsy, athletic activities were a type of entertainment promoted by the church when I was a college student. If you don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t hang out in coffee shops or bars, and don’t sleep around, well, you still have to find something to do on weekends besides go to church and get caught up on your homework.
I had planned to begin my higher education at Eastern Arizona College, the community college four blocks from the house where I grew up in rural Arizona. Why not? My father and big sister had graduated from it, and it had one of the best mascots I’ve ever seen: Gila Hank, a scowling purple and gold gila monster wearing a cowboy hat and brandishing a pair of six shooters. Not only that, but to distinguish women’s teams from their male counterparts, who were simply “the Gila Monsters,” female athletes at EAC were called “the Lady Monsters.” Who could resist that? Especially since it was cheap and convenient, and almost everyone else in my graduating class – all 80 of us – would enroll there too.
Instead I got a fat academic scholarship to the University of Arizona in Tucson, and my mother insisted I take it, insisted I would be more successful in the long run if I skipped a stint at a community college and went straight to a university. I didn’t care about that; I cared that I was being forced to leave my home and friends before I felt ready, forced to move to the big city before I’d acquired so much as an ounce of the sophistication even a community college confers. But I glumly acquiesced, because I was nothing if not dutiful – that’s how I earned the scholarship in the first place, by being valedictorian, editing the yearbook, playing the bassoon in concert band when no one else would.
At freshman orientation I was miserable, convinced I was utterly and obviously out of place. I tromped around campus, my gaze fixed resolutely on my feet; I knew, I just knew, all the hip, urbane college students were looking at me, sneering at me, that they could recognize immediately what a drippy little hick I was. After a morning of agony, I took a deep breath and told myself, “You must start learning to deal with all the scorn coming your way.” So I raised my eyes to meet the contempt in the faces of everyone I passed . . . but no one was looking back. It was one of the most shocking and liberating moments of my life: I was nondescript and anonymous; therefore, no one gave a damn about me, and I was no longer answerable to and for everyone else I saw each day. Realizing that gave me the courage to scrutinize all the other anonymous people wandering the campus. A man clad only in a pair of running shorts stood in a patch of shade, playing the bagpipe. It was not a sight I had encountered before, but people seemed content to let him do his thing. Why, I could get a bagpipe of my own, I suddenly realized, and stand in front of the library with it all day, and no one in town would accost my mother in the produce aisle and ask, “When did Holly take to performing in public?”
I didn’t get a bagpipe, but I did discover how marvelous anonymity can be.
The best thing about that kind of anonymity was that I could escape it when I wanted. Across the street from the student union was the LDS Institute of Religion, a building with classrooms, a small library, a big lounge, a kitchen, a chapel, a gym, the cleanest bathrooms on campus, and a closely guarded parking lot. The Institute offered loads of squeaky clean fun as alternatives to the keg parties elsewhere on campus – sometimes water skiing or hiking or rock climbing, more often a dance in the Institute gym. If having dances in a gym made it seem like high school, it also meant that you had room to move without worrying about bumping into some sweaty stranger. We absolutely loved Adam Ant’s bouncy pop tune “Goody Two Shoes,” about a girl whose refusal to drink or smoke only prompted speculation about the vices she might be willing to indulge in. We thought it a pretty funny song for a bunch of Mormons to dance to. We knew we were wholesome, but we didn’t think that meant we had to be boring.
For instance, for the Halloween dance one year, my roommate Melanie, our friend John and I dressed as Brigham Young and two of his pregnant wives. John rented a tux, wore a beard, dyed his hair silver, and carried a steel-tipped cane my grandfather had brought back from his mission in Germany; Melanie and I wore long dresses, shawls, sun bonnets, and pillows under our skirts. We looked great, though irreverent, but what scandalized people even more than our costumes was the fact that we insisted on dancing together, all three of us, which Simply Wasn’t Done. It was totally unfair but not surprising that we were denied the prize for most original costume – it went instead to three guys dressed as the Ghostbusters.
