Hi.

It’s really early here – about 4am. I’m awake with jet lag having returned a few days from overseas, where I married my college sweetheart. As I lay awake staring at the ceiling, I realized that there was something that I needed to get down on paper for you, the ex-Mormon community, to hear.

While I spent the bulk of the summer overseas, I’ve had considerable time to lie on beaches on the Aegean and think about my life, and to try to reach an understand about what motivated me to join Mormonism, what made me question, what made me leave, what made me come back to it, and what finally, in the end, drove me out, I think I’ve come up with the narrative that seems to bring it all together. Please indulge me while I share it with you.

My ‘story’ isn’t simple and straightforward, and my narrative has come to me over the last year in bits and pieces – if you read this you’ll understand why. Anyway, this is my story. It’s long, it’s complicated, it’s full of plot twists, so grab a cup of coffee and pull up a chair. I think everything is pretty much in chronological order.

I grew up in a fundamentally dysfunctional home. There was multi-year childhood sexual abuse and dysfunction, threats to leave on behalf of my mother, a cold, distant father, and a general atmosphere of distrust. My birth family was nominally Protestant, Presbyterian to be more precise, but I frankly had no idea of what that meant other than the regular observance of Christmas and Easter, and the usual Sunday obligations of going to church. All the time, though, there was the sexual abuse, the emotional abuse, the conditional love, the conditional acceptance. A nice foundation.
I was the ‘odd one’, and, as far as I know as a fact, was the only one sexually abused over a period of years. At age 15, I sought comfort in religion. I experimented with several – Hinduism, Baha’i, and brief flirtations with most of the world’s major religious traditions. It wasn’t until I met other non-Christians who explained to me that Christians believe in things like the Virgin Birth, the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection that I had any grasp of what Christianity taught at all. I thought it just meant be nice (and of course have a nice happy family).

As a kid, the head of my dad’s life insurance company, a Stake President, wrote a book about having ‘family night’ once a week, a practice my dad insisted in observing for a time. Around that time, we were solicited by Mormon missionaries, one from Australia, the other from somewhere in the States. I had never met a 20 year-old man before, and these guys were clean-cut, white shirts, tall, good looking, as all-American as you can be. Apple pie and all that. And kangaroos. My dad invited them in a few times, and they had Thanksgiving dinner with us at one point. I just remember my general impression of them – which they really believed in all this stuff – the golden plates, Joseph Smith, all of it. They left pamphlets with our family, and I used to take them to my room and read over them again and again. It sounded too good to be true (which, of course it is), but a seed had been planted nonetheless. The Mormon Church had begun actively advertising on TV at that point – I just remember the general message about families, being happy, etc. None of the weird stuff I’d find later on. I don’t know why, but the missionaries stopped coming by at some point, and I basically moved on in my spiritual pursuits. I ended up as a Baha’i, as the universalism of it was highly appealing to me having looked at many religions over a period of years. I graduated from high school as a Baha’i, the only one in my city. My Baha’i friends attended my high school graduation. My senior prom date was a lovely Iranian refugee Baha’i. Absolutely lovely, open-minded, fair, decent people. I still hold them in high regards.

So, throughout high school and into my early College years, I clung to religion for identity, something I struggle with to this day. My various religious wanderings piqued the interest of my Freshman French professor, a sincere Anglo-Catholic, and she and I became fast friends, which we remain to this day. It was her who first, calmly and lucidly, explained to me what Christians believe – that Christ died a redemptive sacrifice on the Cross, and literally rose from the dead on Easter Sunday. I had been reading the Bible from a non-Christian point of view for years, and had overlaid my own religious ideas onto the biblical narrative, but when I finally came across the statement that:

1 Corinthians 15:16-18

16 For if the dead do not rise, then Christ is not risen. 17 And if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins! 18 Then also those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. New King James Version (NKJV)

I realized that at that point I was in a bind – I was claiming that I both believed in the Bible (the New Testament specially) and not believing that it was true in a very real sense – that those things happened – the crucifixion and the resurrection. I reached an impasse and realized that I couldn’t maintain that the Bible was true (that is, that the events actually happened), and that its central message (the culmination of biblical history in Jesus) was somehow distorted – at the same time. I resigned my membership in the Baha’i Faith, and began to take instruction in the Catholic faith – because, I believed that it was the only continuing church that had a real concrete historical lineage to apostolic times. I was received into the Catholic Church by confession and Chrismation several months later.

