#book of mormon reader insert

[downthe-f4ndom-rabbith0le]

The Way Back Home (Spencer Reid x Reader) - Prologue

The Way Back Home (Spencer Reid x Reader) - The Prologue Word Count: 4001 Reader Insert: she/her pronouns Warnings: major angst, major fluff, mentions of murder, crime scenes, near-death experiences, slow-burnish romance, death, canon violence, rape, swearing, guns, knives, prostitution, canon cuteness of the team. Spoilers: Maeve's death, mentions of previous cases or canon events from seasons 1-10.

Spencer and you have an unspoken connection with one another. Nothing has ever happened between you two, especially since everything went down with Maeve, but your love has grown and overcome and is now clear as day to everyone. However, just when Spencer builds up enough courage to ask you out officially, you're requested on an undercover mission that halts your budding relationship in its tracks.

Months go by without a word from you until bodies of prostitutes start showing up in New York and the BAU is brought in to help. Spencer and you finally reunite as both your cases collide, but your lives and your love are both on the line now.

Will you and Spencer be able to find the way back home this time?

Prologue | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Epilogue

~~~

You released a tired, relieved sigh as you and the rest of the team exited the elevator and walked back into the bullpen. You'd just landed back after a week in Utah chasing a serial killer who turned out to be a mormon. He killed in the name of burning out the false children of God from humanity - literally. The Unsub managed to burn six innocent people alive before they apprehended him.

'I cannot wait to go home for a hot bath and a good glass of scotch,' Rossi said, rubbing at the kink in his neck from the sleep home on the plane.

'Ditto,' Alex said. 'James is home for the weekend, and he has promised me some home made pie that I am very much looking forward to.'

You smiled as you reached your desk, the echo of the others adding to the conversation of what they were looking forward to when they got home warming the usually busy room as they passed you. A sense of comfort and relief washed over you as you placed your go-bag on your desk. Hearing all your friends' voices back in the office after a mission was never a guarantee, so you relished every time you heard them, regardless of the conversation.

You looked up when a figure entered your peripheral vision, and that comfort and warm feeling spread further through you when you saw who it was.

'What about you, Y/N?' Spencer said by way of greeting, a soft smile gracing his own tired features. 'What is waiting for you at home on this fine Friday evening?'

You paused to think about it for a second, a content smile tugging at your lips at the thought. 'Well, unless I've been robbed in the last few days, I will be enjoying a nice glass of moscato while I order pasta from the restaurant below my apartment, and snuggle in with my book that I've spent literally months trying to finish,' you said dreamily, the thought of good food and good wine and a good book sounding almost too good to be true. But Garcia had informed the team before landing that no new cases had been submitted and so you had the weekend to yourselves.

'That all?' he asked, amusement dancing on his lips.

You chuckled, shaking your head. 'I know. First Friday night home in DC in a while and I am choosing to stay at home instead. The utter shame of it all.'

You both laughed, and it pleased you to see his amber eyes light up after the long week you'd had.

'I didn't mean that as a bad thing,' Spencer said, brushing a stray curl from out of his eyes. Even though it was the shortest length it'd ever been, some rogue curls still managed to dangle out of confinement every once in a while. 'What book are you reading?'

'Don't laugh at me, but... The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.'

Spencer's brow furrowed curiously. 'Why would I laugh? I love Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's work.'

You shrugged, casually leaning against your desk as you crossed your arms. 'I know, it just seems a little silly that a federal agent is reading some old detective stories.'

'Actually, Doyle was one of the forefathers of detective fiction, as he brought in the concept that the science of deduction isn't just physical evidence but psychological observations. He created a space where all the sciences we know today can help in solving crime, and actually paved the way for more psychological avenues to be taken more seriously in academia and law enforcement. If you think about it, without Sherlock, you and I may not have our jobs as profilers right now.' Spencer paused when he realised he was rambling, and despite your soft, encouraging smile, he saw the tired blankness in your eyes.

Spencer licked his lips before speaking again. 'What I'm trying to say is... I don't think it's silly at all.'

You nodded your thanks although you knew you didn't need to. 'So what about you?', you asked in return. 'What will entertain Dr. Spencer Reid on this "fine Friday evening"?'

His words repeated back to him kept the smile on his face, more importantly the life in his eyes. But he began to fiddle with the strap of his satchel bag, and you couldn't help but notice he slightly swayed. Like he was nervous or something. It was cute.

He was cute.

You forced the rising heat in your cheeks to stay underneath the surface to not give away your embarrassment or your inner thoughts. Thoughts you'd been having since the day you'd met him six years ago. Thoughts that you'd suppressed so as to not interfere with your work, and then later so it wouldn't ruin your hard-built friendship.

When he told you about Maeve, you'd had mixed feelings. Of course, you'd been ecstatic for him that he'd found someone he could be himself with, and even more so when he disclosed to you that no one else knew about her - just you. But you couldn't deny the twinge of sadness that pulled at your heart knowing that that someone he could be himself with wasn't you.

But you hadn't hesitated, hadn't faltered when he'd needed a shoulder to cry on when Maeve was killed. Once he decided to open up and accept help, you were first in line to help keep the young doctor afloat in his sea of grief and loss.

It's been over a year since Maeve's death now, and while she would always remain important in his heart, he had, for the most part, moved on, slowly getting back to be his usual, quirky, logical self.

The past year and a bit has only brought you two closer together, and as much as you have tried to hide how amazing that makes you feel, you've had plenty of conversations with Penelope and others on the team about finally asking the boy wonder out. It's not like you didn't want to, but if Maeve was his type of girl, you just weren't sure you were what Spencer was looking for in a romantic partner. Besides, you were happy with your friendship.

It was by far the most precious relationship you had aside from your family - why ruin it?

You quickly realised you'd both been silent for a while, Spencer still not having answered your question yet. 'Spence?' you prompted gently.

The cute doctor managed to grasp his satchel strap fiercely and ground himself back in the present. 'R-Right. I too have a book at home. The one you got me for my birthday, actually.'

'Oh yes!' The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes. You'd been hooked from the first line, and by the time you finished, all you could think about was how much you thought Spencer would enjoy it. So you instantly wrapped up your own personal copy and waited for Spencer's birthday to roll around. You never told him it was yours, you just hoped he didn't notice the slight bend in the spine or minuscule tears in some pages from you flipping them too quickly. 'I've been meaning to ask you if you enjoyed it or not. I just assumed you'd read it already.'

'We've just been so busy with cases lately. I haven't had time to even consider picking it up.'

You rolled your eyes. 'Come on, we both know you could've finished that book on one of our plane rides.'

He shrugged, eyes dipping for a moment before landing back on you. 'I know. I guess... I just wanted to give it the time and attention it deserved,' he settled on, and the honesty in both his words and his eyes threatened to steal your breath.

A silence that rested between comfortable and awkward settled upon you two. This had happened many times in recent weeks although you weren't quite sure why. Regardless of your hidden feelings and the tragedy of Maeve, neither of you lost your comfortability with one another.

'So... we've both got book dates tonight,' you said in an attempt to break the silence. The rest of the team was still chatting just a little away from them, but it felt like it was just the two of you sometimes when you talked.

'Well, actually, maybe...' Spencer started, and his fingers were twitching again. 'I was wondering if maybe you'd want t-to bring your book over and... join me, tonight.'

The request wasn't an unusual one. In fact, you'd conducted your own mini book club between the two of you on plenty of occasions. Mainly because you both found out you were the kind of people that liked your personal time and space, but didn't like the thought of being completely alone. This wasn't new, but it warmed your heart all the same at the gesture.

'That sounds great, Spence!' you said heartily. 'Give me half an hour and I'll be around at yours-'

'Actually,' Spencer interrupted, 'I was thinking we could grab some dinner together first. You know, like at a restaurant or some place you can sit in at.'

'...Like a date?' you asked softly, breathlessly. The words just kind of slipped from you before you even contemplated how they would affect Spencer. It just felt natural and right.

Your heart pounded like a jackhammer between your ribs, but you were more concerned at what expression Spencer would pull in the next five seconds.

To your relief, he smiled that small little smile of his that spoke volumes of his insecurity but also of his genuine intentions. 'Yeah. I guess it is like a date,' he finally replied.

Oh my goodness. He was nervous. His words were rushed and higher-pitched in tone. but you still managed to understand him, as well as what dinner implied.

A half-smile pulled at your lips. 'Dr. Spencer Reid,' you began softly, half-scared, half-excited to speak the words you'd been holding back for so long. 'Are you asking me out on a date right now?'

At your words, his anxiety seemed to disappear, as he stopped fidgeting with the satchel strap and took a daring step closer to you. 'I guess I am.'

You couldn't stop it now, the smile of pure joy you'd been holding back from splitting your face open. After years of suffering silently, of repressing the truth, it was all worth it for that one question.

'So what do you say, SSA Y/N L/N,' he quipped cheekily. 'Would you like to have dinner with me tonight?'

The answer was right there in the tip of your tongue, almost spewing from you, when your name was called out across the bullpen for all to hear.

The globe of silence and serenity that had built around Spencer and yourself suddenly shattered as you both, alongside the rest of the team, turned to Hotch standing in his office doorway. But while you all looked at him, his hard gaze was honed in on you.

'L/N,' he called again, having your attention now. 'Can I see you in my office, please?'

You looked between him and Spencer, unsure who to answer first. In the end, you were still technically on the clock so you nodded at your boss and said, 'Sure, I'll be in there shortly.'

'This can't wait, I'm sorry.'

It was the seriousness and discomfort in his voice that caused you to throw aside your personal agenda, giving Spencer an apologetic look before quickly making your way through the bullpen, up the stairs and into his office. You tried not to look at your team too much as you did, but you felt their gazes on the back of your head nevertheless.

They were just as confused as you were, then.

'Close the door,' Hotch instructed gently, to which you obliged. He pointed to the seat on the other side of his desk. 'Have a seat.'

'Everything okay, Hotch?' you asked, taking a seat in the chair. 'Oh no. Did I make an error in one of my reports again?'

'No, nothing like that,' he reassured you, which didn't help your already built up worry. For a moment, it was just you two sitting in his office in silence; you waited for him to explain his mysterious actions, while he seemed to struggle to find the right words.

He never struggled to find the right words.

You leaned forward in your seat, worry furrowing your brow. 'Hotch. What's wrong?'

'Nothing is wrong, so to say,' he insisted, but his frown remained. 'I've just been in contact with your old unit chief from Organised Crime. They believe there is an underground operation being conducted by gang leaders in Manhattan that involves the transporting, selling and purchasing of girls and women in the prostitute industry.'

'Okay,' you drawled out, more confused than ever. 'What has this got to do with us?'

'It doesn't,' Hotch answered immediately. 'Just you. Your old unit chief wants you back to go undercover in the case.'

'What?' You stood up from your seat instead of shouting, but goodness it took all your strength not to. 'Why do they need me? They have a whole squadron of agents to choose from.'

'They want a profiler to help them find out who these people are first, then go undercover and become part of the operation's inner circle and report back to them,' Hotch explained, although his tone displayed his displeasure in saying so. 'Y/N, you have more experience in undercover missions than anyone else on this team, even before you joined us as a profiler.'

You knew his words to be true, but the reality of it all was an ever-growing weight on your chest. 'What they are asking, Hotch, could take weeks, months even. Those kind of people will not trust so easily,' you tried reasoning with him.

You couldn't help but look through the blinds to your team still standing and talking outside in the bullpen. To Spencer, who had joined the team since you had left, but just looked at the window as if he could find out what was going on behind the glass and blinds if he looked long enough. It broke your heart to think you wouldn't see him for months, maybe even years.

Because that was the thing with undercover missions. Once you assumed the life of someone else, your old life became non-existent. That meant no contact with anyone outside of the case as a safety precaution.

That meant no talking to Spencer, or anyone in the BAU, until the case ended. Or unless you were killed, in which case you wouldn't be able to do a lot of talking anyways.

You turned back around at the sound of Hotch standing from his seat and coming around the desk to speak directly in front of you, no walls to hide behind. 'You know I wouldn't be asking if I hadn't tried to change their mind first. But even I can't argue that you are the best agent for the job.'

You nodded your understanding even if you hated to admit he was right. 'I guess it's not one of those jobs that I can decline, is it?'

Hotch shook his head regrettably. 'Head Chief requested for you personally. You've already been taken off the roster here at the BAU so you're not disturbed by other cases.'

Hearing that was just rubbing salt in the wound, and you hated the burning feeling of tears rising at the back of your eyes. You were already gone from here, like a ghost that didn't realise she was one to begin with.

Hotch's hand rested heavy on your shoulder as he comforted you. 'We can discuss your return to work when your mission is over. You will always have a place with us, Y/N.'

You attempted a smile, but it was strained as you tried to force back tears. You wiped at the strays that dribbled down your cheeks, pulling yourself back together before speaking again. 'All right. How long do I have before I am expected in the Big Apple?'

'There's someone waiting for you at your apartment already. They'll take you to their headquarters when you're done packing tonight.'

You sucked in air as you felt your whole world tilt unstably. Tonight. You had to leave tonight. Again, you found yourself seeking out Spencer through the half-closed blinds.

'So what do you say, SSA Y/N L/N? Would you like to have dinner with me tonight?'

You bit your lip as you blinked your tears away, trying but failing to ignore the cry of your heart as its strings were pulled harshly. 'Tonight?' you asked in the hope you'd misheard.

But no such hope existed, unfortunately.

'Yes,' Hotch said, that one word the final nail in the coffin of your impending suffering. 'I'm sorry. This goes without saying, but don't mention any of this to the team as you leave. Only myself and Section Chief Cruz will know where you are and the details of your mission.'

You huffed out a joyless laugh. 'Hiding truths from a team of profilers is like playing poker with a mirror attached to your face,' you said, and you didn't bother to hide your displeasure and sadness when you did. 'They're going to ask questions, and they will find out the truth eventually.'

'Let me worry about that,' Hotch said gently, letting go of you and leaving a cold mark where his hand once was. 'You've got bags to pack.'

'Right.' You sucked in a few deep breaths before making your way to the door. tears burned at your eyes again but you couldn't let the team see you like this. You couldn't let Spencer see you like this.

Because you had a job to do. And you always finished a job.

Before you could open the door handle, however, Hotch stopped you once more. 'Y/N.'

You looked at him, forcing an expression of blankness and indifference. 'Yes, sir?'

He must've seen your inner struggle, as he offered one of those genuine smiles of his that were oh so rare. 'We'll see you when you get back,' he said.

It wasn't a promise or a done deal, but it was the most hope you could ask for right now. So you smiled your thanks, nodded your goodbye, and opened the door back into the bullpen.

Immediately, all eyes set upon you and the room grew quiet. Your first instinct was to cry, then to run, then to blurt everything out because you hated keeping secrets. But you remembered what had just been said, and you whipped a bright smile onto your face to hide your despair.

'Don't you guys have homes to go to?' you asked cheerily, walking down the stairs as casually as possibly. You would've bee-lined for your bag, but if you moved too quickly they would suspect something. 'I recall hot baths and scotch were awaiting most of us, are they not?'