We were often told that the most important part of our education took place at the Institute rather than “across the street,” as the university was ominously referred to in lectures about “how to be in the world, but not of the world,” or how to avoid being seduced by carnal pleasures and secular thought. But I loved every bit of my undergraduate education. After twelve years of public schooling in one of the poorer and smaller school districts in the nation, I suddenly felt stimulated and smart. I studied things that seemed important. At my high school, the foreign language department had consisted of one year of Spanish taught by an Anglo who’d served his mission in Mexico – and this in a town where a fourth of the students were Chicano. But at a university, I could take four whole years of French if I wanted! And I did want to. In fact, I wanted to take practically every class in the catalogue. I wanted to go to college forever.
I majored in English and Creative Writing, figuring I’d be a poet. I discovered that a bachelor’s degree was the perfect venue for a kind of reading I’d already been trained to do: exegesis, or explanation and interpretation of a text. The Book of Mormon contains an exhortation to “hear ye the words of the prophet, which were written unto all the house of Israel, and liken them unto yourselves” (1 Nephi 19:24). That’s how I was taught to read: look at everything as if it were about me, “that it might be for [my] profit and learning” (1 Nephi 19:23). I also learned from the church a particular, thoughtful, thorough way of reading scripture, with attention to the many contexts of those texts: a word in a sentence, a sentence in a verse, a verse in a chapter; a passage of verses as an illustration of a principal, as the basis for a doctrine, as a way for God to speak personally to me. Then, because Mormons are expected to narrate faith-promoting experiences, I also had the challenge of reconciling all those readings into some kind of cohesive whole, something I could communicate to others.
The readings in my freshman composition class included Paul Theroux’s travel memoir The Great Railway Bazaar. Theroux devotes two chapters to his time in Vietnam, the beauty of the country, the damage done by the war, and the effects of the American withdrawal. One day in class the professor said something about Theroux’s condemnation of the war, and I said blithely, “Oh, I thought he was in favor of the war.”
The teacher looked at me, baffled. “Why would you think that? Can you cite a passage?”
I dropped my head to stare down at the book and flipped through a few pages, instantly aware that I would find nothing to support my view. The closest I could have come was this:
The Vietnamese had been damaged and then abandoned, almost as if, dressed in our clothes, they had been mistaken for us and shot at; as if, just when they had come to believe that we were identified with them, we had bolted. It was not that simple, but it was nearer to describing that sad history than the urgent opinions of anguished Americans who, stropping Occam’s Razor, classified the war as a string of atrocities, a series of purely political errors, or a piece of interrupted heroism. The tragedy was that we had come, and, from the beginning, had not planned to stay. (Theroux, Paul. The Great Railway Bazaar. 1975. New York: Washington Square Press, 1985. p. 260.)
But that passage could not serve as proof that Theroux supported the war, only that he saw its results with some complexity. I knew immediately that it was simply my own biases as the product of a conservative community that had made me think Theroux had supported the war; I realized that despite a skepticism so thorough I was always being chastised by Sunday school teachers for asking too many questions, I hadn’t been skeptical or questioned enough. I wasn’t entirely ignorant of the war – one of my uncles had served two tours of duty in it – but I’d been too young and indifferent to pay attention to news of it while it was still going on, and it was still a sensitive enough topic that we hadn’t studied it much in my high school history classes. Nor would I have comprehended the cruel, futile stupidity of the war even if I had paid attention to reports of it: most people in Thatcher, including my parents, had supported the war – after all, it was going to help rid the world of communism – and that was the attitude I expected sensible people to hold. It had not occurred to me to look for views other than my own, and so I had not seen them. I raised my head, I opened my mouth, I waited a moment – I remember sitting with my mouth open, as if I hoped words might come to fill it up – then finally said, “No, I can’t show you anything. I think I was wrong.”
The teacher shrugged, relieved that I didn’t intend to argue the point, and the discussion moved on. I was left alone with a very important moment: I confronted in a way I never had before that people – including me – could hold insupportable opinions, could be deceived, through complacency or effort, into accepting their own assumptions as fact. I learned that likening everything unto myself meant I could miss important differences if I had not already been alerted to the fact that such differences might exist. I also discovered the value of the example my father had set every time he said, in response to a question, “I really don’t know”: it was better to admit I was wrong or ignorant than to waste time trying to cover up my foolishness.
