Posted by:
Lost Mystic
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Date: May 02, 2011 10:03PM
I will post the whole thing to the site once I'm done, but I wanted to put some of it out there already. I guess I'm hoping that some of you might get to know me better. I just feel like sharing, especially since it brought up a lot of feelings typing this so far. Anyway, here goes.
In order to tell my story, I need to start at the beginning. I was the fifth child born to my birth parents, but the first one given up for adoption. I was given away at 3 days old to a family who had one natural born son. I was told of my adoption at such a young age, that I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know. This knowledge has been a source for many issues for me psychologically, and has played a role in my spirituality as well.
My adoptive family was not really religious, but they always had an interest in spiritual things. My mother is a Presbyterian who attends church once a month or so, and my father considers himself a Christian who doesn’t subscribe to any organization. He attends church once or twice a year. Very early on, I began to show a strong interest in things of a spiritual nature. My parents, for reasons unknown to me, nurtured this drive but in a very strange way. They would tell their friends and relatives cute things I said about God, but they never really talked about God themselves unless I asked. Even then, their answers were usually very short and included “I don’t know”. I really admire their willingness to admit things they weren’t sure about. They wrote down all kinds of things I said about God when I was a little kid, and praised me in my spiritual quest for knowledge. I was an odd little fellow who spent a lot of time wandering around outside pondering life and the mysterious world around me. At the same time, I developed strong social skills and was always starving for attention. I learned early on how to make people laugh and tell me how cute I was.
I became the spiritual representative of our family as I grew older. Starting in about second grade, my parents pressured me to say grace before meals. Yet if I didn’t say grace, it wasn’t said at all. My parents and my brother wouldn’t say it. They would say “You are the spiritual one”. I never understood why they placed me in that type of position. I was the family’s medicine man.
As I grew older, my love for God deepened. I was Christian, but personally believed that God expressed “himself” in different ways to different people. I felt that God spoke to me in a way that only I could understand. And I believed he spoke to all people in a way only they could understand. I believed that God loved all people, and that all people would eventually be “one” with God. I didn’t believe in hell.
In junior high, I began attending my mom’s Presbyterian church fairly often and became involved in the youth group. During services, I would look around the chapel, seeing light pour through the stained glass window, and feel what I believed to be God’s presence. Yet it felt like a partial presence, like something was being withheld a tad to keep me searching. It was comforting and mysterious at the same time. When I attended youth group, I asked questions that stumped the youth group leader. He eventually developed a distain for my curiosity.
I felt like an alien in my family, and at one point, my mother even told me she loved my brother more than me because he was theirs naturally. She said that she couldn’t help it, because she carried him inside her and developed a bond with him. I had always sensed this, even prior to Kindergarten, but to hear it was heart-wrenching. I never felt like I was accepted fully by anyone. I longed for female attention, and was kissing girls in 2nd grade. In 5th grade I French-kissed most of the girls in my class. In junior high, I lost my cuteness and moved cities. I went through the awkward stage, but emerged a very attractive young man when I started high school. That is when most of my serious trouble began.
I was addicted to female attention, and I had learned how to get it. I became highly sexually active, and measured my self-worth by the attention girls would give me. I became a master at flirtation. Yet nothing prepared me for when I first fell in love. After dating for a year, she left me for a friend of mine. I attempted suicide and almost succeeded. The rift between my parents and I grew.
Things got so bad at home that for most of my junior and senior year, my parents stopped taking family photos. They wanted to forget that time period, and any memory of me during that time. I still felt love for God, but didn’t really want to talk to him. I felt abandoned by everyone.
I moved states when I turned 18 and I see my parents once every 2 years or so. I made a lot of very close friends, and my spirituality picked up again. We would talk until the early hours of the morning about God and other things. Many times, people would tell me that they felt that God was speaking through me to them, and they would get goose bumps and the warm fuzzies talking to me. A few of these friends became addicted to these experiences, and I felt uncomfortable that they were putting too much importance in my words and perceptions. I didn’t feel like a mouthpiece for God. I just enjoyed my personal relationship. My mother, despite our rocky relationship, would ask me spiritual advice and tell me she thought God spoke through me at times. My father said similar things, but less often. They told me that I should start my own church. I laughed at the idea. I knew I had charisma, but I didn’t want to manipulate people spiritually.
While I was going to LSU, I partied as hard as I studied. My roommate and I threw enormous keg parties on Fridays and Saturdays, and we had a few friends over on Sundays to finish off whatever was left in the kegs. I met my future ex-wife at one of my keg parties. We had an instant attraction to each other, and after a very complicated and short period of time, we started dating. She told me she was Mormon, but I really didn’t know what that meant, nor did I care. After a while, she began to cry during sex and told me she was feeling guilty for “breaking the law of chastity.” I remember thinking WTF? What law is that? We hadn’t broken any laws yet as far as I knew! She told me that God was angry with her for having sex with me. This was a completely foreign idea to me. I had a fairly good concept of what was right and wrong, and I didn’t feel that we were doing anything evil. But now that she was crying, something was obviously not right. I didn’t understand, but I wanted her to feel better. She said that she would feel better if she started going to church again, and that I should go with her.
I thought “why not?” I still had a deep love for God, and loved going to different churches. I wanted to continue the relationship, so I went. We also began going to the institute classes on campus. The institute teacher was the most Christ-like man I have ever met, and had a deep love for mysticism. As I would find out later, the things he taught would get him in trouble with the church fairly often. Therefore, the open-minded and deep teachings were not mainstream to Mormonism. If I had known this right off, there is a chance I might not have converted.
One day I was at institute, and saw some movie that showed Jesus going to the Americas. I loved the idea, because one of my questions had always been “why didn’t God expose more people to Christianity?” It just felt to me that this made more sense from a loving God. I was intrigued at some of the other things I heard, so I signed up to have some missionaries come by. Now, I had been exposed to Mormons when I was growing up, but I didn’t really know much about what they believed. I just knew that I had to work extra hard with my charm to get Mormon girl’s clothes to come off.
When the missionaries came to my apartment, my roommate wouldn’t let them in. Granted, they probably wouldn’t want in. Our apartment was known as “The House of Sin” due to extreme partying including drugs and alcohol, gratuitous sex, and of course my roommate’s pornographic magazines that could be found in various rooms. The missionaries were very polite and down to earth. Again, it wouldn’t be until later that I would discover that their personalities and approach was quite different from “the norm” of LDS missionaries. (I am still very close to one of them, and he is happy for me that I’m exmo. He was supportive and excited for me as I journeyed out of the church. I love him deeply.) Since we couldn’t go inside, we sat on the deck and had a fantastic discussion.
One Elder had just started his mission, and I was his first contact. He was nervous and said “bear with me. I haven’t done this before.” I replied “it’s my first time too, so let’s just relax and have a good time.” And that we did. I learned that the Mormons had answers to many of the questions I had come up with that other Christian churches couldn’t answer. Also, they taught that everyone goes to heaven. Baptisms for the dead also made sense to me in order to include all of the people who never heard “the gospel”. I always believed in an all loving, all inclusive God, but thought that everything would just work itself out after death. The apostasy idea made sense to me, because I too wondered how there could be so much contention over which church was the best to join. I also liked the idea of eternal marriage. Eternal families didn’t make sense to me, but eternal marriage did. I also loved the idea of an eternal mother. Everything just felt so damn good.