During the early years of being a Catholic, I met someone who was later (and who still does – she’s asleep in our bed in the next room) to change my life in the most profound way possible. Just wanted to insert this here so that what I’m going to say at the end makes sense. She and I became romantically involved. She was an immigrant, a native Greek, Greek Orthodox by faith, and the most profoundly loving person I had ever met in my life. That’s still true today. But I digress.

After college, my activity in the Catholic Church was strong at first, as a new convert, but I developed a really solid foundation of prayer and religious discipline. I began to seriously consider Religious Life (as a monk or priest) a few years into it, and, finally literally, gave all my belongings to the poor and entered a monastery of Franciscan monks as a Postulant. I spent a year there – one which I look back on with great fondness. There were the routines of prayer, fasting, service. A pretty healthy balance, in my opinion. By the end of the year, however, it became apparent to me that I was more attracted to the co-eds on the campus of the college we ran than to monastic life, so I left. Shortly thereafter, I moved to Arizona to be near my father and his wife.

I moved to Arizona not having a job or any prospects for a job, no friends, nothing, just a father and step-mother who, though kind, lived some distance away. I was really alone for the first time in my life. On my way to the job center looking for work each day, I used to drive by the Arizona Temple Visitor’s center. One day, I decided out of curiosity, to stop in and have a look. I had this childhood impression of Mormons as decent, good people, with strong family values. By this point, I was pretty primed for their message.

I took to going to the visitor’s center almost daily to watch the film ‘You’re Not Alone’ over and over again. Every time it would bring tears to my eyes. I would stop by just to have them put on the video for me. Finally, I filled out a card asking for the Missionaries to visit me. This gaping hole inside me was so deep from, as I have come to understand, a history of childhood sexual abuse and a dysfunctional family background, that I latched on to the Mormon image of a ‘perfect’ family, and the central message became for me how to have a perfect marriage and family.

I was baptized in short order, after having chased the missionaries off several times. It was one Sunday morning, after having gone to Confession the night before, then having gone out and gotten roaring drunk, and suffering a tremendous hangover, I called the Missionaries and asked them to baptize me – that night. They, of course, eagerly agreed. The odyssey had formally begun.

I became a rising star in the local Mormon community. Having lived in a monastery for a year, I was asked to give talks to church groups, at Stake Conferences, to groups of missionaries, to ‘tell my story’ about how I came to See the Light. I finally got the attention I had craved. I was heady with it all, and came to the attention of an older young Mormon woman. We dated very briefly, and married several months later. I threw myself into Mormonism full-speed. I accepted calling after calling, served, paid my tithing, the whole bit. The bishop of our Single’s Ward married us civilly, having counseled us to marry quickly so that we wouldn’t ‘sin’ sexually. We were married about 6 months before I was eligible for going through the Temple for my own endowments and being sealed to her. I remember going through the Temple for the first time very clearly, and the oddest thing wasn’t that there were all the secret handshakes and stuff like that, it was that I was told explicitly that the Temple was ‘Sacred, not Secret’, and the oral instructions at the beginning of the Endowment actually stated that it was Secret, and that there were penalties for divulging the secrets of the Temple. The throat slitting, the disemboweling, that stuff – the ‘signs of the tokens of the Holy Priesthood’ – the explanation that you would rather than divulge the secrets of the temple you would ‘suffer that my life would be taken’. As weird as it sounds, that stuff didn’t really phase me. It kind of perversely drew me in. I was in a Secret Club now, with handshakes, passwords, and on the path to Godhood – my own planet, my own Spirit Children, my own Eternal Family.