Thankfully Rossi took the bait, and picked up his go-bag in a huge huff. 'The lady is right. I spend enough time with you people as is, I am not wasting anymore not drinking and soaking.'

'Soaking in what? The bath or scotch?' JJ asked, also picking up her go-bag to make her way back to the elevator.

The group devolved into laughs and other jests, and you breathed a sigh of relief as you picked up your go-bag and followed them. Before you could though, a gentle call of your name halted you in your tracks, out of both politeness and frozen fear.

'Hey,' Spencer started, looking between you and Hotch's office. 'What was all that about?'

'Oh, uh, nothing super important,' you said, scrambled as you words were. 'Just a paperwork issue. Again.'

He broke out in smile that set your heart aflutter despite your inner turmoil. 'You know, you really shouldn't do paperwork on the plane when you're tired if you're just going to make a mistake. You're better off leaving it to the morning when your brain and body has rested enough to comprehend what the paperwork is asking of you.'

'Well sorry if I don't want to do a mountain of paperwork when I come back into the office,' you countered, grateful for the playful distraction as you made it over to the elevator. The others were just piling in when Spencer halted you again.

'So...' he dragged out, eyes flickering between you and teh floor nervously, '...what do you say?'

'To what?' you asked.

'To dinner. You didn't have time to give me an answer before.'

Shit. Your voice failed you now as you grasped at words - any words - to tell him. Your heart screamed yes, but there was someone waiting for you back home. A home you wouldn't be visiting for who knows how long.

Capitalising on your gaping mouth, you forced out a yawn and feigned covering it up out of embarrassment. 'Oh my goodness, sorry about that. Um, actually, now that you mention it, I am pretty beat. I'm just... going to go home and sleep it off if that's all right.'

It pained you to see his smile drop at your words, to see the hope leave his beautiful eyes at your rejection. And you knew you shouldn't say anything or make promises you couldn't keep, but you couldn't just leave him with no hope.

'Maybe next week sometime,' you offered, hoping your smile could bring some of that light back. 'You know, you've never tried the Italian Restaurant under my apartment before. We could go there. On me.'

Instinctively, you reached for his hand, relishing in the warmth it held and brought into you. To your relief, he didn't pull away. Instead, you got your smile back, and a little light returned to his eyes. You were kind of glad you wouldn't be around when the light left him completely.

'Okay,' he said softly, surprising you with a gentle squeeze of your hand in his. 'It's a date.'

'Yeah,' you replied, trying and failing to push aside the fluttering sensation his words gave your heart. You were only prolonging not only your pain, but his.

Selfish. So selfish.

'Come on, you two,' Derek called out from the elevator. 'I can't hold these doors open forever. Savannah will kill me if I miss our dinner reservations.'

You both quickly made it in to the elevator before Derek let them close on you, and then you were caught up in the chaos that was your team. You weren't sure how you got onto the topic of what scotch goes best with what foods, but you didn't care. It made you happy to know they never let the weight of a dark case get in the way of living their own lives to them fullest.

You all reached the car park and before you could make a run for your car, Spencer called out to you. 'See you Monday, Y/N!'

You turned back around to face not only him, but Derek, JJ, Penelope, Alex, and David as they all slowly went for their cars too.

You caught yourself staring at them, taking their happy faces in one last time before you left them behind. Hotch said you'd always have a place with the BAU, but you weren't sure how long this mission would take. And if you'd be replaced by then.

You forced a smile onto your face and waved them farewell. 'Yeah, see you then.'

You hated the bitter taste the lie brought to your mouth, but you managed to keep it together long enough that you got in your car and drove out of the car park without any more issues. That's when the tears came.

You wouldn't be there next Monday, and were not getting that date with Spencer next week.

It hurt you more to think that you may not get that date at all.

[the-imagines-of-tonight]

Kiss the Girl

Pairing: Kevin Price x reader

Prompt: “can you do a Kevin Price x reader where everyone teases Kevin that he loves the reader but he denies it (but he does) and eventually the reader asks him to watch a movie with her and he randomly kisses her which ends up being a makeout session”

Word Count: 1,848

Warnings: Make out scene, slight suggestive themes

Author’s Note: 1. I love Kevin Price 2. I love Disney 3. I loved writing this fic

Kevin watched as you let the door shut behind you, walking back to your own house. He was unaware of the small smile that had found its way onto his face, still looking at the door long after you had left.

“Oh boy, Elder.” A laugh sounded from behind Kevin, Connor pausing before continuing on, “You really have it bad for her, don’t you?”

“W-what?” Kevin shook his head as if to rid himself of thoughts of you, turning to face Connor. “No, no - I only have, uh, platonic, feelings for Y/N. Nothing more, nothing less. You could even call us acquaintances.” He stammered and stumbled over his words; perhaps talking fast would convince everyone around him of his lack of feelings.

“Uh huh.” Connor raised an eyebrow in response, evidently not believing a word that came out of Kevin’s mouth. “I bet if we asked anyone - and I mean anyone, Kevin - about the way you react around Y/N they’d tell you it was love.”

“They would not!” The indignant defense all but confirmed it for Connor; the boy was head over heels for her.

“Whatever you say, Kevin. Whatever you say.” A look of pity had found its way onto Connor’s face and he shook his head as he walked away, leaving Kevin alone to deal with his conflicting thoughts.

Kevin had never really understood his own feelings, especially his feelings in regard to you - first he thought they were purely platonic, a thought he insistently defended. But as you spent more time together, and even through the briefest of interactions, he grew more and more fond of you. Whether it was your laugh, the sparkle in your eyes or the ease with which you held a conversation, there was absolutely no denying it: he was in love with you.

Love. It was a scary thing. Kevin hadn’t been in love before, or at least he couldn’t remember ever being in love before. But the unknown feeling he had in the pit of his stomach every time he looked at you must’ve been love. There was no other explanation for it - for the butterflies in his stomach, for the thoughts of you that kept him up at night, for the way his attention was immediately drawn to you every time the two of you were in the same room.

“Something wrong, buddy?” Arnold’s soft voice sounded from behind Kevin and a hand found its way to rest on his shoulder.

“Maybe.” Kevin gave a defeated sigh, slightly folding in on himself as he turned his face towards Arnold. “It’s just-”

“Matters of the heart, huh?” Arnold nodded understandingly, as if he had abundant experience in such matters. “Is it... You know... Y/N again?”

“Y/N! Again?” Kevin laughed nervously, running a hand through his hair. Glancing around to ensure Arnold was the only one within earshot, Kevin dropped his voice to a whisper, asking, “Is it really that obvious?”

“‘Fraid so.” As soon as the words came out of Arnold’s mouth the handle of the door turned and you walked back into the room, evidently having left something behind. “Good luck, bud.” Arnold whispered into Kevin’s ears before attempting hasty exit, leaving the two of you alone.

“Um, hi, Y/N.” With a weak wave Kevin greeted you, internally cursing himself for his awkwardness - it seemed as though you acted as a repellent for any logical thought he attempted.

“Kevin! Just the man I wanted to see,” You smiled wide and Kevin’s eyes flickered down to your lips, tentatively licking his own. Picking up the jacket you had left draped over the back of the couch you took two steps closer to Kevin. “Do you wanna maybe come over to my place tonight? Like, to watch a movie or something? I’ve got some Disney movies I want to re-watch but not alone, so I thought to myself, ‘who’d want to watch these with me’ and you came to mind -”

“Yes.” Kevin thankfully cut off your rambling with a shy smile. “I’d love - uh, like, that a lot.”

“Great!” You felt your face flush as you watched Kevin’s eyes roam around your face, more often than not landing on your lips. “Well, I’ll see you soon?” Phrasing it as a question you crossed your arms and looked up at Kevin, awaiting an answer.

“How about I grab my stuff now and come with you?” It took everything in Kevin’s power to prevent himself from hitting his own face - your eyebrows had shot up at his statement, evidently because he came on too strong and probably scared you off. “I mean, if that’s alright and all...” Nice. Very obvious back peddling. Kevin cringed slightly, the skin of his forehead crinkling in embarrassment.

“Of course it is, Kevin!” Getting over your initial shock on how forward Kevin was you relaxed your face into a smile, a light blush dusting your cheeks. With a slight nod in your direction Kevin all but ran off in the direction of his room, rushing to collect the things he deemed necessary - his wallet, keys, phone - and shoved them into a backpack.

He reappeared in your line of vision, droplets of sweat beading along his hairline and a rosy glow to his cheeks. “Let’s get going then,” You smiled, continuing to do so as the two of you made your way out of the Elder’s accommodation and towards your own.

Kevin blushed just thinking about being alone with you, something he had never experienced before; at least three others were always in the same room as you both. Perhaps this was the chance he had to finally make a move, or at least tell you how he felt - how he had felt for the longest time. He followed you into your lounge room, placing his bag gingerly against the couch that stood facing the television.

“Is The Little Mermaid okay? It’s one of my favourites,” Your statement hung in the air between you and Kevin; somehow despite being able to talk for hours whilst surrounded by others, alone it seemed you were complete strangers.

“S-sure.” With an awkward, jerky movement Kevin nodded and you began to play the movie, sitting a respectable distance away from where Kevin was seated. But that didn’t last very long, as within about ten minutes both of you had readjusted your sitting positions, shifting closer to the middle until you were separated only by a distance wide enough for Kevin’s hand to rest.

The first part of the movie passed without incident, Kevin apparently awaiting the perfect moment to turn to you and -

And you don’t know why but you’re dying to try, you wanna kiss the girl.

Kevin gulped as he snuck a glance your way; you were completely engrossed in the movie, despite having seen it numerous times before. His cheeks turned red as the song played on, strangely mirroring the voice of his own internal monologue.

Looks like the boy too shy, ain’t gonna kiss the girl. Ain’t that sad? Ain’t it a shame? Too bad, he gonna miss the girl.

The singing, animated crab was right: if Kevin didn’t grab your attention in someway he would lose his chance - it was now or never.

Boy, you better do it soon, no time will be better.

“Hey, Y/N?” You turned your head to face Kevin, who had managed to grab your attention. Opening your mouth to reply you froze in shock as you felt Kevin press his lips hard against yours, having misjudged the force needed to carry him to you. You didn’t respond, initially unable to even comprehend the quick succession of events.

Sensing your hesitation, Kevin pulled back, a look of confusion on his face as he began to mutter out an apology. “Y/N, I’m sorry, I - I don’t know what came over me-”

To prevent his rambling from continuing, you mustered up the courage to press your own lips to his, shifting closer to him on the couch. He gasped and his eyes fluttered shut as he felt your lips press once more against his. Your hands had travelled up his body with a feather-light touch, resting in his hair and tugging slightly.

Kevin was nervous - you could tell from the way his hands shook against you, as if touching you in any way would make you stop; or worse, could hurt you. But his hands came to lay on your waist, the both of you turning to face one another whilst still sitting on the couch.

Tracing the curve of your body one of Kevin’s hands moved up to tip your jaw slightly further up, giving him more access to your lips as they parted. It seemed as though your lips were made for one another, moving together in harmony as your tongues explored each other’s mouths. You let out an involuntary moan as Kevin pressed himself flush against you, his kiss evidently becoming both more needy and passionate.

A knock sounded throughout your small house, the only noise able to draw you away from Kevin. “Excuse me a second,” You laugh, panting slightly as you stood up and walked to the door, a giddy smile remaining in place on your face.

“Hello?” You opened the door to a smiling face - Connor’s smiling face. Without realising, your face was still flushed, lips swollen slightly and hair mussed; all tell-tale signs of the deed you had just partaken in.

“Oh, Y/N, um, I needed to ask Kevin a question, but, uh, I see the two of you are... busy... So I’ll just leave you to it.” After raking his eyes over your appearance Connor’s cheeks were coloured with red, having understood the reason behind them. He promptly turned on his heel without waiting for you to respond, leaving you befuddled in the doorway.

“So I guess Connor knows now,” You stated simply, sitting back down on the couch, this time with your thigh pressed against Kevin’s.

“I’m sorry,” He replied, gently placing his hand on the top of your knee. You rested your head against his chest, falling into a calming rhythm together.

Breaking the comfortable silence, Kevin said, “I - I’ve always wanted to find and tell someone, ‘You deserve to be in an art museum because of how beautiful you are.’ And I think I found that person in you, Y/N.” Taking in a deep breath he continued, “I think I might actually love you.”

You gasped at his words and turned your head up, watching a blush spread across his face. Studying the way his eyes lit up by simply seeing your face and being in your presence you couldn’t help but smile. “And I think I love you too, Kevin.”

He laughed as he pressed a chaste kiss to your temple, wrapping an arm protectively around you. You moved in closer and placed a flat palm to brace yourself on his chest; the rhythm of his breathing and the feeling of happiness filling you quickly putting you to sleep.

[dddemigirl]

I’m close to halfway done with Midnight Sun and I have some thoughts. It bothers me how much SMeyer writes Bella as the definition of “not like the other girls,” but also how much I see myself in Bella. Disgusting, considering Bella is Smeyer’s self insert. The clumsiness, not wanting to be the center of attention, being nerdy, being terrible at sports and dancing. I can relate to that stuff. Certainly not the fiction protagonist I’d want to find myself in.

Some other things that intrigue me; was Edward always unable to put together Charlie‘s thoughts? I don’t remember that. Granted I haven’t read the books or watched the movies since I was a young teenager. I was also wondering about Tanya and the Denali Clan, did they have much of a role? Something that surprises me is how teenager-ish Edward’s actions/thoughts can be. When I first read the books I always saw him as mature, so sure of himself. I guess one would be if they were as old as he is but Midnight Sun really reminds us that this emo sparkle boy is mentally 17.

Speaking of the Cullens, I love how much I’m seeing of their banter and personalities compared to what I remember from Bella’s POV. I’m really into the potential vampire lore that Smeyer denied us. I feel like if this story wasn’t so focused on Edward and Bella we could’ve seen that stuff fleshed out. Where do other vampires live in the US? Where in other countries? What are their laws or activities? We see so little of other vampire clans outside of the big battle scene in Breaking Dawn (?) or when we occasionally are introduced to the Cullens’ vampire friends. You’re telling me that Edward is the only vampire to ever develop feelings for a human? That every other group of vampires just see humans as prey? I know the Cullens are considered different from many for being “vegetarians” and for living as a family but still.. Also! Stephanie Meyer, your obnoxious Mormon ass incidentally went and wrote Alice as sapphic. I bet you’d hate it if you knew some of your readers thought this. The way Alice talks about loving Bella?? Hello??? Edward even refers to Alice being Bella’s girlfriend. I know this is being used in the way straight women refer to their friends as “girlfriends,” which is super obnoxious to me as a lesbian, but come on..! Alice is sapphic and polyamorous. I’m calling it. She is happy for Edward and Bella and truly loves Jasper but she has feelings for Bella too. No one can take this from me. Okay, so onto another topic. We all hate how racist this series is, it’s so focused on white people and has racist writing choices. I would’ve liked if the Cullens were diverse. Not just in race but in sexuality, gender, perhaps there could’ve been disabled vampires? Think about it; these are killing machines with great physical ability, would any physical disability they had as humans be gone with their change to vampirism? I think it would be good writing and good representation to have say, a vampire in a wheelchair for example. As someone with dyscalculia and ADHD I would enjoy reading about learning disabilities as well. Meyer writes about how smart Edward and Bella are in academics. I grew up learning that I would never truly be perceived as smart because of my dyscalculia and other learning disabilities.