It was also a revelation to take classes in western civilization and look carefully at art and architecture for the first time. My father had plenty of books on art history, but I’d never bothered to look at them, just as I’d never bothered to read his books on the Pacific theater of battle in World War II. It wasn’t that I didn’t recognize the cultural importance of such things; I didn’t recognize their importance to me. Mormonism places little importance on visual aesthetics. Churches are designed for economy, not beauty: there’s rarely any stained glass, and what little art a building might hold is almost always representational, instructive, idealized and clean. Nothing is abstract, nothing is designed to provoke questions rather than answer them. Members are encouraged to display in their homes photographs of their families, of church leaders, of important church buildings. They’re not encouraged to own original artwork or to display reproductions of masterpieces. Mormon churches don’t even have crosses, because “Mormons believe in a living Christ, not a dead one” and “prefer not to use instruments of torture for decoration.”
I felt I’d had my head blown open when I first saw slides of the baroque art of the Italian Renaissance. Of course I’d dutifully admired everything I’d seen before that, noted the wet drapery of Greek statuary, marveled at the tininess of the tesserae of Roman mosaics, rejoiced in the discovery of linear perspective, reverently acknowledged the genius of the paintings in the Sistine Chapel. But one day, when the screen at the front of a dark classroom lit up with an image of Bernini’s David poised in the seconds before he flings the rock at Goliath, I felt some electric switch in my body flip to On. “Can you leave that slide up for a minute?” I asked the teacher. She complied, and I took a deep breath and evaluated what my body was telling me. There was no mistaking it: my entire being was alive, burning with the feeling I’d been taught at church meant I was hearing or seeing or experiencing something true, something intended to teach me about the eternal nature of God and myself.
I’d always believed that art and literature were holy, expressions of talent, divine gifts from God. The church encouraged us to make use of our talents, especially if we could do so in support of doctrine. But this was something different, something more, something that wasn’t just instructive and clean. The point of Bernini’s statue wasn’t that righteous David slew evil Goliath; the point was that an entire body marshaled its energy to throw a rock. The point of Carravagio’s Conversion of Saint Paul wasn’t that God spoke to Paul on the road to Damascus; the point was that a guy fell under his horse, and neither his eyes nor his outstretched arms could help him right himself again. After the minute passed and the slide show went on to display more of the paintings of Carravagio, the dramatic chiaroscuro, the strong diagonals, the dirtiness of the feet and finger nails of Jesus and all his apostles, I knew that this other truth of art also required a kind of obedience from me. Even if the truth I was seeing now had been revealed by people who drank coffee and wine, didn’t read the Book of Mormon, didn’t claim to be the only authorized mouthpiece for God like the president of the Mormon church, and even if this truth didn’t have as its main reason for existence the desire to make me be righteous, it nonetheless made me curious and contemplative, made me think about what it means to see and feel and move, brought me outside myself and into dialogue with the rest of the world.
* * *
My family drank boiling hot Dr Pepper every morning for breakfast the whole time I was growing up; as a matter of fact, we still drink it. We buy the unmixed syrup and add boiling water to it – it’s easier, neater and cheaper than buying the carbonated soda and heating away the bubbles. We all know this is a fairly eccentric breakfast beverage. One of my friends, a non-Mormon raised in the Midwest, said her family liked drinking hot Dr Pepper after snow fights, but she was horrified to learn that my mother let us drink it for breakfast: “It’s a soft drink, after all,” my friend said. Most people are just plain horrified. They want to know two things: one, how my family developed this habit, and two, who came up with the idea in the first place. The answer to the first question is that it was served at a wedding reception my parents attended in 1961. My mom wanted something hot to drink in the morning – Mormons can’t drink coffee – and since hot Dr Pepper is what she started drinking, the rest of the family drank it too. As for the second question, it was someone at the Dr Pepper company who invented the practice, not us, as we got tired of explaining. Long about 1985, when my dad found an ad for hot Dr Pepper in an issue of Good Housekeeping from the early 1960s, he ripped it out, framed it, and hung it on our kitchen wall. There’s a photograph of several mugs of steaming Dr Pepper; the ad urges you to “Try Dr Pepper hot! It’s devilishly different!”