I think you see where I’m going with this.

A few years earlier, my father, who had flirted with becoming a Mason for years, had become one, and had risen in the ranks of the Lodge to Master his Lodge. I had an admiration for Masonry for years, having had a maternal grandfather who had sworn off alcohol and straightened up his life after becoming a Mason. My dad never ‘encouraged me’ to become a Mason. I had read in various sources about Joseph Smith’s involvement in Masonry, but there was nothing out there like there is today. This was pre-Internet. Just an odd book at the local bookstore, rumors, nothing more. Anyway, in what was largely an attempt to get closer to my dad, I petitioned, and joined his Masonic Lodge. Things began to fall apart in a big way.
I confronted my wife (we were the parents of two small children at the time) about the similarities between the rituals of the Temple and those of the Lodge. Her calm reply to me was that I was to shut up about it, never mention it to the children ever, and to choose between her and Masonry. I asked her for a divorce, later changed my mind for a host of reasons (I was close to her family, Mormon royalty, I had no contact with my birth family other than my father at the time, my whole world was the Mormon community – the social pressure was ENORMOUS). I chose to stay with her. I suppressed my doubts, but I began to investigate on my own. There weren’t many sources out there about Masonry and Mormonism, just one book I think, but I read it (sorry, I don’t remember the specific name, but I think it’s out of print anyway). Nothing online – there was NO ONLINE at the time. I lived a pretty nominal Mormon life for years, got a normal job, and began to raise two kids in the Church, just a normal Mormon life, nothing extraordinary. Just to back track for a second, when my second child was born, I began to admit to myself, did so to my wife, and finally did to a therapist, that I had been sexually abused as a child – not one incident, but a pattern over a period of years. This admission to myself would have profound ramifications later on.

So, back to the Mormon part.

Normal life, ward activity, callings, Temple attendance (we went weekly for many years to Friday night sessions at the Mesa Temple), the whole bit.

Finally, eight years into it, we moved to the west coast for a job transfer. I thought that it was a chance to re-establish myself, forge a new identity, a new career, new ward, new people, everything. I loved it.

Then came the World Wide Web.

About ten years into Mormonism, I stumbled upon the web site of a group calling itself ‘True and Living Church of Jesus Christ of Saints of the Last Days (TLC)’. They had a nice web site, made very bold claims about a ‘falling away’ from the early days of the Restoration, and I entered into an email dialogue with one of their Apostles. It was just mild flirtation, just an interest, really. Anyway, I was called into the Stake President’s office one Sunday morning, and he and the Bishop, a co-worker of mine, began to ask me about having sympathy for dissidents. I asked them where they got their information and they told me that it ‘wasn’t important’. They began grilling me with all kinds of questions about my possible sympathies with the Manti TLC group. I saw, with my own eyes on the desk of the Stake President, two letters, one a printout of an email I had sent to the TLC Apostle with handwritten margin notes - my email address circled, my city, ‘send to SLC’, stuff like that – the other, from the Office of the First Presidency, the Committee For Strengthening Church Members requesting that I be investigated for possible sympathy with the TLC Manti group. I called the Stake President and the Bishop fascists, I think, and left. Over the next few weeks, I injured myself in a table saw accident, was put on prescription pain meds, which didn’t work, and over-used them and basically killed my liver. I ended up in the hospital, close to death, and the person who I reached out to? The TLC Apostle. He and I had a chance to talk about the email incident, and that he told me that he had become aware that a ‘sniffer’ had been put on the Mormon-owned mail server in Manti, and that emails had been screened and cross-referenced to church records in Salt Lake City, and investigations had been launched. I was not the only victim, he was aware of others who had suffered the same fate.