I also like the idea of a trans vampire, someone who spends their new life as an immortal working on their gender expression how they see fit and becoming happiest with their body. They have all the time in the world after all. Obviously give me all of the lgbt vampires please. Onto race diversity, I had a thought, could a Native vampire exist in the Twilight canon? Imagine a Native who feels conflicted with their new vampire identity and how their heritage warns them to stay away from the Cold Ones. Becoming the thing your family and community despise and having to decide where your loyalties lie, if your loved ones would even accept you? Smeyer did the Quileute tribe soooo fucking dirty. I am so pissed. Who the fuck... what the fuck? Who the fuck involves an indigenous community in their writing, without permission, and doesn’t give said tribe funds from their earnings from the book(s)?? This lady’s racist, homophobic, slut shaming, holier than thou attitude is so prevalent in her writings and it worries me because she influenced a whole generation of young teenagers with her books. I was one of them. Not to mention she tried to play off that Edward and Jacob’s treatment of Bella were somehow romantic and healthy! Today’s young adults saw that shit! You’re a grown woman Stephanie. You romanticized toxic behaviors in your books targeted toward a young and impressionable audience. I’m thinking about how many of today’s preteens and teenagers will go read the Twilight saga for the first time due to Midnight Sun’s release. They will think that racism, predatory relationships and shaming girls for liking popular things (See Bella “not like other girls” Swan for reference) is acceptable. I’m a hopeless romantic, a dreamer, so I hate when these books easily make me go “aww” internally even when I know it’s not “aww,” it’s unhealthy. I’m old enough to know what is a red flag in Bella’s relationships but not everyone who reads them is old enough to understand that yet. Baby me certainly didn’t see how Edward and Jacob were both not good for Bella. I was too caught up in the Team Edward and Team Jacob craze. (Baby me was Team Jacob by the way. I’m a trashy furry who loves werewolves, I can’t help it.)

My final thoughts for now anyway: in the dedication our wonderful author says that this book is for the fans who were first young teens when reading Twilight, something like that. She writes that she hopes we achieved our dreams. Not the exact wording but you get it. I remember when I read that dedication page I felt immeasurable sadness. I haven’t reached my goals, lived my dreams or become a successful young adult. I’m still that socially awkward, clumsy, unremarkable person I was when I first read and watched this story. (Ew. Once again why do I sound like how Smeyer describes Bella? I’m cringing.) I’m stuck being a nobody because I’m too scared to change. I know this rant is about Midnight Sun/the Twilight saga and isn’t about me but damn that shit hit me like a ton of bricks.

[sharionpage]

For the Love, Loathing and Laughter of the Temple Endowment

The LDS Temple Endowment is an extraordinary thing. It is central to a mature Mormon’s religious life, but if you ask one simply to explain what it is most of us will struggle to come up with a coherent response. What even is this thing?! A series of covenants? A blessing? A ritualised story? Immersive theatre in the round? Performance art? It is so many things at once, and its origins are exactly that – a buffet of individual rituals and covenants and teachings that include prayer circles, hand gestures, symbols, annointings with holy oil and water and blessings with roots in the ordination rituals of ancient Jewish Tabernacle priests, chanted prayers, new names, ceremonial robes, ‘magic underwear’, promises of deification, and creation mythology.

Claims are made about the experience promising peace and answers and clarity in a stressful and confusing world; a refuge from strife. We are encouraged to go to the temple to seek personal revelation about our most important life changing decisions. We expect going through it to solidify a person’s faith into something lasting and mature. After participating for ourselves we return to reach out to our ancestors and perform the same rituals for the dead, continuing the most ancient forms of animist religion where reverence, prayers, ceremonies and offerings are directed towards dead ancestors who are believed to still be around us and watching over us, and in need of our care and interventions to aid them on their journeys through the afterlife.

So how on earth did a new religious movement emerging from the evangelical Puritan and Protestant religious world of the rationalist, Enlightenment era early 19th century eastern United States end up doing this crazy stuff?! Heavily influenced by their experience of Freemasonry, Brigham Young and his fellow apostles constructed a total ritual experience from all the fragments and doctrines that Joseph Smith had taught to them before he was murdered to create a religious service that is a wonderful layer cake of meanings and possibilities. Some see it as a perfectly formed and profound ordinance that has hardly changed since the first biblical temples, others as a flawed mess that has rightly required several phases of reform and editing in its nearly two century history.

For some it is an oppressive shockwave still reverberating through our religion from the darkest days of polygamy and the treatment of women as property; others find it empowering and feminist. We love it. We loath it. We laugh at it. We laugh with it…..and then it tells us to promise not to laugh loudly! As a school teacher I can testify to the complete futility of telling people to stop laughing at something that is clearly a bit bonkers, however seriously one may take it oneself. So how on earth are we meant to take it seriously when we struggle to even say what it is? And when it has a name ripe for double entendres?

I have been blessed since my endowment aged 18 in 1989 to live 40 minutes’ drive away from the London Temple, and while my busy life has made it impossible to be anything close to a frequent participant, I have been a regular one. I have been well endowed!! I loathe bits of it, I have a quiet chuckle at bits of it, and mostly I love it more and more every time I go, although perhaps not for the reasons traditionally expected of me.

I have experienced the endowment before and after Gordon B Hinckley’s 1990 reforms when he removed the bloodthirsty masonic ‘penalties’ for revealing its secrets that were ritually enacted throughout the endowment service and cast a sinister and disturbing pall over the whole thing. I have not been enough of a tourist to get around much, but have participated in endowments in the London, Provo and Preston temples, and also a ‘live’ session in the Salt Lake Temple, where my British Brigham Young University student parents were married, before I went into the Missionary Training Centre in Provo.

I did not have time to go in when it was open, but one of my favourite temple experiences was nipping out of a hotel next to Central Park in New York on a school trip a couple of years ago late at night to walk around the block to the Manhatten Temple, a delightful and surreal piece of Mormonism inserted into the heart of the model modern city. A perfect plume of steam was rising up from an altar of road works in front of it like all the films of New York I had seen growing up, and also like the smoke of the burnt offerings on the open air altar of the ancient desert Tabernacle of Moses. Across the road flowing with busy yellow taxis was the Lincoln School of Performing Arts, to the left a bright red logo shone in the darkness on the CNN building, and somewhere round the corner were the Sesame Street studios. Standing on the beehive insignia on the immaculate granite sidewalk in front of the Temple I was standing on holy ground, my spiritual home, in the heart of the archetypal urban Babylon. I was part of the international community of Latter-Day Saints. As an honorary lifelong Londoner I adore the idea that our religion can flourish in the city and that a temple doesn’t have to be in a landscaped garden.  Our religion must be able to be relevant to people who don’t live physically or psychologically in Midwestern agricultural towns or middle class suburbs. Its architecture is pretty simple and functional – it really isn’t beautiful on the outside – but for all these things that it represents the Manhatten Temple may actually be my favourite now.

I have been married twice in the London Temple, the second time when given pretty much no choice but to become a polygamous Mormon sealed to two living women when it was made clear that cancelling my first sealing after divorce was not going to be an option the institution of the Church would play ball with, despite my expressed wishes. I discovered to my amazement and horror that a temple marriage sealing wasn’t a voluntary covenant after all – it was spell cast upon me that could become a curse controlled by other people who did not have my best interests in mind and that I could not shake off like something from a fairytale. The institution’s instinct to assert its authority and control over my free will was far more powerful than the instinct to bless and protect.

I have been present in the same room as those sealings when my recently baptised Granny was sealed by proxy to my recently departed Grandfather and to their 6 adult children who they raised as diligent Mormons, including one who died in her own young motherhood. So the Temple has been the setting for my family’s most frustrating, abusive and unsettling experiences with the sealing-empowered priesthood authorities and practices of the Church, and our most profound, unifying, healing and transcendent experiences.

My conclusion then, as with so many things in real life (and real life in any religion), is that there is good, bad and hilarious in everything. I can be completely honest about all these dimensions and live with their contradictions and complexities. The tensions they create are the places where I gain some of my most profound insights into Life, the Universe and Everything.

Eugene England expressed this in his book ‘Why the Church is as True as the Gospel – Grappling Constructively With the Oppositions of Existence’:

“Just before his death Joseph Smith, also with prophetic perception, wrote, “By proving contraries, truth is made manifest” (History of the Church, 6:428). By “prove” he meant not only to demonstrate logically but to test, to struggle with, and to work out in practical experience. The Church is as true — as effective — as the gospel because it involves us directly in proving contraries, working constructively with the oppositions within ourselves and especially between people, struggling with paradoxes and polarities at an experiential level that can redeem us.”

Part of the life-enhancing fun of my faith journey has been working out which of the good, bad and hilarious things is which, and sometimes changing my mind along the way. This has taught me to have some humility, some courage, a sense of humour, and always an open mind to new insights. At its best, that seems to be ultimately what the temple and its strange collage of initiations and endowments and sealings is all about. While offering a sanctuary from the complexity and worries of life on earth, it also embraces and engages with those befuddling complications and adds a few more of its own.

I am going to share some of my specific thoughts about the endowment now with the caveat that I am not going to reveal any details that I have covenanted not to, a reminder to readers that what we covenant not to reveal in the endowment is only the specific details of each sign and token, and that pretty much everything else is in the public domain in books about the temple by LDS apostles and prophets and other approved curriculum materials. The Church recently released a film about temple clothing, the Wikipedia page about the endowment is informative, and if you want to know every detail, the scripts for all the versions of every incarnation of the endowment have been easy to find on the internet for years, so I am not going to pretend they aren’t, while honouring my promises.

I love how Protestant the endowment is – like our baptism and sacrament rituals, the endowment is shorn of every scrap of unnecessary elaboration. Even where symbolic priesthood robes are required the costume only allows for the merest hint of embroidery. You listen to the Word, and what it means to you is between you and God – noone really talks about it or interprets it for you officially. There are ambiguous positions about whether it is all symbolic or literal, and a range of opinions in between. Did Adam and Eve really live in a garden without any dinosaurs and eat forbidden fruit? Is it all an archetype of how men and women are, like a sacred version of ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus’? I get a lot out of viewing it from that perspective.

If people push it they usually get fobbed off with ‘pray about it’ or maybe an interview with a member of the Temple Presidency who may offer what in effect are personal opinions, or something someone told them when they asked. Or you could wade through a long esoteric book by Hugh Nibley who looked for matches in ancient Egyptian and early Christian rituals and get a couple of ideas from that. Generally though you really are on your own to interpret them as you see fit and as the Holy Spirit communicates to you.

A dear friend serving in a temple presidency said to me that offering an interpretation of the endowment’s meaning is inappropriate because it is up to each individual to receive spiritual insights about it for themselves that may not be relevant for someone else. A sceptic might say that this is a convenient way to avoid having to officially make sense of something inherently nonsensical, but he very much sees it as something to grapple with and appreciate over time by and for yourself. I love and agree with his open-minded approach and hope he doesn’t mind me going to town sharing my personal opinions and insights here – I mention what he said to indicate that I don’t claim anyone else has to share or agree with any of my opinions or experiences with the temple. It may be completely different for you, “and that’s OK!” as the immortal and wise Stuart Smalley used to say on Saturday Night Live…before the comedian who played him went on to become one of the more sensible voices in the USA’s Senate. Because real life is crazy like that.

I love how Catholic the endowment is. Normally the Mormon experience of sacred space and architecture verges on puritanical minimalism – our chapels are sparse, generic buildings, devoid of symbolism beyond vague visual motifs involving threes for the ‘Godhead’, the Mormon Trinity. There are centrally approved artworks in European style and European frames on the walls featuring European Jesus / ‘Bjorn Borg in a Blanket’, and very little of any local cultural artistic expression.

But in our luxurious and exuberant cathedral-temples with their murals, paintings and stained glass windows telling the stories of our heritage and the soul’s journey, architectural styling and detail reflecting the local cultural norms and history, prayers for the dead, and blurring the boundaries between this life and the next, we go vigorously Vatican. We have a classical golden angel in ancient Athenian attire on the spire, and these days a faux-marble Romanesque broad-shouldered Jupiter-Jesus in a toga statue in the visitors centres, the Mormon Pieta, for pilgrims to venerate. How that ever became a thing in Mormonism is beyond me, but it’s all the rage now. Give it 20 years and people will be kissing them and touching them for miracles at this rate.

Temples celebrate the close kinship and community of the living and dead members of the holy congregation, praying for and communing with our dead ancestors who suffer or thrive in the next world depending on our prayers and ceremonies for their progress and redemption from purgatory, or “spirit prison” as we call it.

The endowment tells a story loaded with veneration of the saints. Saint Eve is our Mother Mary, having prayerful visionary compassion on all of humanity and submitting to God’s will for her to be a Mother so that we can be sanctified. Saints Peter, James and John bring truth and power to mankind. Saint Michael the Archangel is a powerful member of the heavenly host. Salvation is a team effort involving all of us to create and redeem us. Our rituals and works, gilded with divine love and clerical authority and holiness, use Saint Peter’s keys to seal on earth and in heaven. Holy men from the past appear in visions to tell our leaders where to find their relics entombed in the ground, and we build some of our temples in places sacred to our foundation stories, which Mormons love to make pilgrimages to.

We embrace robes and ritual, hand gestures imbued with profound meaning; we receive stigmata and contemplate the suffering of the crucified Lord with our own bodies like St Francis. Blessings are given and received by touch and anointing with holy water and holy oil, as well as speaking and hearing.

I had an epiphany in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral on my first solo date with my wife (…I should emphasise we didn’t just lurk in crypts!) as I looked around at the usual collection boxes for coins alternating with racks of burning candles. Little prayers and pleas for loved ones written on small pieces of folded paper were tucked in among the dribbles of melting wax. In the past this had always seemed completely alien to my Mormon religious norms; pagan, superstitious and desperate. Exploiting grief for money. But this time I suddenly realised what a fool I had been – this was no different to paying tithing to enter the temple and say prayers for the dead or the very ill. The chapels above our heads were originally financially endowed for monks and nuns to pray for the souls of wealthy donors regularly throughout the day, just as our orders of temple-working monks and nuns perform daily rituals and prayers for the dearly departed dead.

I am very proud of my Great Aunty Queenie, my Roman Catholic grandad’s sister, who was a nun in the order of the Little Sisters of the Poor and dedicated her life to the service of God and suffering mankind. But there was always a distance of confusion and disdain for the alien superstitious mumbo jumbo of Catholicism with its strange pagan festivals and obsession with martyrdom and suffering, and relics of the dead.

