Posted by:
elderolddog
(
)
Date: October 11, 2018 05:49PM
After meeting with a GA (someday I'll get around to checking my church records to see if they indicate who it was, so I can brag about it if it was a big enough name, because, at that time, he was just another old mormon White man...) in late 1964, to be judged as to my worthiness to go on a mission, and being given the okay, after 6 months in the penalty box, I was the most devout mormon you ever saw. But a lot of what you couldn't see didn't change, you know, the masturbation and always trying to take a deep visual breath of boobs... Someday I'll do a soliloquy on what boobs meant to a guy back in the 1960s...
So anyway, I was honestly, sort of, trying to be a good, clean, healthy mormon. I was reading church books and going to ALL the meetings I could (Monday: Choir Practice; Tuesday: M.I.A.; Wednesday: Stake M.I.A. with my G/F, the Patriarch's daughter, but we'd always leave early and go cruise Fremont St.; Thursday was a free night!; then Friday was date night, usually a movie and then cruising Fremont; then Saturday was a dance night somewhere in the Stake; and then Sunday there was church all day and then a youth fireside somewhere. I was totally consumed with the church.
Now get this, as an only child, I obviously had my own bedroom. And it was a huge room, which as I've mentioned before was part of my daydream to get married in the 8th grade and Susie Smith would have had plenty of room in the big closet, et al.
So it's late at night and I finally was ready for bed. So as was my habit I went into the closet to pray. I would kneel by the dirty clothes hamper and put my elbows on it and bow my head and do pray. On this occasion, after closing my eyes, I immediately saw/felt a strong light. You know how with your eyes closed in the presence of a strong light, you see the red of the blood going through your eyelids? Well, that was what I was sensing. And I'd gone into the bedroom alone, and the light was off!
So based on what I was experiencing and on what I knew about life, mormons, ghawd and angels, I jumped to the conclusion that there was an angel in the closet with me. And the next conclusion was that he (why do we never see female angels?) must have a message for me.
Now I'm reasonably intelligent and supremely lazy, so it was obvious that a message from an angel probably entailed doing something, and I don't ever volunteer to for extra duty without the benefit(s) first being spelled out! So within just a couple of seconds, I had reached the conclusion that not having asked for anything that required a heavenly visitation, I wasn't going to accept the angel's visit. So I squeezed my eyes tighter shut (and the light was still seemingly penetrating my eyelids) and suggested to the angel that I was not worthy of his visit and maybe we'd all be better off if he left. And after another few seconds, the light that was seemingly in the closet went away and I opened my eyes and found myself to be alone.
I carried that memory around for a few months, wondering if I had thrown away the chance to become a tool in ghawd's hand? But then the same thing happened again, with the eyes and the light, in a secular setting, and I knew then that I had not been visited by an angel.
And of course, once I went through the temple, I suffered a complete loss of belief in angels and the entire panoply of heavenly beings.