To make a very long story short, I began to experience symptoms of severe depression. I went to see my family physician, who put me on Zoloft. My reaction to Zoloft was extraordinary – extraordinarily BAD. When I went back to him for a follow-up, he told me that as I had reacted so badly to the anti-depressant, that I had to be bipolar. There was no real screening, not like today, just the assumption that if you had certain personality characteristics and a reaction to an anti-depressant, you must be bipolar. Thus began my odyssey into 17+ years of psychiatric medications. Next drug: Zyprexa, after that, Depakote, after that, Lithium, after that, Seroquel. I don’t remember the whole list of drugs I was put on to ‘stabilize’ my mood, but none of them ‘worked’ until I reached a level of 2400 mg daily of Lithium (usual dose is 50-100 mg per day) and 1000 mg of Seroquel (average therapeutic dose is 150 mg daily).

A few weeks after the Saw Incident, as it came to be known, I resigned my Church membership – the first time. I started investigating various religions again – Islam, Judaism, stuff like that, major religious traditions. Finally, I began to look back into the Catholic Faith, started to attend a local parish, and sought to have my weird marriage blessed by the Catholic Church so I could receive Communion again. Confession, Communion, the whole thing. I stayed in the Catholic Church for about a year. I left again, sought re-baptism in Mormonism.

Why?

The answer was pretty simple. My entire social environment was Mormon. My wife was multi-generational Mormon, her family were all Mormons, all my friends were Mormons (they thought I was ‘confused’), so basically I caved into social pressure completely. I didn’t care if the Church was true or not, I needed it, plain and simple. I needed a family, a community, and identity, and Mormonism provided it. I had to be drugged into submission to get to that point (keep reading) but there I was.

Over a period of many years, with all the psychiatric meds, I became a walking zombie, unable to function. I don’t remember much of my children’s teenage years. Just the odd memory. I had Lithium toxicity twice, was hospitalized for what they told me must have been ‘suicide attempts’ – and my abuse of the painkiller following the table saw accident must have been a ‘suicide attempt’ as well, so make that ‘three suicide attempts’. Over the 17 years that followed the initial diagnosis of depression, I went through job after job, reached out to anything I could find to try to make sense out it all, but above all became a complete and total victim – being a victim was fundamental to my identity. At one point, jobless, we went on Church Welfare. To its credit, the Mormon Church paid our bills, gave us food, basically took care of us until we got back on our feet. I remain indebted to the good people who did these things for us.

I was on Lithium therapy for about 17 years, as I can recall. My memory is spotty – Lithium does that to you. The Lithium caused brain damage, resulting in the development of Parkinson’s Disease (actually, Parkinsonism, the manifestation of the disease), leading to my having to exit working life and go on Social Security Disability.

My daughter went to BYU, met and married a RM, my son went on a mission. When he was about a year and a half out, we moved to a small timber town, close to my wife’s work. I basically had no life. I walked the dog every day, twice a day, did a lot of thinking, tried to put things together in my very foggy mind, prayed a lot, visited the local Catholic parish, and took the step – a second time – to join the parish and go to Confession and Communion. My wife was pretty livid at this point. She had been remarkably tolerant, to her credit, actually far beyond any tolerance I had, but she had vowed to never leave me, no matter what. I was basically stuck. There was nothing I could do to escape, nothing whatsoever. I began to romanticize suicide, began to walk under the high bridge over the bay wondering if throwing myself off it would ‘work’. This became pretty concrete for me when a local woman threw herself off it in despair, so I knew it would work, at least in theory. I didn’t care about God, truth, family, nothing at that point. My life had become un-livable. I was boxed in, no way out, no way to escape the cognitive dissonance, trapped in a loveless marriage in a mind-numbing religious cult’s control. Even practicing an alternate faith, like the Catholic Faith, had proved fruitless. Nothing brought relief from the emotional pain I felt like a searing knife. Death was my only way out.
I began to plan my suicide – a real suicide, not like the ‘suicide attempts’ that I had accepted had occurred, but a real, genuine one. The only question became when. Before my son returned from his mission, or after?

At this time, in the midst of the hell that my life had become, a light suddenly turned on.