Mormons are sometimes criticised for doing weird rituals at altars for dead people in our temples, but since the 8th century every altar in a Catholic church or cathedral has had to contain a relic of a martyr or saint in order to be consecrated (preferably large enough to be a recognisable piece of their body) and this goes for lots of Anglican altars too, so I’m pretty bullish about being criticised by them for dabbling in necromancy. At least we don’t have to have actual bits of dead bodies present to do our thing!

But I now feel a growing connection with Aunty Queenie’s religious world as I realise how we have far more in common with Catholics than the evangelical Protestants I used to think were our natural peers as proselyting Reformers, despite their deep hostility to Mormonism.

I love how in the endowment the deepest secrets are the simplest things – obedience to God, sacrifice of selfishness for something better, seeking truth, fidelity to your spouse, consecrated service to others. In some ways the endowment covenants are basically the same as the baptismal covenant, so this journey to the highest level of Mormon ritual feels like coming full circle back to the basics. This was particularly striking in the 1980’s after my teenage years had been awash with the wide ranging speculative doctrines and study of Journals of Discourses that used to be the norm in the Church. It was completely reasonable to expect to be inducted into an even more complicated and gnostic body of knowledge in the temple endowment then, and therefore completely surprising to find it does the opposite in many ways.

It is also a relief because initiates go into their endowment with basically no idea what they are about to be asked to make eternal covenants about under immense social pressure not to walk out halfway through, which is inexcusably unethical when you think about it objectively. At least when one finds out what the covenants are they mostly represent concepts and principles one is already familiar with from the scriptures.

The crescendo of the service after being promised royal kingdoms and thrones to sit on in heaven is not to actually sit on a throne. It is to gather in sometimes extremely awkward discomfort in a circle of prayer before the metaphorical throne of God, the only condition for participation being having no malice towards the other members of the circle, and a heart full of compassion. We plead with God to bless the most distressed, the most needy, whose names have literally been written on scraps of paper like the prayers in the Canterbury crypt. We pray for the shoulders that carry the heavy burdens of responsibility and leadership, the young, the missionaries tramping about out there in the difficult world. Our hearts pour out from the temple altar in unified compassion for the suffering of the world. That’s what being an enthroned God or holy monarch is all about in Mormonism – totally giving yourself to the glorification and development of others, not glorying in receiving adoration on a throne. I love that.

The chapel of Scala Sancta – “the Holy Steps” – in Rome has a 28 step marble stairway which Emperor Constantine’s devout mother brought home from her relic-hunting tour of the Holy Land. They are believed to be the steps from Pontius Pilate’s palace that Jesus ascended to his trial. Today pilgrims ascend them on their knees, stopping to pray on each step. It is incredibly painful and while I wouldn’t say my experience on them was as ‘spiritual’ as it was for my Catholic colleague as he recited rosary prayers on each step, for me it was profound to experience trying to focus on spiritual things while powerfully distracted by physical pain. It was a small insight into Christ’s suffering and how it takes grit and determination for us all to focus and persist in faith and good works when it is really difficult and painful. In Mormonism we usually avoid any kind of flagellation and intentional physical pain (although psychologically of course we can do self-harming guilt trips at an Olympian level) but in the prayer circle if you are tall like me with a tiny wife it gets very uncomfortable indeed pretty quickly, and we have a tiny taste of the vicarious and empathetic suffering that so many Catholic rituals encourage.

The prayer circle is also an act of trust that the usually old man leading the prayer will speak clearly enough to be heard and repeated, and not ramble. It is the only time in Mormonism that we repeat the words of a prayer said by someone else in a call and response format that is the norm in Catholic liturgy.

It also provides one of the moments that is most ripe for comedy. Will the old man leading the prayer mumble a really long sentence that we will struggle remember and repeat, or will he remember to chunk it up into smaller pieces? You just never know, and the collective panic when the prayer starts to veer off the road of comprehensibility can be a hoot and induce one of those ‘Why am I here, what am I wearing, and what the heck am I doing?!’ moments. It may not quite be the Twelve Tasks of Hercules, but it takes some courage to step up and volunteer to be in the prayer circle.

I love the idea of ‘sealed’ families, voluntary covenants highly conditional upon personal choice and commitment and endurance, a fragile thing that can disappear in a blink if we do not continually feed and choose it. The highest glory we can aspire to is to be a family, to love our spouse and children and devote ourselves to facilitating the wellbeing and education of the next generations. We are not wasting all the time and energy we invest in our marriage and family relationships – they are the goal of our existence and spiritual journey, not the distraction from the holy life that family is seen as in many Christian traditions. It just doesn’t make sense to me that when we go to heaven everyone reverts to being generic individuals for whom our experiences and relationships on earth have become an irrelevance, however blissed out the ecstasies of worship on offer there might be. I love the idea that ultimately all our families can be sealed to each other in a universal internet of relationships where every friend is also a relative.

I loathe how the temple sealings make ‘family’ an idol that diminishes and demoralises the huge percentage of my LDS brothers and sisters who are single, divorced, married to a non-Mormon or LGBTQ. I loathe watching the distress of Church members who are not sealed to their children, or whose children have left the Church. I loathe watching the distress of the widows who were sealed to their deceased husband and now find themselves in an impossible quandary because if they want to marry again a single Mormon man will not want them because they cannot be sealed to them, and they so often end up turning to a non-Mormon to live with or marry with all the uncomfortable compromises that often involves personally, spiritually and morally; whereas a widower can be sealed in the temple to as many new Mormon wives as he finds. Mormon widows suddenly find themselves toppled from the security and status they once had and abandoned to roam in the marital wilderness while the men can carry on as normal, although some of them also struggle and end up choosing remarriage to non-members. Jesus was very specific about how we treat widows and orphans being the litmus test of our morality as a Church. I loathe that widowers and widows who remarry each other just for this lifetime cannot fully invest in that relationship or expect it to continue into the next life. But I love how that works for some of my friends who do not want to compromise their adoration of their first spouse.

I loathe how our excitement about having the concept of sealed families has morphed into an aggressive political crusade against civil rights for people who do not practice monogamous heterosexual marriage, and all the shameless hypocrisy involved in the very same arguments that used to be used against Mormon polygamy now being deployed by Mormon leaders against other minority groups who are deemed an existential threat to the ‘traditional natural family’ like Mormons used to be. I don’t want to watch my Church die on that hill – we have so many other, better principles to institutionally martyr ourselves for, or better live for, that don’t involve such brazen double standards and whitewashing of history.

I loathe that because of the institution’s policies a remarkable, faithful woman who had prayed for a temple marriage for decades had to wait until after our civil marriage before we could even apply for a sealing clearance, even though we had done nothing wrong and the Church encourages the belief that starting a marriage with just a civil ceremony is a shameful failure or at best inferior. Many members have been catapulted out of the Church from a starting point of complete devotion by the shock of discovering how unjust, arbitrary, inconsistent, theologically confused and indefensible some of the regulations around divorce and temple sealings are.

I loathe how our crowning glory theologically – eternal families progressing towards theosis as outlined in Doctrine and Covenants 132:18-20 which provides a lot of the language and concepts for the sealings and endowments – is so thoroughly tainted by the history and vile scriptures of polygamy in this Section that demean and enslave women and mock their free will. After some pushing we finally received an ‘official’ doctrinal explanation of why still being sealed to my first wife, even though she has left me and participation in the Church but said she did not want our sealing cancelled, would be of any benefit to her. The answer from somewhere in the echelons above was that it guarantees her a place in the ‘First resurrection.’ No explanation of why, but the only place that idea can be found in the scriptures is D&C section 132. Its text was committed to paper by Joseph Smith under extreme pressure from his exasperated family, outlining the rules governing polygamy which he had already been secretly practicing and teaching for years, often behind his first wife Emma’s back, but never put into writing. (When her brother in law Hyrum presented it to her, Emma gave him what he described as the most severe talking to of his life, and a few days later seems to have thrown a copy of it into the fire, or insisted Joseph do so depending on which account is more accurate.)

Although we depend heavily for our eternal marriage theology on selected verses from this scripture, when you just read it through from beginning to end it becomes a horror story, a manifesto of sexist oppression that demeans women as property.  It states that if they object to their husbands adding more wives to their marriage they should be ignored and God will ‘destroy’ them as ‘transgressors.’

Intriguingly it also promises that anyone who enters a sealed marriage in the temple has their ‘calling and election made sure’ to use the Mormon jargon – the get out of jail free card for Mormons who will still scoff at the corruption of medieval popes selling papal bulls of forgiveness being a sign of the ‘Great Apostasy’. Couples sealed by the Holy Priesthood are promised that whatever sins they commit short of the unforgiveable sin, they will still have a place in the Celestial Kingdom and the first resurrection (hence my first wife still benefitting from a sealing she has otherwise abandoned) after doing some purgatory time to be punished by Satan for those sins:

“…if a man marry a wife according to my word, and they are sealed by the Holy Spirit of promise, according to mine appointment, and he or she shall commit any sin or transgression of the new and everlasting covenant whatever, and all manner of blasphemies, and if they commit no murder wherein they shed innocent blood, yet they shall come forth in the first resurrection, and enter into their exaltation…” D&C 132:26

Section 132 takes a chain saw to several otherwise fundamental Mormon principles regarding respecting free will, and what we were always taught growing up about the existing wives’ permission being essential for polygamous marriages to proceed, which this scripture calls ‘the law of Sarah.’

It says a lot about the power of the cognitive dissonance and indoctrination we collectively normalise that we have created such a powerful firewall between what Doctrine and Covenants 132 actually says in its text in our canonised scriptures and the rest of our beliefs and practices. Still, a polygamous blast from the past reached through that barrier and the passage of time to grab me and my marriage by the throat, just as it did to thousands of Mormon marriages in the polygamous 1800’s and early 1900’s, and triggered a disempowering nightmare.

There has been some intensive spinning by Bruce R McConkie and others over the years to contradict or neutralise its worst statements, but they are all still there in our canon. The guarantees of exaltation regardless of righteousness or blasphemes which Section 132 gives to everyone who is sealed in the temple have since been translocated to the secretive and rare ‘Second Annointing’ only administered in the temple to the faithful elite, and which they are sworn to keep secret.

But that’s not what the scripture actually says. So party on people! The Church teaches us that being married in the temple is a call to the highest standards of faithfulness and righteousness, but the actual scriptural instructions for the whole concept say you can binge on blasphemies and nearly all the possible sins and still be exalted, so in fact it is quite the opposite. The pressure is off! I mean, even if you don’t want to snort cocaine in an orgy and drink champagne from your temple shoes, you can at least quit having guilt trips about not doing your home and visiting teaching. Surely the satanic buffetings for that small infraction can’t hurt too much on your way to the Celestial Kingdom.

And even then the wording of Section 132 is suspiciously wishy washy in verse 19: “Ye shall come forth in the first resurrection; and if it be after the first resurrection, in the next resurrection”, so the first resurrection ticket isn’t even guaranteed. For this we are made to suffer the indignities heaped upon so many of us instead of simply ending temple sealings at the moment of civil divorce.

But I love the way Section 132 pretty much acknowledges that Joseph Smith committed adultery and sinned against Emma with the polygamous liaisons he did not tell her about in the awkward marriage reconciliation negotiation verses…and I loathe how Joseph gets rewarded and promised exaltation out of this mess while Emma is just threatened with destruction. Let’s crawl out of this depressing rabbit hole…..

…into another one. I loathe the male chauvinism of the Endowment – Women come to the temple and see their deepest fears come true – they are subservient to men. They make covenants with God through their husbands rather than in their own right. They have to hide their faces in veiled shame to approach God in prayer. As soon as Adam is established as ruler, Eve stops talking to spiritual beings or receiving revelatory insights. We see behind the scenes into heaven where the team planning and delivering creation deliberate and Heavenly Mother is not seen or mentioned…or the Holy Ghost, who maybe is Heavenly Mother in disguise! Either way, no women.

I love how feminist the Endowment is – Eve is totally the hero of the story! As Genesis 3:6 describes, when she looks at the fruit she uses multiple intelligences to decide what to do – her practical intelligence says it is good for food, her aesthetic intelligence tells her it is beautiful (as an artist I have to endorse the idea of being willing to suffer and die for beauty) and her intellectual intelligence and curiosity tells her it is a key to greater knowledge and wisdom. She understands that to resolve the contradiction between the commandments God has given them to multiply, but not eat the fruit because it will make them mortal, they have to self-sacrifice.

She is the first and greatest Christ-like archetype, consciously choosing to suffer pain and death in order to give us all life. The men like Moses usually presented in our curriculum as ‘types’ or archetypes or living symbols of Jesus don’t come close.  She is a visionary strategist, ambitious, loving and seeking truth and knowledge above all other things, whatever the price.   She is a boundary-breaking explorer who wants to progress and grow. She is brave in the face of uncertainty, danger and physical suffering. These are all attributes traditionally attributed to strong males, particularly in the medieval Christian culture that absolutely demonised Eve, and with her all women, as weak and corrupting influences. To them, and many people still today, women are the downfall of men, ruled by their emotions and bodies rather than their minds, unable to think boldly, or most importantly strategically, and therefore unsuited to the rigours of political or commercial or spiritual leadership. So the endowment takes the philosophical foundation myth of western sexism and oppression of women and assertively kicks it into a shredder.

Women are promised they will be queens and goddesses. They wear the robes of the Aaronic and Melchezedek priesthood which they have not needed to be ordained to, participate in all the same rituals, and are inducted into the same knowledge and covenants as the ordained men. Women even administer some of the priesthood ordinances when they annoint and bless women in full priestess-representing-Jesus mode in the ‘initiatory’ rituals. Priesthood is as priesthood does! So we have a female priesthood in the Church, at least in the temple if not in the playpen of the wards and stakes where the boys and men are getting extra training to do it properly because, as D&C 121 makes clear, they have a major tendency to screw it up. Technically they need to start specifically proving that they will not abuse an endowment of power before being allowed near the temple.

I love how the Endowment continues the most ancient cultural ritual traditions of all – the tribe gathering to tell and retell the stories of its creation myths and heroes, the eternal struggle between good and evil, how the plants and animals and people came to be and why they do what they do, or have certain roles and powers in our physical and spiritual ecosystems. It guides us through the transition from Dreamtime to the time and world we live in now where the places and creatures in the stories have become avatars or symbols, shadows of the momentous events and struggles in the primordial age of creation.

I love how the endowment translates these stories into a medieval pageant, a Mummers play, a Pilgrim’s Progress of Adam the Everyman and Eve the Everywoman facing and overcoming the challenges along the way. It is performance art, kinaesthetic learning, immersive installation, theatre in the round. Its varied physical, auditory, verbal and visual ingredients fire all our mechanisms for learning and present us with different kinds of symbology that allow the Spirit and our current experiences and interests to roam and find personal meanings as we interpret it. They can yield very different but helpful insights and interpretations each time we go. Its weirdness and mysteries give us a lot of freedom to decide what it means for us, which a less eccentric experience would lack.

The accounts of the original endowment in Nauvoo Temple sound like they would blow your freaking 19th century mind! They took all day, and as you proceeded from one curtained space to the next you would encounter the characters in the stories who would perform and talk to you. A brilliant dissertation installation by one of my fellow Arts students set up in the university chapel a maze of huge white sheets where every space involved a different sensual experience of things like music, or a smell or woodchips under your bare feet. Imagine Lucifer coming at you in an enclosed space to gloat about his power and then being defeated by the heroes. It must have been a pretty intense virtual reality experience.