Sometimes people ask, “How could you drink Dr Pepper? You grew up Mormon. I thought Mormons couldn’t drink caffeine.” The Mormon dietary code, also known as the Word of Wisdom, states that “strong drink, tobacco, and hot drinks” are “not for the belly.” It says wine is OK, and for a time in the nineteenth century, wine was: my ancestors in Toquerville, Utah, worked at a church vineyard. But in the twentieth century, the strict interpretation of the Word of Wisdom came to be this: all alcoholic beverages, including wine, are forbidden. Tobacco and illicit drugs are forbidden. Coffee and tea, iced or hot, are forbidden. Consuming any of those substances means you are not worthy to get a temple recommend. Chocolate, hot or cold, liquid or solid, white or dark or milk, is OK despite its caffeine content, and one of the biggest candy counters I ever saw was in the student union at Brigham Young University. Soft drinks are a matter of personal discretion, although plenty of Mormons won’t drink any soft drink with caffeine in it and condemn anyone who does. But as my family is happy to point out, you can still get a temple recommend if you drink Coke or Pepsi.
So perhaps it will make sense when I say that beverages were very symbolic in my world. Coffee, for instance, so ubiquitous in the non-Mormon world, always struck the Mormons I knew as expressive of the blind condition of those who drank it. Coffee was a bit dirty, tainted, like a used ashtray. When a waitress carried a coffee pot around a restaurant, we’d note with vague fascination and pity the people who let her fill their cups with the insipid looking liquid. The action revealed a lot about them, we thought: you knew they weren’t Mormon; you knew they were ignorant of the truth; you knew that even though they might be nice people, they lived in spiritual darkness. The idea that coffee might simply be a beverage rather than a moral barometer was something I never contemplated until I drank it myself – and even then, it seemed an odd, alarming idea.
* * *
Even as a young child, I dreamed of traveling through Europe. One of the ways my mom convinced me to take the scholarship to U of A was by promising that if I did, I could spend a semester abroad. So the second semester of my junior year I went to London, where I lived in a house in Knightsbridge with a few dozen other American students. I was horribly homesick at first, but got over it in no time.
It was the first time I’d had a group of friends who weren’t predominantly Mormon – in fact, there wasn’t another Mormon in my house or my classes. I lived near the LDS Hyde Park Chapel and attended church there a few times, but didn’t meet anyone I cared to socialize with: none of the members lived near the chapel, and they weren’t interested in the touristy things I wanted to do. Besides, I liked the people I lived with. I made friends who were funny and smart and generous, and the fact that they drank coffee, tea and alcohol and even had sex from time to time didn’t seem to render them spiritually dead or morally bankrupt.
Each day our boarding house offered a continental breakfast. There was milk and juice, as well as coffee and tea, but the milk was tepid and the juice canned. One morning my friend Mauri asked me, “Don’t you get tired of drinking that awful juice?”
“Well, yeah,” I said. “But it’s all I can drink.”
“Why don’t you drink tea?”
“It’s against my religion,” I said.
She stared at me. “You do know how silly that sounds, don’t you,” she said, then added “Sorry, sorry,” when I bristled. But later, she said, “So explain this religion-tea thing to me. Have you ever had a cup of tea?”
“Never,” I said. “It’s a health thing and an obedience thing. We’re just told not to drink it.”
“And that’s reason enough not to?”
“Look, you agree to play by certain rules, so you play by them. I give the church ten percent of everything I earn, too. I figure, paying tithing and not drinking tea are the easy rules, because they’re clear-cut. You know exactly how well you succeed in keeping them. They’re not like loving everyone or never losing my temper – those are the hard rules.”