After one Sunday Mass, I was sitting in front of my computer, and the thought popped into my head – ‘What about your old Greek college girlfriend? Why not look her up?’ So, I went on to Facebook, did a search, and there she was. I sent her the following text message:

“Are you the … who moved to from … to … to study architecture 32 years ago?’

The reply:

“Yes, it’s me. How are you?”

The exact story of why I believe this happened is kind out of scope, and is too personal, but I don’t think it was by coincidence. It involves the death of family members, stuff that’s just too strange to be coincidental. The timing of it was so odd – the exact circumstances of the messages. Just really strange. Some people, who read this, know what that is, but I’m trying to get to the bottom line here.

As I was in this transition period, something profound happened.

I had reached a crossroads in my life. I knew that if I were to stay with my wife, in the Mormon environment, totally immersed in it, that I would end up destroying myself, no matter what I might believe. So, one night, I took a box containing every psych med I had and parked my car under the bridge. I waited. I called my old sweetheart. I told her I couldn’t do it, that I couldn’t leave, couldn’t stay, couldn’t make any decision at all, that the only decision was to live or to die, that night.

She told me something profound, which has changed my destiny forever – ‘You must choose. This must be your choice.’ It was pretty simple. Choose to live, or choose to die.

I chose to live.

I turned my car on, drove back to the home, and planned my exit strategy. I told my wife that I was divorcing her and moving. The night I left her, my son, by now a returned missionary living at home, cornered me in the kitchen and began to hit me, while simultaneously quoting the Bible. I think he said ‘Jesus said…’ Slap. Something like that. Nice.
In short order, I left, moved across country – with one carry-on and three boxes – in the divorce settlement I gave my ex-wife everything – money, savings, cars, everything. I had no money, no credit cards, absolutely nothing.

I arrived on the door-step completely broken, with no foreseeable future, bipolar, with Parkinson’s, un-employable. She took me in, my wife did, took me in, introduced me to leading experts in the fields of psychiatry and neurology, who were willing to question the status quo. I underwent a complete medical and psychiatric workup, and the neurologist, a world expert in Parkinson’s disease, had me undergo a DAT Scan, the definitive diagnostic imaging tool for a positive Parkinson’s diagnosis. The image showed damage to the brain, in the area responsible for Dopamine production, which controls movement. But, he said, given my medical history and my long-term use of Lithium, he had a theory that it might be reversible if the Lithium therapy were to be stopped. Well, to make a long story short, he and my psychiatrist stopped the Lithium, my psychiatrist stopped the Seroquel, and within six months all symptoms completely evaporated – I had no psychiatric symptoms, no Parkinson’s. I was kept on Tegretol on a low dose as a precaution during the period of recuperation - until I could be sure I didn’t need it any more. Two weeks ago I threw the Tegretol off a mountain on the island of Rhodes.

I’m drug free, symptom free, and I have the future ahead of me. I’ve begun meeting with a Ph.D. career counselor about how to return to work. I’ve confronted my birth family about the childhood sexual abuse and the destruction it has caused – to my life, to the lives of my children, having raised them in the Mormon religion. My birth family has cut off all contact with me completely. Don’t ask, don’t talk, and don’t tell. As for my own children, well, they don’t really talk to me anymore, they aren’t interested in having a relationship with a father who can be fully present in their lives, as a fully-functional, emotionally healthy man. They wanted the broken, drugged, suicidal man that I was.
Well, they can have him.

I prefer me as I am.

So to wrap it up, I think it goes like this: Childhood sexual abuse created such a chasm in my soul that I sought refuge in dysfunctional and controlling religion, and the cognitive dissonance caused by Mormonism led to establishing myself as a victim, leading nearly to my death. And if you want honesty and transparency in your life, you better be prepared to live with the consequences.

Yeah, miracles do happen. That’s called love, unconditional love. That’s what can save you.

This took 52 years to live, a few years to reflect on, and about three house to write. The sun is up, and I need some tea.