I adore the endowment for its laughter! How can you not laugh? Or wonder for a moment at whether ‘The Lord’s Annointed’ really knew what they were doing when they put this crazy thing together? For me the laughter began in my own endowment – a nervous 18 year old finally being let into the strange secret world my parents and their peers and the Church leaders and Authorities valued above all else…and had told me next to nothing about. I was an artist with a VERY vivid imagination fed by years of consuming and making elaborate fantasy artworks – I was expecting full-on Dungeons and Dragons, runes on paving stones on the floor, and standing naked in the light of a burning torch in a dark catacomb after the minimal preparation I had. It had mentioned lots of symbols and having parts of your body blessed and anointed, but explained very little.

My first chuckle was the realisation that after all my extravagant expectations this was going to be about as exotic or exciting as a sacrament meeting. The second came when my parents and the Stake President and adults I had looked up to all my life donned the robes of the Holy Priesthood…and suddenly I was at a guild meeting of artisan bakers! If the Swedish Chef from the Muppets had appeared at the altar proclaiming “Chicky in the basket!!” at that moment I would not have been surprised.

And then there was the film. Oh, thank You Dear God for the pure camp genius of the film. It took a few years at Art college after my mission researching postmodernist pastiche to fully appreciate and adore all its retro-chic kitsch facets, but what a smorgasbord of fun it was.

Now, I am blessed to be British, so I have grown up with our possibly unique total adoration of very camp gay national treasures like Kenneth Williams and Boy George. The one genre of theatre all Brits experience and share regardless of social class or education is Christmas pantomimes. Pantos tell the stories of traditional fairy tales like Peter Pan, Aladdin and Cinderella with loads of audience participation and filthy double entendres for the grown-ups. Boys are played by girls, and old women are played by old men in the most over the top drag humanly possible. Think LDS roadshows on steroids that break all the rules in the Handbook, on purpose, with glee and contemporary political satirical commentary, often delivered directly to the audience in moments that break the 4th wall. It has to be experienced to be believed…which some people have also said about the endowment, funnily enough…

So imagine my secret joy when discovering that our very serious American religious leaders who had filled my teenage years with every kind of sexually repressive and homophobic message and guilt trip possible from their unworldly Rocky Mountain citadel made a FABULOUS Panto, complete with a villain who threatens the audience, naïve protagonists in peril and heroes to the rescue, and instructed us to treat it as our holiest religious ritual, the apex of our spiritual lives – the way to reach out and touch the face of God! And not only was it pure panto, with terrible wooden or totally over-the-top acting by the glorious Lucifer giving it lip-curling gusto just like a Panto Dame, it was also rampantly Batting For The Other Team.   The Nearly Dead White Males who pontificate against ‘counterfeit families’ signed off on a bold contribution to gay cinema, and made us pay 10% of our income to see it. Over and over again.

Divine beings wafted about in voluminous sparkly satin robes with massive beards and long perfectly set permed white hair like aryan Barry Whites, as if they had just wandered in from Disco Heaven at Studio 54 to plan their next party in their dressing gowns…surrounded by actual giant pink pillars. In Eden immaculately quaffed and manicured naked Adam and Eve sat around stroking furry animals with unsettling sensual intensity like Bond villains, surrounded by rainbow coloured shrubbery.

The Let’s Make a Temple Film Committee have probably never heard of French portraitists Pierre et Gilles who photograph and digitally remaster celebrities surrounded by brightly coloured plastic flowers. I had already chuckled about this connection with the scenes of Adam and Eve tastefully framed by flowers and foliage to hide their naughty bits, but a few years ago the old temple films were digitally remastered by somebody who must have had their computer screen colour settings under par. What unfolded when the screen descended from the Endowment Room ceiling and the lights went down was a version of the familiar old film of such searing technicolour intensity it was like a psychedelic acid trip created by Pierre et Gilles. It was the perfect swan song for a kitsch classic. I for sure had an intense religious experience ponderising that, although perhaps not for the reasons originally intended.

I will sorely miss the old film, but to my joy the new temple films are ravishing in their gorgeous high definition footage of the natural world’s landscapes and creatures and beautifully sketched and painted plants and animals – high art meets David Attenborough and the Lord of the Rings movie credits. They also still have delightful moments of terrible soap opera acting, plus some more contemporary twists. There’s a profoundly melancholy bald Emo Lucifer who is like a hybrid of Marvin the depressed robot in Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy and Varys in Game of Thrones. Adam and Eve worry and weep like snowflake metrosexuals, taking plenty of time to pause and think about the enormity of what they are doing instead of just getting on with it. We have now reached Latino Level soap opera acting. The final step will be Sri Lankan Level. If you have never seen a Sri Lankan soap you must – it has Latino Level over-emotion but adds showing each dramatic moment about 20 times over so you can relish the shocked expressions on literally everyone in the room, one at a time, and sometimes twice.

And now we also have a Made in Chelsea meets Hip Hop video Jehovah literally casually leaning back chilling with his homies on his bling golden throne in what seems to be an exclusive nightclub with loads of OTT gold leaf and expensive granite if my memory serves me right. My mind boggled at that one – what on earth were the directors thinking?! Unfortunately one cannot book in the foyer which of the 3 new films you are going to get so I’ve only seen that one once so far. I’m still looking forward to catching the legendary third one which apparently has slightly brownish people as Adam and Eve – the only Mormon race revolution we are likely to get in my generation the way things are going. It’s got to be a bit weird when your religion’s holiest ritual is like getting a ticket to see a mystery premier at the cinema and there are going to be a few people in the audience when the film begins thinking “Oh no, not this one…I was hoping it would be the other one.”

And the funniest thing of all is despite all of this they want us to make a sacred promise not to be light-minded or laugh loudly, which I hope still leaves some room for a quiet chuckle. Karl Bath said ‘Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God’ and I just love all the absurdities of the temple films. The journey to the temple is so deadly serious with years of waiting, mountains of doctrinal complexity, probing self-reflection in recommend interviews and a life dedicated to a very demanding set of standards to even get in. Yet when you finally get to it the secret / sacred crescendo of that long journey is a bunch of surrealist amateur dramatics and swishing about in hats.

I just love that – it says, to me at least, ‘Stop taking yourselves so seriously! What were you really expecting?!’ and ‘Look at all these people taking themselves and this whole thing so seriously, but be still and know that I am God…and I definitely have a sense of humour!’ It is like the best and purest virtues of laughter – laughter that releases tension, celebrates the absurdities of existence as a cause for joy rather than depression, and empowers you to stop being afraid of totalitarian systems or leaders. People got up the courage to face down or endure fascist and communist dictators by making fantastic political cartoons and jokes about them. In a Church that now concentrates arguably far too much power in the hands of its top leaders, who have not presented any of their major doctrinal or policy changes to the general membership for a ‘common consent’ vote since 1978, God seems to have made sure there is a built-in release valve from the pressure of their assumed infallibility, strategically placed at the heart of the whole edifice.

At times in the endowment I hear laughter with true humanity and soul rather than the satanic humourlessness described so beautifully in Umberto Ecco’s ‘The Name of the Rose’ and the script of the film of it.  In this story William of Baskerville struggles with a nasty medieval librarian monk called Jorge to find the last copy of a missing book by Aristotle about laughter and humour that Jorge is murdering people to hide from the world. Mormons sometimes discuss what the injunction to avoid loud laughter, which is repeated a few times in the Doctrine and Covenants, means. The conclusion is usually that it means we should not mock sacred things – some things are beyond the reach of comedy or satire and lose their holiness if we are not incredibly reverential when talking about them. This feeds into a lot of LDS cultural norms that get out of hand to suppress honest and open discussion, or people challenging the wisdom of the ‘man-made good ideas, programs or expectations’ President Uchtdorf warned us against in his October 2015 General Conference talk ‘It Works Wonderfully’. ‘The Name of the Rose’ is a perfect book to explore that whole premise in much more depth and perhaps reach different conclusions:

“Jorge: Laughter kills fear and without fear there can’t be any faith. Because without fear of the devil there is no more need of God.

William: But you will not eliminate laughter by eliminating that book.

Jorge: No, to be sure. Laughter will remain the common man’s recreation. But what would happen if, because of this book, learned men were to pronounce it permissible to laugh at everything? Can we laugh at God? The world would relapse into chaos.”

“William: “The Devil is not the Prince of Matter; the Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt….I hate you, Jorge, and if I could I would lead you downstairs, across the ground, naked, with a fowl’s feathers stuck in your asshole and your face painted like a juggler and a buffoon, so the whole monastery would laugh at you and be afraid no longer…to say to all: He was announcing the truth to you and telling you that the truth has the taste of death, and you believed, not in his words, but in his grimness…..God allows you to imagine a world where the presumed interpreter of the truth is nothing but a clumsy raven, who repeats words learned long ago.”

“In that face, deformed by a hatred of philosophy, I saw for the first time the portrait of the Antichrist….the Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God or of the truth….Jorge feared the second book of Aristotle because it perhaps really did teach how to distort the face of every truth, so that we would not become the slave of our ghosts. Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from the insane passion for truth.”

Perhaps one of the hidden gems in the endowment, which says truly wonderful things about embracing all truth, not just bits of it, is this insight – that in a world where we only see the truths of God ‘in a glass darkly’ we must always be prepared to have our assumptions about even the most revered doctrines about God turned on their head. We cannot make any of them our idols or fully trust them – they must all be susceptible to laughter and even mockery to remind us that no human yet knows the whole truth, and any of our most cherished beliefs could in truth be ludicrous and laughable distortions of the real truth we will one day discover.

As the Radio Free Mormon podcaster expressed so brilliantly recently in his episode 17 ‘True Believing Mormon’, Joseph Smith was very assertive that Mormonism should be literally defined by embracing all truth from any source, and should avoid the limiting written creeds of the apostate Christians which build walls around their doctrines and understanding that they cannot break through. Joseph pointed out that the scriptures only damn people for not having any faith, not for believing too many things, so he intervened to defend members on trial for apostasy because they had added beliefs to their Mormonism that made other leaders uncomfortable. He really valued freedom to think outside the box as not just a right but absolutely essential if we are ever to get to really know as much as God.

As he discusses with Benedictine Jorge, William is a Franciscan monk, his order founded by St Francis who famously did counter-intuitive, disruptive and comical things like preaching to the animals to challenge the pharisaical orthodoxies of his age that were crushing the flower of the gospel in his Church, as President Uchtdorf would put it. He and many other religious reformers like the prophet Hosea who married a prostitute and gave his poor children crazy names, Isaiah who walked around naked for 3 years (or at least in his undies according to more prudish Christians who can’t cope with Isaiah 20) and Elijah who lay in the street for over a year playing with tiles and a skillet, cooking his food with dried human poo and burning his hair, all used irreverent humour and attention-seeking public performance art to challenge their societies’ assumptions. They physically demonstrated that real religious truth is not in the things religious people make sacred and impervious to laughter.

Maybe that’s one of the things God wants me to remember and represent when I go to the temple. For some reason I often turn into a disruptive klutz when I step through the front door, accidentally upsetting the equilibrium by outrageous faux pas and slapstick physical humour. I cause a kerfuffle by making it into the temple chapel in a short sleeved shirt before being hurried out by alarmed attendants to change into a long-sleeved one. The last time I was doing sealings was for my diligent temple-worker mother in law’s ancestors and I could feel myself going into a visual tunnel as I knelt at the altar. I thought I could tough it out – it’s not the kind of thing you want to interrupt – but ended up passing out on the altar and came too, legs akimbo, slumped on the floor with my horrified wife calling my name and hoping I hadn’t died. I just don’t seem able to do dignity.

I recently went to a Christian bible seminar in London with a dear friend who I met at Christian Union at university and introduced to Mormonism. He reminded me that at his endowment on the way up to the prayer circle I tripped over and literally fell flat on my face on the floor. It says everything you need to know about what a calamity I am at the temple that I had completely forgotten that even happened. How do you forget a humiliation like that?! It’s like inviting Harold Lloyd or the Keystone Cops in an old silent movie inviting me to the House of the Lord to turn it momentarily into a house of disorder, like the Lords of Misrule that William of Baskerville appreciated.

In fact it seems I have actually been called by God to be that funny guy. My patriarchal blessing was given to me by a holy poet for whom I will always be grateful. He turned 90 this year. It says “I bless you with a joyful heart, that you shall bring balance and true relaxation into your life and the lives of others with a merry quip and a happy thought, so that all things be not solemn and dark…for the gospel is not a grey and forbidding thing when taken in the round…..your Heavenly Parents rejoice over you; sometimes they are anxious; and indeed they do chuckle on occasion.”

So what some of my concerned family members see as my worryingly reckless and irreverent responses to overbearing pompous General Authorities or other things they hold sacred doesn’t come out of nowhere. As an 18 year old I was introduced in the most solemn way my religion allowed to the idea of humour being an essential ingredient in the gospel, and one of the divine attributes, like the young novice Adso is by his older and wiser mentor William in ‘The Name of the Rose’. I was told to remind everyone, like William does, that truth does not have the taste of death. (…Death Eaters! Harry Potter reference! Tick.) And who gets told in their patriarchal blessing that Mr and Mrs God are actually for real laughing at them?!! Seriously?! Best. Blessing. Ever. My apologies to everyone with really boring ones.

As well as all this frivolous…or deeply profound…light relief, I love how the temple provides us a rare opportunity to be deadly serious – sombre, earnest, philosophical. To put aside all the clutter and trivia that overwhelm modern adult life and contemplate the nature of existence and the universe and our place within it. To make the most serious commitments possible before God and His angels.

I loathe how temple work for the dead is a massive waste of time and money and a diversion from helping the living. Surely Jesus cautioned his disciples “Let the dead bury their dead: but go thou and preach the kingdom of God.” (Luke 9:60). Some Mormons become total fanatics, neglecting family duties, missing family events and failing to be present to nurture their grandchildren to hide away in a place they cannot go, constantly repeating time-consuming rituals and “repeating words learned long ago.” I should add, since I have mentioned her, that my amazing human dynamo mother in law does both temple and family spectacularly and goes the extra mile with both. I’m not talking about you Mummy in Law! (She’s a true redhead – you can’t be too careful.)

I love how the temple teaches and reminds me, and makes me prove that I really believe, that every person matters. Vicarious temple work is the pure love of Christ in action, casting bread on the waters without necessarily expectation of reward or immediate gratification or gratitude from those you help. An extreme Zen discipline. Like the cloistered monks and nuns who never interact with the people in the world but devote themselves to making everything better, as they see it, through the service of ritual and prayer for the living and the dead.