“They’re also the really important ones,” she said. “Do me a favor, OK? Have a cup of tea at breakfast tomorrow. For me.”
I stared at her. “Why would you ask me to do that?”
“Because I think you’re misguided. And I think you’re not thinking for yourself.”
Despite the fact that I had been commanded, explicitly and repeatedly, not to question my leaders or heed my own doubts, I hated any inference that I was failing to think for myself – and here was a direct accusation. I was speechless for a moment, indignant at both Mauri and the church. Nobody thinks I can make a decision on my own, I thought, because everyone wants to influence me to make a decision that agrees with how they think. If I disagree with someone, they think it’s because I let someone else influence me first. In the end, I have to choose who I let influence me. I mentally flipped a coin. “OK,” I said.
And Mauri was right: tea wasn’t so bad. In fact, I loved Earl Grey. Mauri convinced me to try Guinness Stout, and I loved that too. I also liked champagne. But what I liked best – to my surprise – was coffee, not just the taste of it, but its warmth, body and aroma. In a way coffee was like the Fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil for me, not because it remained an exotic and tempting indulgence, but because it immediately became mundane: drinking it made sense, and I looked about me with a feeling of betrayal. On the one hand I felt I was betraying the church by not following rules I considered sensible enough. But I felt betrayed that those rules had been elevated beyond good sense to a gauge of my worthiness before God, and I knew that was not the least bit sensible. This betrayal led to other questions. It occurred to me more forcefully than ever before that perhaps many of the ways the church gauged worthiness before God were inaccurate or inadequate. The church’s morality was all predicated on fear of punishment and desire for reward, anyway: there was little sense of what I’d found in certain philosophies whose teachings most interested me: that virtue is its own reward. In Mormonism (as in many branches of Christianity), virtue is what you cultivate so that God will love and bless you rather than what you cultivate so that you will love and bless others – or yourself, for that matter. It struck me as a puerile form of spirituality, like trying to do well in school so that the teacher will give you an A, not because you care about the subjects you’re studying.
Realizations like this made me feel incredibly sophisticated – but then, so did my entire social situation. It wasn’t just that I managed to be friends with cool, cosmopolitan people; it’s that they were friends with me. I didn’t feel like a hanger‑on or an interloper; I felt like these people actually liked me, despite my lack of worldliness; I could make them laugh. And because I wanted to make the most of my time in London and was game to go anywhere and do anything – even watch something as boring as a rugby match on a really cold afternoon in January – I had a busy social life.
Eventually I began to think, “If people treat me like I’m sort of cool, maybe I should try looking cool – or if not cool, at least different.” My mom always maintained that I looked cuter with short hair, and couldn’t understand why I insisted on growing it out every so often – or why, almost every time I cut it short, I inevitably cried afterwards, mourning the hair I’d cut off. A year or so before I went to England, I ended up with a haircut she hated – one so short nothing could be done to improve it until I grew it out. That shut her up, and she left me alone so I could leave my hair alone, and I had arrived in London with unremarkable shoulder-length curls. I mustered the courage to have my hair cut short in an actual style, which my mother would have loved, then dyed it burgundy, which she would have hated. I was thoroughly happy with the results, and didn’t shed a single tear.
I also got over being really uptight about things that had obsessed me for years. At age 15 I’d been anorexic and my clothes had hung on my frame as if my shoulders were a coat hanger. I wasn’t still that skinny when I started college, but I certainly watched my calories. But getting fat on what to me was exotic fare like scones and clotted cream, curries and kabobs, didn’t seem like such a tragedy. It was only weeks before my jeans were too tight. While I wasn’t especially happy to be fat, I was happy that I could eat like a normal person. It felt like progress, of just the sort I was interested in.
