Twenty five years ago, I was a teenager in Florida who befriended a Mormon girl. Out of respect to her privacy, I'll rename her Anne (with an "E" of course).
When Anne and I first became friends, we had one thing in common - Brett. (Again, name changed.)
Brett was this cute baritone in the school's top choir who graduated the year before Anne and I became friends. He was tall and skinny with green eyes, and he made most of the girls in choir giggle with his teasing and antics. He had a great voice and could drive. To someone like me at 15, he was a hunk.
Brett and Anne, a senior and a junior, had dated for two months at the start of my sophomore year. They were so publicly adorable - similarly good looking, smiley with sparkly eyes. They looked so cute together walking hand in hand from their typing class each day. We were all in love with Them.
Then Anne suddenly dumped Brett, and we were all heartbroken. Brett claimed that Anne cheated on him with another guy. I later learned that it wasn't that simple, but I digress...
After the breakup, Brett was devastated - as in, occasionally sitting catatonic in a chair in choir devastated. Then some adult told him, "Young man, you should not be so fixated on one young woman. You are young! Date around!" So that was exactly what he did.
Brett started asking out practically every girl in choir. We all had a crush on him, and we all said yes. Alas "date around" in Brett's language didn't mean "go out on dates and be friendly with lots of different girls." It meant "take a girl out, watch a movie, and make out for at least an hour with each one of them so they can compare notes later."
I was one of the girls, but I didn't want Brett to make out with other girls. Headstrong and convinced I was in love, I hoped I could become his new girlfriend. After about a month of dating, however, Brett stated that he and I could never have a future together on the grounds that we had religious differences. He was moderately religious, and I was not religious at all.
In actuality, Brett fell for an old girlfriend whom he eventually married. All's well that ends well.
It took months for me to recover. So when Anne joined the chorus the next year - my junior year and her senior year - we became friends and started exchanging stories about Brett. Well, also about religion. At first it was about religion and Brett, but eventually it was just religion.
To start with, I learned that the reason Anne and Brett broke up the previous year was religious differences. Anne was a Mormon, and Brett was a regular Christian. In fact, Brett worked at a Christian book store -you know, the kind that keeps books about Mormons in the "cult" section. Brett would read those "Christian" books at work, and he would start debates with Anne on their next date. In no time, her feelings toward him soured. So Anne moved on and dated someone else.
For some reason, Anne's faith was one of the things that drew me to her. I usually didn't associate with such smiley people. I preferred people passionate and angsty, with a potty-mouth, like myself. Still, I liked the Mormons I had met. The seemed...authentic for the most part. They didn't feel pious. It still amuses me that Utahns associate Mormonism with piety, because it's very different in Florida. Perhaps being a religious minority and knowing that you are often alone in your beliefs and values forces you to be more authentic.
The title of Mormon seemed mysterious to me. I found myself attracted to the LDS church despite knowing nothing about it. In fact, though I had balked at most Christian religions, I imagined that if I were ever to join any church, it would probably be the Mormon church.
Wanna to hear a funny story that illustrates this fascination I had with the church? When I was at the start of my junior year in high school, I filled out a survey about my interest in college. One of the questions was "If you were to attend a church affiliated school, which religion would it be affiliated with?" I had no idea. I was officially Protestant, having been baptized Methodist as an infant. I was not a practicing Methodist, though. My mother had mostly taken my sister and I to the Church of Unity, a sort of non-doctrinal and mostly fellowship-based organization. I felt no devotion to it or belief in it. I had no devotion to any faith at all.
Yet there as I took the survey and scanned the list of religions, I saw "CJCLDS" listed for one of the religions. Not knowing what it meant, and for no particular reason, I checked the box.
It turned out that "CJCLDS" stood for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints - the Mormons.
Here is the real punchline: Two and a half years later, I began attending Brigham Young University, the LDS church's university based in Provo, Utah.
No comments:
Post a Comment