Mormons can be the absolute best at rallying round to help people who need us, even if it is expensive, difficult, inconvenient, exhausting, or neglecting our families whose needs are greater. We don’t even need to know them or be related to them – we will turn up, step into their lives, and carry them for a while. I am convinced that at least some of that powerful and ennobling instinct which truly ministers to the living and builds Christ’s kingdom in their lives comes from what the experience of family history research and temple work for the dead teaches us – that every person matters. Their parents matter. Their children matter. Their great grandneices twice removed matter. Their time in history matters even if it was a time when God seems to have turned his face from the world. Their nation matters. Their language and culture and unpronounceable names from a place completely different to our own matter. And we don’t need to have any prior personal connection with them whatsoever for them to still matter just as much as anyone else. The ultimate attribute of deity is unconditional self-sacrificial love for ‘even the least of these my brethren.’

So, for me, the endowment with all its random ingredients and irreconcilable contradictions is a metaphor for the Church as a whole.  It is earnest, well intentioned, flawed, treated as communicating ancient unchanging truths yet reviewed and reformed with each new generation to better fit the social norms and cultural values of the current generation. It is capable of elevating your mind and soul to the heights of love and compassion and wonder at the grandness of existence in our extraordinary world, yet obsessed over small details of clothing and conformity to a long list of rigid lifestyle and ideological requirements before you are permitted or trusted to fully participate. It is expansive and small-minded at the same time. It is silly nonsense in fancy dress; it is the deepest truths. It really does have to be seen, perhaps over and over again through a lifetime, to be believed and understood.

For the Love, Loathing and Laughter of the Temple Endowment published first on http://ift.tt/2wQcX5G

[the-imagines-of-tonight]

Do you do headcanons? If you do could you write "Dating Elder Cunningham would include?"

He hugs you. A lot. Even if it’s only been five minutes since he last saw you he’d run towards you and envelop you in a tight hug

He’d make you watch all his favourite movies with him: a different one every week, probably on a Friday night

But you wouldn’t really hear any of it, ‘cause Arnold would talk over the whole thing, just spewing out random facts about the production and lore

Once you watched a scary movie together. He got so scared he didn’t make it to the end, so it was both the first and last time watching one together

Sometimes you’d catch him just staring at you with a slight smile and glazed over eyes - he’d claim it was because he was ‘just thinking’ but he was actually just admiring you

Late a night, if you two were cuddling together on the couch, he’d whisper “How did I get so lucky”

He did not mean to say that out loud holy frick

That was meant to be an inside thought not an outside statement

Every morning you’d help him with his tie, either tightening it or straightening it up

He would say “I love you” at least 12 times a day

He’s just so in love with you it hurts he’s so cute and loves you with all of his heart

[the-imagines-of-tonight]

Hey! I have a couple fics I'm working on atm, which one should I prioritise and publish first? - Evan Hansen x reader angst - Connor Murphy x reader accidental sex smut - Connor Murphy x reader Beauty and the Beast AU fluff - Jared Kleinman x reader smut - Kevin Price x reader fluff Please let me know so I can publish what most people want!!

[the-imagines-of-tonight]

Fireworks

Pairing: Kevin Price x Reader (Book of Mormon)

Prompt: kevin price takes reader to disneyworld on a romantic trip and they watch fireworks together and ride roller coasters and stuff

Author’s Note: My first BOM fic! I saw this musical three weeks ago in Melbourne and I fell in love (especially with Kevin, I relate too much to that boy). I really enjoyed writing this fic and I am going to try getting more fics out on this blog because I know it’s been like seven hundred years since I last posted :)

Word Count: 2140

Warnings: Nothing, it’s just pure fluff

“Where to first, Kevin? Pirates of the Caribbean? Space Mountain? Big Thunder Mountain?” You wanted nothing else but to make this trip the best damn day of Kevin’s life. It helped that you shared a love of all things Disney, and were extremely happy to follow Kevin around the park, led by your hand and heart.

“Y/N...” There was a mock-scolding tone to Kevin’s voice and he looked at you with an expression of endearment. “You know we can’t do anything without ears on!” The bright smile on his face finally reached his eyes, giving them a sparkle you saw only on rare occasions.

With the hand not clutched tight to the map Kevin entwined his fingers with yours, leading you away from the entrance in the direction of Main Street. The two of you stopped abruptly at a small cart selling a wide variety of ears. Your eyes were immediately drawn to the pair of sequined ears that sparkled in the light of the early morning sun.

“What do you think about these ones?” With no mirror in sight you turned to Kevin for an opinion.

“Y/N, you’d look gorgeous in any of these pairs. But in those? You look absolutely stunning.” He pressed a quick, yet loving, kiss to your forehead after ensuring that the image of you, illuminated by the rays of light and with a smile almost as bright as the sun itself, was preserved in his mind forever.

“Shush, you.” You laughed, trying to distract from the rising tinge of pink making its way onto the apples of your cheeks. “Now let’s find you a pair of ears so we can get going.” You picked up a tacky pair of ears as a joke: a joke that Kevin obviously did not pick up on.

“These are perfect!” He placed the ears on his head and pulled you in close for a hug, whispering a quick, “Thank you, Y/N.” Giving you a tight squeeze he plucked the ears off your head, taking them to the cashier to both pay and get the tags cut off.

Kevin gently placed the ears back on your head, an expression of concentration present on his face as he stuck his tongue out a little, wanting them to be positioned perfectly for you.

“C’mon, babe, let’s get going.” You stood up on your tip toes to press a kiss to Kevin’s cheekbone, your lips lingering for a couple of seconds.

The two of you strolled away, hand in hand, down Main Street. “This is better than I remembered it being.” Kevin murmured, unable to tear his eyes away from the castle in the distant. “Maybe it’s because you’re here with me.” He tightened his grip on your hand, running his thumb over the back of your hand.

“You’re so cheesy, Kev.” A laugh followed your words, the two of you falling into a comfortable silence; taking in the sights, sounds and sweet smells of the park.

The music changed and the colours shifted into a mix of bright pastels - the two of you had walked past the castle (after many, many photos) and found yourselves in Fantasy Land. Your eyes were drawn to the sight of the signature blue of Peter Pan’s Flight, and, noticing the significantly short wait time, you tugged on Kevin’s sleeve. “How ‘bout we make this the first ride of the day?”

“It’s almost like you read my mind,” he laughed, taking long strides towards the entrance of the ride, pulling you along with him by the hand. It was cloudy, slightly cold and a Wednesday, so the line wasn’t very long and you practically walked on to the ride.

The hanging boat swung as you boarded it, Kevin first and then followed by you, both waving to the ride attendant as you passed by. You felt the familiar weight of Kevin’s hand on your knee as the ride progressed, the boat gliding over the fake miniature city of London, complete with glittering LED lights.

You and Kevin had watched many, many Disney movies in preparation for the trip, (Kevin had said that going on a ride based on a movie you hadn’t seen was one of the worst things you could do), and you hummed along with the soundtrack playing.

On your way out of the ride Kevin turned to face you, asking, “Are you related to Wendy, Y/N? Because you’re a darling.”

“Kevin,” You mock-scolded, laughing whilst simultaneously rolling your eyes. “Your extensive knowledge of Disney movies is both a blessing and a curse. And I’m not sure which one it is in this case.”

“There wasn’t a lot to do in Uganda apart from watch movies, to be completely honest,” Kevin appeared to be thinking out loud, wandering aimlessly through the park with you following one or two paces behind him.

He was caught up in thought and had not realised that you stopped walking, and he turned back to you, following your line of sight. A family of ducks had jumped out in front of you, waddling from one isolated plot of flowers to another. You bent down, taking your phone out to take pictures of the ducks rather than pictures of the rest of the park. Kevin had also taken his phone out, but not to take photos of the animals in front of you: the pictures filling up his camera roll were ones of you, smiling down at the waddling ducks.

“Do you want to come on Space Mountain with me?” You and Kevin had entered Tomorrowland and were now standing outside the entrance of the aforementioned ride - it was mid-afternoon and you had managed to avoid going on every roller coaster the pair of you had passed thus far. But Kevin wouldn’t let you spend a day in Disney World without setting foot on at least one roller coaster, so here you were. “I’ll keep you safe, Y/N, I promise.”

Sincerity was visible in his eyes and you didn’t doubt the truth behind his words. What you did doubt, however, was your stomach; especially with the addition of one too many sugary snacks.

“Fine.” You gave in to the request, making a wide grin appear on his face. “But this is the both the first and last time I’m doing this, okay?”

“You’re the best!” He almost jumped in the air at your agreement but restrained himself, instead pressing a hurried kiss to the top of your hair before pulling you into the line for the ride. “It’ll be fun, trust me!” He called back to you, already several steps ahead.

“Kevin, if the ride is going to be as fun as you claim, then why the heck are there so many exits?” You questioned after seeing the fourth doorway that lead away from the ride, back out into the park.

“They’re only there for the people who chicken out.”

“So they’re there for me?” You laughed, but were also quite serious.

The rest of the time spent waiting passed quickly enough - Kevin kept you laughing and distracted, regaling you with stories from before he met you.

Rounding a corner you got your first glimpse of the carriages shooting off at about one thousand miles an hour - from your perspective, at least - up the tunnel.

“Kevin.” You whispered in a hurried tone as you made your way closer and closer to getting onto the ride. “Kevin, are you sure it’ll be alright? Like, one hundred percent sure?  Would you bet -”

You stopped rambling as Kevin took one of your hands in his, bringing it up to his lips, peppering them with kisses.

“Nervous?” The voice of a cast member interrupted your train of thought, making you realise just how soon you’d be strapped in. “It’s one of my favourite rides here, you’ll be fine.” She gave you a toothy smile as the line moved on. “And between you and me, your boyfriend looks like he’ll take perfect care of you.” She had leaned in close to you, ensuring Kevin wouldn’t hear her side comment. You shot her a wavering smile and she winked in response; the playful attitude helping to quell some of your nervous tension.

“Alright everyone, make sure all hats and glasses are taken off and stored in the baskets in front of you with your bags!” Another cast member, with a voice more grating and an attitude more annoying than the last, stood above you. You and Kevin had been seated in the front row; it was a stroke of luck according to Kevin, and one of the worst things that could’ve happened according to you. “Safe travels!” A salute and wave sent you off, the movement of your hand to Kevin’s leg a subconscious reaction to the sudden jolt of speed.

You didn’t think you had ever screamed that much in your entire life. The many dizzying twists and turns, ups and downs, left you disoriented: how on Earth they had managed to construct such a long track indoors was beyond you.

“That was so fun!” Kevin was on an adrenaline high as you stumbled out of the building, practically bouncing down the exit path.

“Yeah that’s... One way to describe it.” The smile on your face wasn’t there because of the ride, but because of Kevin’s reaction to it. This was the happiest you’d ever seen him, every new ride, character interaction and sight only increasing his level of enthusiasm.

“I was thinking...” Kevin spread out a plastic cover on the ground in front of the castle for you two to sit on, making himself comfortable before continuing. “This has been the best day of my life. And it’s because of you. And, uh - jeez, I just want you to know I love you. More than I have ever loved anyone in my entire life.”

He wasn’t looking directly at you, too embarrassed to do so, and you could see the red tinge blooming on his cheeks. He crossed his legs and placed his hands in his lap, waiting for you to reply. What he couldn’t see were the couple of tears that had fallen down your face combined with the smile you simply couldn’t get rid of.

“I - uh - really, really love you too, Kevin.” You cleared your throat and shifted closer to Kevin, gingerly resting your head on his shoulder. He placed his hand on your leg, palm facing up, as an invitation for you to hold it. You interlaced your fingers with his, drawing your eyes back up to the castle, waiting for the fireworks to begin.

Suddenly, Kevin sat up a little straighter and turned to face you, accidentally pushing you off him in the process.

“Y/N. Will you-” The rest of Kevin’s question was cut off by the first note of Wishes and the following fireworks. You figured the question was not important enough for him to continue through the firework special, so you turned your attention fully towards the animation playing out on the castle.

A tap on your shoulder half way through, therefore, was a surprise: you turned around to see Kevin’s face about three inches away from yours.

“Need help with something?” You laughed, watching the reflection of each firework explosion in his shining eyes.

“Um, yeah.” Your eyes were focused on his and didn’t notice his hand reach into the front pocket of his backpack to pull out a small, black box. “Will, oh gosh,” He was extremely nervous but continued on; “Will you do me the honour of - uh - being my wife?” His eyes closed as he spoke the last word, as if not seeing your reaction would save him from any further embarrassment.

“Y-yes.” You breathed out, unable to do much more. His eyes opened as soon as you said that single word, his shaking hands finding it hard to take the ring out of the small box. He managed it, and his shaking hands met yours as he slid it onto your left hand, the diamond reflecting the different colours of the fireworks exploding overhead.

His eyes flickered down to your lips before moving in to kiss you. You raised your hands to thread through his hair, your lips moving in harmony as the most well-known Disney love songs played in the background.

You broke apart, your forehead resting on his as your hands moved down to cradle his neck. The fireworks illuminated the glittering tear tracks that had carved their way onto Kevin’s face just as they lit up the ones on your cheeks.

“You’re the best person on this entire freakin’ planet.” He murmured, evidently thinking out loud again. You simply smiled in response and placed your lips softly against his jawline, your heart overflowing with love for him.

[the-imagines-of-tonight]

Hey! Thanks for the wonderful response on the Connor fic I posted!!! I loved writing it so if y'all want to send in more requests for him I would love it. Also, I'm in the mood to write this evening so send in some "dating _ would include..." and I'll try and post some!!

[sharionpage]

For the Love, Loathing and Laughter of the Temple Endowment

The LDS Temple Endowment is an extraordinary thing. It is central to a mature Mormon’s religious life, but if you ask one simply to explain what it is most of us will struggle to come up with a coherent response. What even is this thing?! A series of covenants? A blessing? A ritualised story? Immersive theatre in the round? Performance art? It is so many things at once, and its origins are exactly that – a buffet of individual rituals and covenants and teachings that include prayer circles, hand gestures, symbols, annointings with holy oil and water and blessings with roots in the ordination rituals of ancient Jewish Tabernacle priests, chanted prayers, new names, ceremonial robes, ‘magic underwear’, promises of deification, and creation mythology.

Claims are made about the experience promising peace and answers and clarity in a stressful and confusing world; a refuge from strife. We are encouraged to go to the temple to seek personal revelation about our most important life changing decisions. We expect going through it to solidify a person’s faith into something lasting and mature. After participating for ourselves we return to reach out to our ancestors and perform the same rituals for the dead, continuing the most ancient forms of animist religion where reverence, prayers, ceremonies and offerings are directed towards dead ancestors who are believed to still be around us and watching over us, and in need of our care and interventions to aid them on their journeys through the afterlife.

So how on earth did a new religious movement emerging from the evangelical Puritan and Protestant religious world of the rationalist, Enlightenment era early 19th century eastern United States end up doing this crazy stuff?! Heavily influenced by their experience of Freemasonry, Brigham Young and his fellow apostles constructed a total ritual experience from all the fragments and doctrines that Joseph Smith had taught to them before he was murdered to create a religious service that is a wonderful layer cake of meanings and possibilities. Some see it as a perfectly formed and profound ordinance that has hardly changed since the first biblical temples, others as a flawed mess that has rightly required several phases of reform and editing in its nearly two century history.