But some things I still wasn’t interested in, most notably sex – I remained as virginal, prudish and uptight as I’d ever been, no matter where I was. For spring break half a dozen friends and I went to Russia. On February 28 we took a night train from Moscow to Leningrad, as it was called at the time. No one seemed to plan on sleeping that night, even though we had very nice berths; instead, everyone seemed intent on enacting some scene reminiscent of Anna Karenina. There were parties in every compartment, with more alcohol than I’d ever seen, and I had little experience in handling it. I got drunk that night, about the drunkest I’ve ever been in my life, on Russian champagne, red wine, vodka and beer. On the tour with us was a young, good-looking, condescending British engineer with a slew of degrees from Oxford; his name was Ted or Ned or Ed. “It’s almost Leap Day,” he said when he found himself pressed up against me in a compartment. “In fact, it’s midnight, so it really is Leap Day.”
“Oh,” I said. He was right, but I wasn’t sure where this was leading.
“Everything’s different. The regular rules are off. Women are supposed to pursue men.”
“Oh,” I said, still not sure what that would mean for me.
“That means you need to make a pass at me.” I didn’t move. “That means you need to kiss me,” he said, realizing he had to spell it out.
“OK,” I said, and reached to kiss him. The drunkenness couldn’t have added to my technique. When I encountered an open mouth and a tongue I fumbled, not knowing what he expected me to do.
“You’ve never kissed anyone, have you,” he said, after a moment or two.
“Yes I have,” I said, because I had: three separate people on three separate occasions. “Just not like this.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, removing my arms from around his neck and stepping back a pace. “I shouldn’t have asked you to do this. I don’t think I should take advantage of you any more.”
At that moment, I was glad I was drunk: I knew that had I been sober, I would have been mortified. But as it was, I simply shrugged and went to find a compartment with more women than men in it, so the situation wouldn’t arise again. I thought Ted/Ned/Ed was cute enough, but I had no awareness of any desire of my own; sexual desire was always transmuted into a desire for companionship. It never occurred to me then to do something like masturbate, and when at age 26 I finally did want to try masturbating, I had to consult a book for advice on how to proceed. At 20, my naivete helped me stay the way I wanted: uninvolved and safe. I was so chaste, so unaware of sexuality, that I often didn’t realize when men were hitting on me, and I was always shocked when I finally figured it out. More than once, some guy would grow increasingly frustrated that he couldn’t convince me that it would be really fun to go to his house and do something like look at his roommate’s boa constrictor, and finally would have to say, “Don’t you want to go my place and have sex?” Which was an easy proposition for a virginal Mormon girl to refuse, especially since I couldn’t fathom why these men would be asking me that.
I mean, they hardly knew me, and there was no chance we’d ever get married.
* * *
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was revising the story of my life. Or rather, I did realize it, but I didn’t realize the extent of the revision: I thought I was fiddling with a few details of character development; I didn’t have in mind some major restructuring of the plot. Indulging a fondness for coffee? I could do that, for a few months at least. Sleeping with someone I didn’t know and would never see again? I not only couldn’t do that, I couldn’t even want to do that. Leaving the church?
Leaving the church . . . ?
Well, it was, after all, the logical conclusion to some of my doubts about the church: if I didn’t approve of its morality, why would I be governed by it? If I had discovered that someone’s chastity was not necessarily the best indicator of how compassionate or humane the person was, why would I uphold a system that relied on sexuality as the ultimate indicator of moral worth? If I’d realized that the truth of art was every bit as holy as the truth of scripture, why would I reduce it to a position of secondary significance?
Mormons have a term for someone who contemplates questions like those and decides to leave the church. It’s not “backslider,” or “Jack Mormon.” It’s worse: it’s apostate, the nastiest thing one Mormon can call another, a way of saying, “I know that God disapproves of you, and you’re going to hell, because your heart is hard and your mind is swayed by Satan.” I didn’t think I wanted to be an apostate. It wouldn’t be easy, or fun.
It was one thing to risk alcohol poisoning by drinking, in one night, more booze than I’d consumed in the rest of my life put together – in Russia. It was one thing to drink tea every morning – in England. It was one thing to ditch church for the better part of six months – in Europe. It would be another thing entirely to do them at home.
Because home wasn’t just a place; it was a story, a whole set of stories, about an extended and beloved community created by a religion. The junior college down the street in my home town? It was known as Eastern Arizona College when I contemplated going there, but it had begun its existence as Gila Academy, a college owned by the Mormon church, like Brigham Young University; until the church deeded it to the county during the Great Depression. The college stood across the street from an eccentric, rambling old chapel I loved even more than the house I grew up in; both the chapel and the college’s first buildings had been built of stone hewn from a local quarry, so that the religion transplanted there still seemed organic to the place. My family hadn’t moved to the hinterlands of Arizona because my dad was transferred there for a job: no, my great-great-grandfather had founded the town explicitly to be a Mormon farming town, a haven for people who believed the teachings of the brethren in Salt Lake City but liked their winters without snow. Even 1,000 miles south of Salt Lake, every summer the whole county celebrated “Pioneer Day,” July 24, the date Brigham Young, at the tail end of the first wagon train, entered the Valley of the Great Salt Lake and pronounced it the divinely appointed place where Mormons would be free from persecution, which was a big deal since these people – including some of my ancestors – had just walked 1,400 miles across America in order to avoid being murdered in their homes back in the Midwest.
Suddenly it was a question of how setting and plot would drive character development: If I returned to Arizona, left the church but didn’t leave the state, what state would I be in? Who would I be? Just how big a leap was I ready to make that year – or any year?
When I returned home from my time abroad, I told my parents I had serious doubts about the church. They were sad, and pensive, and after a few heartfelt sighs, told me, “We’re disappointed beyond expression that you’d consider abandoning something we’ve based our lives on and have worked very hard to share with you, but we raised you to think for yourself, and we’ll still love you, no matter what you do.”
Which is how it came about that the leap I ended up making was back into, not out of, the church. By giving me permission to leave, my parents proved themselves too cool, too generous, too decent for me to have the heart to hurt them. I agreed to serve a mission for the church, thinking that would cement my faith, and was sent to Taiwan, where I learned Mandarin and went door to door, trying to convert Buddhists and Taoists to Mormonism’s version of Christianity.
There were so many things I could do because I’d grown up Mormon: I could water ski. I take hold of rope, back slowly off a cliff, and dangle in the air – though I admit doing so made me really anxious. I could say “baptismal font” and “quorum of the 12 apostles” and “I’d like 15 boiled dumplings and a bowl of hot and sour soup, please” in fluent Mandarin. What I couldn’t do was dismiss or answer such nagging questions as, “Why am I trying to convince perfectly happy Buddhists to worship a god who engineered a genocide – that whole Noah’s Ark thing – with malicious glee, then made everyone pretend he was a great guy, just because he invented rainbows?” or “Why are God’s chosen servants almost always old white guys?” and “Why are those old white guys so obsessed with everyone else’s sex lives?”
Here’s something I learned about leaps of faith: hitting the ground after one can really, really hurt. My leap of faith turned into a fall – not just a metaphorical fall from grace, though it was that. It was also a literal fall, through my neighbor’s kitchen roof in a little town in central Taiwan, after I climbed out onto her roof to retrieve a letter I’d dropped there off the balcony. When I landed, I broke my rib, and, though I didn’t realize it at the time, my spirit.
Should I have made a different leap during that year designed for it? I don’t know. I’ve spent plenty of time mourning a painful past but I haven’t been able to wish I’d pursued a different future, one that might have provided me with a very different present, in part because I can’t imagine what that present would look like. I do know that by not making one kind of leap, I had to rely on other forms of locomotion. Almost six years after I first left Arizona I finally left Mormonism, a difficult and heartbreaking rupture I was bound to make by the inexorable thrust of the story I had begun to tell to and about myself. But I didn’t leap out of the church. I didn’t run, or even walk. I didn’t hop, skip or jump. I crawled. And I ended up right where I knew I would: someplace that was noplace, neither home nor abroad, neither cast out nor included. It was no place to be and no place to stay. It was, however, a place to leave, and from there I started to climb.
Holly Welker’s work has appeared in Best American Essays, The Cream City Review, The Iowa Review, Other Voices, and TriQuarterly.