For some it is an oppressive shockwave still reverberating through our religion from the darkest days of polygamy and the treatment of women as property; others find it empowering and feminist. We love it. We loath it. We laugh at it. We laugh with it…..and then it tells us to promise not to laugh loudly! As a school teacher I can testify to the complete futility of telling people to stop laughing at something that is clearly a bit bonkers, however seriously one may take it oneself. So how on earth are we meant to take it seriously when we struggle to even say what it is? And when it has a name ripe for double entendres?

I have been blessed since my endowment aged 18 in 1989 to live 40 minutes’ drive away from the London Temple, and while my busy life has made it impossible to be anything close to a frequent participant, I have been a regular one. I have been well endowed!! I loathe bits of it, I have a quiet chuckle at bits of it, and mostly I love it more and more every time I go, although perhaps not for the reasons traditionally expected of me.

I have experienced the endowment before and after Gordon B Hinckley’s 1990 reforms when he removed the bloodthirsty masonic ‘penalties’ for revealing its secrets that were ritually enacted throughout the endowment service and cast a sinister and disturbing pall over the whole thing. I have not been enough of a tourist to get around much, but have participated in endowments in the London, Provo and Preston temples, and also a ‘live’ session in the Salt Lake Temple, where my British Brigham Young University student parents were married, before I went into the Missionary Training Centre in Provo.

I did not have time to go in when it was open, but one of my favourite temple experiences was nipping out of a hotel next to Central Park in New York on a school trip a couple of years ago late at night to walk around the block to the Manhatten Temple, a delightful and surreal piece of Mormonism inserted into the heart of the model modern city. A perfect plume of steam was rising up from an altar of road works in front of it like all the films of New York I had seen growing up, and also like the smoke of the burnt offerings on the open air altar of the ancient desert Tabernacle of Moses. Across the road flowing with busy yellow taxis was the Lincoln School of Performing Arts, to the left a bright red logo shone in the darkness on the CNN building, and somewhere round the corner were the Sesame Street studios. Standing on the beehive insignia on the immaculate granite sidewalk in front of the Temple I was standing on holy ground, my spiritual home, in the heart of the archetypal urban Babylon. I was part of the international community of Latter-Day Saints. As an honorary lifelong Londoner I adore the idea that our religion can flourish in the city and that a temple doesn’t have to be in a landscaped garden.  Our religion must be able to be relevant to people who don’t live physically or psychologically in Midwestern agricultural towns or middle class suburbs. Its architecture is pretty simple and functional – it really isn’t beautiful on the outside – but for all these things that it represents the Manhatten Temple may actually be my favourite now.

I have been married twice in the London Temple, the second time when given pretty much no choice but to become a polygamous Mormon sealed to two living women when it was made clear that cancelling my first sealing after divorce was not going to be an option the institution of the Church would play ball with, despite my expressed wishes. I discovered to my amazement and horror that a temple marriage sealing wasn’t a voluntary covenant after all – it was spell cast upon me that could become a curse controlled by other people who did not have my best interests in mind and that I could not shake off like something from a fairytale. The institution’s instinct to assert its authority and control over my free will was far more powerful than the instinct to bless and protect.

I have been present in the same room as those sealings when my recently baptised Granny was sealed by proxy to my recently departed Grandfather and to their 6 adult children who they raised as diligent Mormons, including one who died in her own young motherhood. So the Temple has been the setting for my family’s most frustrating, abusive and unsettling experiences with the sealing-empowered priesthood authorities and practices of the Church, and our most profound, unifying, healing and transcendent experiences.

My conclusion then, as with so many things in real life (and real life in any religion), is that there is good, bad and hilarious in everything. I can be completely honest about all these dimensions and live with their contradictions and complexities. The tensions they create are the places where I gain some of my most profound insights into Life, the Universe and Everything.

Eugene England expressed this in his book ‘Why the Church is as True as the Gospel – Grappling Constructively With the Oppositions of Existence’:

“Just before his death Joseph Smith, also with prophetic perception, wrote, “By proving contraries, truth is made manifest” (History of the Church, 6:428). By “prove” he meant not only to demonstrate logically but to test, to struggle with, and to work out in practical experience. The Church is as true — as effective — as the gospel because it involves us directly in proving contraries, working constructively with the oppositions within ourselves and especially between people, struggling with paradoxes and polarities at an experiential level that can redeem us.”

Part of the life-enhancing fun of my faith journey has been working out which of the good, bad and hilarious things is which, and sometimes changing my mind along the way. This has taught me to have some humility, some courage, a sense of humour, and always an open mind to new insights. At its best, that seems to be ultimately what the temple and its strange collage of initiations and endowments and sealings is all about. While offering a sanctuary from the complexity and worries of life on earth, it also embraces and engages with those befuddling complications and adds a few more of its own.

I am going to share some of my specific thoughts about the endowment now with the caveat that I am not going to reveal any details that I have covenanted not to, a reminder to readers that what we covenant not to reveal in the endowment is only the specific details of each sign and token, and that pretty much everything else is in the public domain in books about the temple by LDS apostles and prophets and other approved curriculum materials. The Church recently released a film about temple clothing, the Wikipedia page about the endowment is informative, and if you want to know every detail, the scripts for all the versions of every incarnation of the endowment have been easy to find on the internet for years, so I am not going to pretend they aren’t, while honouring my promises.

I love how Protestant the endowment is – like our baptism and sacrament rituals, the endowment is shorn of every scrap of unnecessary elaboration. Even where symbolic priesthood robes are required the costume only allows for the merest hint of embroidery. You listen to the Word, and what it means to you is between you and God – noone really talks about it or interprets it for you officially. There are ambiguous positions about whether it is all symbolic or literal, and a range of opinions in between. Did Adam and Eve really live in a garden without any dinosaurs and eat forbidden fruit? Is it all an archetype of how men and women are, like a sacred version of ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus’? I get a lot out of viewing it from that perspective.

If people push it they usually get fobbed off with ‘pray about it’ or maybe an interview with a member of the Temple Presidency who may offer what in effect are personal opinions, or something someone told them when they asked. Or you could wade through a long esoteric book by Hugh Nibley who looked for matches in ancient Egyptian and early Christian rituals and get a couple of ideas from that. Generally though you really are on your own to interpret them as you see fit and as the Holy Spirit communicates to you.

A dear friend serving in a temple presidency said to me that offering an interpretation of the endowment’s meaning is inappropriate because it is up to each individual to receive spiritual insights about it for themselves that may not be relevant for someone else. A sceptic might say that this is a convenient way to avoid having to officially make sense of something inherently nonsensical, but he very much sees it as something to grapple with and appreciate over time by and for yourself. I love and agree with his open-minded approach and hope he doesn’t mind me going to town sharing my personal opinions and insights here – I mention what he said to indicate that I don’t claim anyone else has to share or agree with any of my opinions or experiences with the temple. It may be completely different for you, “and that’s OK!” as the immortal and wise Stuart Smalley used to say on Saturday Night Live…before the comedian who played him went on to become one of the more sensible voices in the USA’s Senate. Because real life is crazy like that.

I love how Catholic the endowment is. Normally the Mormon experience of sacred space and architecture verges on puritanical minimalism – our chapels are sparse, generic buildings, devoid of symbolism beyond vague visual motifs involving threes for the ‘Godhead’, the Mormon Trinity. There are centrally approved artworks in European style and European frames on the walls featuring European Jesus / ‘Bjorn Borg in a Blanket’, and very little of any local cultural artistic expression.

But in our luxurious and exuberant cathedral-temples with their murals, paintings and stained glass windows telling the stories of our heritage and the soul’s journey, architectural styling and detail reflecting the local cultural norms and history, prayers for the dead, and blurring the boundaries between this life and the next, we go vigorously Vatican. We have a classical golden angel in ancient Athenian attire on the spire, and these days a faux-marble Romanesque broad-shouldered Jupiter-Jesus in a toga statue in the visitors centres, the Mormon Pieta, for pilgrims to venerate. How that ever became a thing in Mormonism is beyond me, but it’s all the rage now. Give it 20 years and people will be kissing them and touching them for miracles at this rate.

Temples celebrate the close kinship and community of the living and dead members of the holy congregation, praying for and communing with our dead ancestors who suffer or thrive in the next world depending on our prayers and ceremonies for their progress and redemption from purgatory, or “spirit prison” as we call it.

The endowment tells a story loaded with veneration of the saints. Saint Eve is our Mother Mary, having prayerful visionary compassion on all of humanity and submitting to God’s will for her to be a Mother so that we can be sanctified. Saints Peter, James and John bring truth and power to mankind. Saint Michael the Archangel is a powerful member of the heavenly host. Salvation is a team effort involving all of us to create and redeem us. Our rituals and works, gilded with divine love and clerical authority and holiness, use Saint Peter’s keys to seal on earth and in heaven. Holy men from the past appear in visions to tell our leaders where to find their relics entombed in the ground, and we build some of our temples in places sacred to our foundation stories, which Mormons love to make pilgrimages to.

We embrace robes and ritual, hand gestures imbued with profound meaning; we receive stigmata and contemplate the suffering of the crucified Lord with our own bodies like St Francis. Blessings are given and received by touch and anointing with holy water and holy oil, as well as speaking and hearing.

I had an epiphany in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral on my first solo date with my wife (…I should emphasise we didn’t just lurk in crypts!) as I looked around at the usual collection boxes for coins alternating with racks of burning candles. Little prayers and pleas for loved ones written on small pieces of folded paper were tucked in among the dribbles of melting wax. In the past this had always seemed completely alien to my Mormon religious norms; pagan, superstitious and desperate. Exploiting grief for money. But this time I suddenly realised what a fool I had been – this was no different to paying tithing to enter the temple and say prayers for the dead or the very ill. The chapels above our heads were originally financially endowed for monks and nuns to pray for the souls of wealthy donors regularly throughout the day, just as our orders of temple-working monks and nuns perform daily rituals and prayers for the dearly departed dead.

I am very proud of my Great Aunty Queenie, my Roman Catholic grandad’s sister, who was a nun in the order of the Little Sisters of the Poor and dedicated her life to the service of God and suffering mankind. But there was always a distance of confusion and disdain for the alien superstitious mumbo jumbo of Catholicism with its strange pagan festivals and obsession with martyrdom and suffering, and relics of the dead.

Mormons are sometimes criticised for doing weird rituals at altars for dead people in our temples, but since the 8th century every altar in a Catholic church or cathedral has had to contain a relic of a martyr or saint in order to be consecrated (preferably large enough to be a recognisable piece of their body) and this goes for lots of Anglican altars too, so I’m pretty bullish about being criticised by them for dabbling in necromancy. At least we don’t have to have actual bits of dead bodies present to do our thing!

But I now feel a growing connection with Aunty Queenie’s religious world as I realise how we have far more in common with Catholics than the evangelical Protestants I used to think were our natural peers as proselyting Reformers, despite their deep hostility to Mormonism.

I love how in the endowment the deepest secrets are the simplest things – obedience to God, sacrifice of selfishness for something better, seeking truth, fidelity to your spouse, consecrated service to others. In some ways the endowment covenants are basically the same as the baptismal covenant, so this journey to the highest level of Mormon ritual feels like coming full circle back to the basics. This was particularly striking in the 1980’s after my teenage years had been awash with the wide ranging speculative doctrines and study of Journals of Discourses that used to be the norm in the Church. It was completely reasonable to expect to be inducted into an even more complicated and gnostic body of knowledge in the temple endowment then, and therefore completely surprising to find it does the opposite in many ways.

It is also a relief because initiates go into their endowment with basically no idea what they are about to be asked to make eternal covenants about under immense social pressure not to walk out halfway through, which is inexcusably unethical when you think about it objectively. At least when one finds out what the covenants are they mostly represent concepts and principles one is already familiar with from the scriptures.

The crescendo of the service after being promised royal kingdoms and thrones to sit on in heaven is not to actually sit on a throne. It is to gather in sometimes extremely awkward discomfort in a circle of prayer before the metaphorical throne of God, the only condition for participation being having no malice towards the other members of the circle, and a heart full of compassion. We plead with God to bless the most distressed, the most needy, whose names have literally been written on scraps of paper like the prayers in the Canterbury crypt. We pray for the shoulders that carry the heavy burdens of responsibility and leadership, the young, the missionaries tramping about out there in the difficult world. Our hearts pour out from the temple altar in unified compassion for the suffering of the world. That’s what being an enthroned God or holy monarch is all about in Mormonism – totally giving yourself to the glorification and development of others, not glorying in receiving adoration on a throne. I love that.

The chapel of Scala Sancta – “the Holy Steps” – in Rome has a 28 step marble stairway which Emperor Constantine’s devout mother brought home from her relic-hunting tour of the Holy Land. They are believed to be the steps from Pontius Pilate’s palace that Jesus ascended to his trial. Today pilgrims ascend them on their knees, stopping to pray on each step. It is incredibly painful and while I wouldn’t say my experience on them was as ‘spiritual’ as it was for my Catholic colleague as he recited rosary prayers on each step, for me it was profound to experience trying to focus on spiritual things while powerfully distracted by physical pain. It was a small insight into Christ’s suffering and how it takes grit and determination for us all to focus and persist in faith and good works when it is really difficult and painful. In Mormonism we usually avoid any kind of flagellation and intentional physical pain (although psychologically of course we can do self-harming guilt trips at an Olympian level) but in the prayer circle if you are tall like me with a tiny wife it gets very uncomfortable indeed pretty quickly, and we have a tiny taste of the vicarious and empathetic suffering that so many Catholic rituals encourage.

The prayer circle is also an act of trust that the usually old man leading the prayer will speak clearly enough to be heard and repeated, and not ramble. It is the only time in Mormonism that we repeat the words of a prayer said by someone else in a call and response format that is the norm in Catholic liturgy.

It also provides one of the moments that is most ripe for comedy. Will the old man leading the prayer mumble a really long sentence that we will struggle remember and repeat, or will he remember to chunk it up into smaller pieces? You just never know, and the collective panic when the prayer starts to veer off the road of comprehensibility can be a hoot and induce one of those ‘Why am I here, what am I wearing, and what the heck am I doing?!’ moments. It may not quite be the Twelve Tasks of Hercules, but it takes some courage to step up and volunteer to be in the prayer circle.

I love the idea of ‘sealed’ families, voluntary covenants highly conditional upon personal choice and commitment and endurance, a fragile thing that can disappear in a blink if we do not continually feed and choose it. The highest glory we can aspire to is to be a family, to love our spouse and children and devote ourselves to facilitating the wellbeing and education of the next generations. We are not wasting all the time and energy we invest in our marriage and family relationships – they are the goal of our existence and spiritual journey, not the distraction from the holy life that family is seen as in many Christian traditions. It just doesn’t make sense to me that when we go to heaven everyone reverts to being generic individuals for whom our experiences and relationships on earth have become an irrelevance, however blissed out the ecstasies of worship on offer there might be. I love the idea that ultimately all our families can be sealed to each other in a universal internet of relationships where every friend is also a relative.

I loathe how the temple sealings make ‘family’ an idol that diminishes and demoralises the huge percentage of my LDS brothers and sisters who are single, divorced, married to a non-Mormon or LGBTQ. I loathe watching the distress of Church members who are not sealed to their children, or whose children have left the Church. I loathe watching the distress of the widows who were sealed to their deceased husband and now find themselves in an impossible quandary because if they want to marry again a single Mormon man will not want them because they cannot be sealed to them, and they so often end up turning to a non-Mormon to live with or marry with all the uncomfortable compromises that often involves personally, spiritually and morally; whereas a widower can be sealed in the temple to as many new Mormon wives as he finds. Mormon widows suddenly find themselves toppled from the security and status they once had and abandoned to roam in the marital wilderness while the men can carry on as normal, although some of them also struggle and end up choosing remarriage to non-members. Jesus was very specific about how we treat widows and orphans being the litmus test of our morality as a Church. I loathe that widowers and widows who remarry each other just for this lifetime cannot fully invest in that relationship or expect it to continue into the next life. But I love how that works for some of my friends who do not want to compromise their adoration of their first spouse.

I loathe how our excitement about having the concept of sealed families has morphed into an aggressive political crusade against civil rights for people who do not practice monogamous heterosexual marriage, and all the shameless hypocrisy involved in the very same arguments that used to be used against Mormon polygamy now being deployed by Mormon leaders against other minority groups who are deemed an existential threat to the ‘traditional natural family’ like Mormons used to be. I don’t want to watch my Church die on that hill – we have so many other, better principles to institutionally martyr ourselves for, or better live for, that don’t involve such brazen double standards and whitewashing of history.

I loathe that because of the institution’s policies a remarkable, faithful woman who had prayed for a temple marriage for decades had to wait until after our civil marriage before we could even apply for a sealing clearance, even though we had done nothing wrong and the Church encourages the belief that starting a marriage with just a civil ceremony is a shameful failure or at best inferior. Many members have been catapulted out of the Church from a starting point of complete devotion by the shock of discovering how unjust, arbitrary, inconsistent, theologically confused and indefensible some of the regulations around divorce and temple sealings are.

I loathe how our crowning glory theologically – eternal families progressing towards theosis as outlined in Doctrine and Covenants 132:18-20 which provides a lot of the language and concepts for the sealings and endowments – is so thoroughly tainted by the history and vile scriptures of polygamy in this Section that demean and enslave women and mock their free will. After some pushing we finally received an ‘official’ doctrinal explanation of why still being sealed to my first wife, even though she has left me and participation in the Church but said she did not want our sealing cancelled, would be of any benefit to her. The answer from somewhere in the echelons above was that it guarantees her a place in the ‘First resurrection.’ No explanation of why, but the only place that idea can be found in the scriptures is D&C section 132. Its text was committed to paper by Joseph Smith under extreme pressure from his exasperated family, outlining the rules governing polygamy which he had already been secretly practicing and teaching for years, often behind his first wife Emma’s back, but never put into writing. (When her brother in law Hyrum presented it to her, Emma gave him what he described as the most severe talking to of his life, and a few days later seems to have thrown a copy of it into the fire, or insisted Joseph do so depending on which account is more accurate.)

Although we depend heavily for our eternal marriage theology on selected verses from this scripture, when you just read it through from beginning to end it becomes a horror story, a manifesto of sexist oppression that demeans women as property.  It states that if they object to their husbands adding more wives to their marriage they should be ignored and God will ‘destroy’ them as ‘transgressors.’

Intriguingly it also promises that anyone who enters a sealed marriage in the temple has their ‘calling and election made sure’ to use the Mormon jargon – the get out of jail free card for Mormons who will still scoff at the corruption of medieval popes selling papal bulls of forgiveness being a sign of the ‘Great Apostasy’. Couples sealed by the Holy Priesthood are promised that whatever sins they commit short of the unforgiveable sin, they will still have a place in the Celestial Kingdom and the first resurrection (hence my first wife still benefitting from a sealing she has otherwise abandoned) after doing some purgatory time to be punished by Satan for those sins:

“…if a man marry a wife according to my word, and they are sealed by the Holy Spirit of promise, according to mine appointment, and he or she shall commit any sin or transgression of the new and everlasting covenant whatever, and all manner of blasphemies, and if they commit no murder wherein they shed innocent blood, yet they shall come forth in the first resurrection, and enter into their exaltation…” D&C 132:26

Section 132 takes a chain saw to several otherwise fundamental Mormon principles regarding respecting free will, and what we were always taught growing up about the existing wives’ permission being essential for polygamous marriages to proceed, which this scripture calls ‘the law of Sarah.’

It says a lot about the power of the cognitive dissonance and indoctrination we collectively normalise that we have created such a powerful firewall between what Doctrine and Covenants 132 actually says in its text in our canonised scriptures and the rest of our beliefs and practices. Still, a polygamous blast from the past reached through that barrier and the passage of time to grab me and my marriage by the throat, just as it did to thousands of Mormon marriages in the polygamous 1800’s and early 1900’s, and triggered a disempowering nightmare.

There has been some intensive spinning by Bruce R McConkie and others over the years to contradict or neutralise its worst statements, but they are all still there in our canon. The guarantees of exaltation regardless of righteousness or blasphemes which Section 132 gives to everyone who is sealed in the temple have since been translocated to the secretive and rare ‘Second Annointing’ only administered in the temple to the faithful elite, and which they are sworn to keep secret.

But that’s not what the scripture actually says. So party on people! The Church teaches us that being married in the temple is a call to the highest standards of faithfulness and righteousness, but the actual scriptural instructions for the whole concept say you can binge on blasphemies and nearly all the possible sins and still be exalted, so in fact it is quite the opposite. The pressure is off! I mean, even if you don’t want to snort cocaine in an orgy and drink champagne from your temple shoes, you can at least quit having guilt trips about not doing your home and visiting teaching. Surely the satanic buffetings for that small infraction can’t hurt too much on your way to the Celestial Kingdom.

And even then the wording of Section 132 is suspiciously wishy washy in verse 19: “Ye shall come forth in the first resurrection; and if it be after the first resurrection, in the next resurrection”, so the first resurrection ticket isn’t even guaranteed. For this we are made to suffer the indignities heaped upon so many of us instead of simply ending temple sealings at the moment of civil divorce.

But I love the way Section 132 pretty much acknowledges that Joseph Smith committed adultery and sinned against Emma with the polygamous liaisons he did not tell her about in the awkward marriage reconciliation negotiation verses…and I loathe how Joseph gets rewarded and promised exaltation out of this mess while Emma is just threatened with destruction. Let’s crawl out of this depressing rabbit hole…..

…into another one. I loathe the male chauvinism of the Endowment – Women come to the temple and see their deepest fears come true – they are subservient to men. They make covenants with God through their husbands rather than in their own right. They have to hide their faces in veiled shame to approach God in prayer. As soon as Adam is established as ruler, Eve stops talking to spiritual beings or receiving revelatory insights. We see behind the scenes into heaven where the team planning and delivering creation deliberate and Heavenly Mother is not seen or mentioned…or the Holy Ghost, who maybe is Heavenly Mother in disguise! Either way, no women.

I love how feminist the Endowment is – Eve is totally the hero of the story! As Genesis 3:6 describes, when she looks at the fruit she uses multiple intelligences to decide what to do – her practical intelligence says it is good for food, her aesthetic intelligence tells her it is beautiful (as an artist I have to endorse the idea of being willing to suffer and die for beauty) and her intellectual intelligence and curiosity tells her it is a key to greater knowledge and wisdom. She understands that to resolve the contradiction between the commandments God has given them to multiply, but not eat the fruit because it will make them mortal, they have to self-sacrifice.

She is the first and greatest Christ-like archetype, consciously choosing to suffer pain and death in order to give us all life. The men like Moses usually presented in our curriculum as ‘types’ or archetypes or living symbols of Jesus don’t come close.  She is a visionary strategist, ambitious, loving and seeking truth and knowledge above all other things, whatever the price.   She is a boundary-breaking explorer who wants to progress and grow. She is brave in the face of uncertainty, danger and physical suffering. These are all attributes traditionally attributed to strong males, particularly in the medieval Christian culture that absolutely demonised Eve, and with her all women, as weak and corrupting influences. To them, and many people still today, women are the downfall of men, ruled by their emotions and bodies rather than their minds, unable to think boldly, or most importantly strategically, and therefore unsuited to the rigours of political or commercial or spiritual leadership. So the endowment takes the philosophical foundation myth of western sexism and oppression of women and assertively kicks it into a shredder.

Women are promised they will be queens and goddesses. They wear the robes of the Aaronic and Melchezedek priesthood which they have not needed to be ordained to, participate in all the same rituals, and are inducted into the same knowledge and covenants as the ordained men. Women even administer some of the priesthood ordinances when they annoint and bless women in full priestess-representing-Jesus mode in the ‘initiatory’ rituals. Priesthood is as priesthood does! So we have a female priesthood in the Church, at least in the temple if not in the playpen of the wards and stakes where the boys and men are getting extra training to do it properly because, as D&C 121 makes clear, they have a major tendency to screw it up. Technically they need to start specifically proving that they will not abuse an endowment of power before being allowed near the temple.

I love how the Endowment continues the most ancient cultural ritual traditions of all – the tribe gathering to tell and retell the stories of its creation myths and heroes, the eternal struggle between good and evil, how the plants and animals and people came to be and why they do what they do, or have certain roles and powers in our physical and spiritual ecosystems. It guides us through the transition from Dreamtime to the time and world we live in now where the places and creatures in the stories have become avatars or symbols, shadows of the momentous events and struggles in the primordial age of creation.

I love how the endowment translates these stories into a medieval pageant, a Mummers play, a Pilgrim’s Progress of Adam the Everyman and Eve the Everywoman facing and overcoming the challenges along the way. It is performance art, kinaesthetic learning, immersive installation, theatre in the round. Its varied physical, auditory, verbal and visual ingredients fire all our mechanisms for learning and present us with different kinds of symbology that allow the Spirit and our current experiences and interests to roam and find personal meanings as we interpret it. They can yield very different but helpful insights and interpretations each time we go. Its weirdness and mysteries give us a lot of freedom to decide what it means for us, which a less eccentric experience would lack.

The accounts of the original endowment in Nauvoo Temple sound like they would blow your freaking 19th century mind! They took all day, and as you proceeded from one curtained space to the next you would encounter the characters in the stories who would perform and talk to you. A brilliant dissertation installation by one of my fellow Arts students set up in the university chapel a maze of huge white sheets where every space involved a different sensual experience of things like music, or a smell or woodchips under your bare feet. Imagine Lucifer coming at you in an enclosed space to gloat about his power and then being defeated by the heroes. It must have been a pretty intense virtual reality experience.

I adore the endowment for its laughter! How can you not laugh? Or wonder for a moment at whether ‘The Lord’s Annointed’ really knew what they were doing when they put this crazy thing together? For me the laughter began in my own endowment – a nervous 18 year old finally being let into the strange secret world my parents and their peers and the Church leaders and Authorities valued above all else…and had told me next to nothing about. I was an artist with a VERY vivid imagination fed by years of consuming and making elaborate fantasy artworks – I was expecting full-on Dungeons and Dragons, runes on paving stones on the floor, and standing naked in the light of a burning torch in a dark catacomb after the minimal preparation I had. It had mentioned lots of symbols and having parts of your body blessed and anointed, but explained very little.

My first chuckle was the realisation that after all my extravagant expectations this was going to be about as exotic or exciting as a sacrament meeting. The second came when my parents and the Stake President and adults I had looked up to all my life donned the robes of the Holy Priesthood…and suddenly I was at a guild meeting of artisan bakers! If the Swedish Chef from the Muppets had appeared at the altar proclaiming “Chicky in the basket!!” at that moment I would not have been surprised.

And then there was the film. Oh, thank You Dear God for the pure camp genius of the film. It took a few years at Art college after my mission researching postmodernist pastiche to fully appreciate and adore all its retro-chic kitsch facets, but what a smorgasbord of fun it was.

Now, I am blessed to be British, so I have grown up with our possibly unique total adoration of very camp gay national treasures like Kenneth Williams and Boy George. The one genre of theatre all Brits experience and share regardless of social class or education is Christmas pantomimes. Pantos tell the stories of traditional fairy tales like Peter Pan, Aladdin and Cinderella with loads of audience participation and filthy double entendres for the grown-ups. Boys are played by girls, and old women are played by old men in the most over the top drag humanly possible. Think LDS roadshows on steroids that break all the rules in the Handbook, on purpose, with glee and contemporary political satirical commentary, often delivered directly to the audience in moments that break the 4th wall. It has to be experienced to be believed…which some people have also said about the endowment, funnily enough…

So imagine my secret joy when discovering that our very serious American religious leaders who had filled my teenage years with every kind of sexually repressive and homophobic message and guilt trip possible from their unworldly Rocky Mountain citadel made a FABULOUS Panto, complete with a villain who threatens the audience, naïve protagonists in peril and heroes to the rescue, and instructed us to treat it as our holiest religious ritual, the apex of our spiritual lives – the way to reach out and touch the face of God! And not only was it pure panto, with terrible wooden or totally over-the-top acting by the glorious Lucifer giving it lip-curling gusto just like a Panto Dame, it was also rampantly Batting For The Other Team.   The Nearly Dead White Males who pontificate against ‘counterfeit families’ signed off on a bold contribution to gay cinema, and made us pay 10% of our income to see it. Over and over again.

Divine beings wafted about in voluminous sparkly satin robes with massive beards and long perfectly set permed white hair like aryan Barry Whites, as if they had just wandered in from Disco Heaven at Studio 54 to plan their next party in their dressing gowns…surrounded by actual giant pink pillars. In Eden immaculately quaffed and manicured naked Adam and Eve sat around stroking furry animals with unsettling sensual intensity like Bond villains, surrounded by rainbow coloured shrubbery.

The Let’s Make a Temple Film Committee have probably never heard of French portraitists Pierre et Gilles who photograph and digitally remaster celebrities surrounded by brightly coloured plastic flowers. I had already chuckled about this connection with the scenes of Adam and Eve tastefully framed by flowers and foliage to hide their naughty bits, but a few years ago the old temple films were digitally remastered by somebody who must have had their computer screen colour settings under par. What unfolded when the screen descended from the Endowment Room ceiling and the lights went down was a version of the familiar old film of such searing technicolour intensity it was like a psychedelic acid trip created by Pierre et Gilles. It was the perfect swan song for a kitsch classic. I for sure had an intense religious experience ponderising that, although perhaps not for the reasons originally intended.

I will sorely miss the old film, but to my joy the new temple films are ravishing in their gorgeous high definition footage of the natural world’s landscapes and creatures and beautifully sketched and painted plants and animals – high art meets David Attenborough and the Lord of the Rings movie credits. They also still have delightful moments of terrible soap opera acting, plus some more contemporary twists. There’s a profoundly melancholy bald Emo Lucifer who is like a hybrid of Marvin the depressed robot in Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy and Varys in Game of Thrones. Adam and Eve worry and weep like snowflake metrosexuals, taking plenty of time to pause and think about the enormity of what they are doing instead of just getting on with it. We have now reached Latino Level soap opera acting. The final step will be Sri Lankan Level. If you have never seen a Sri Lankan soap you must – it has Latino Level over-emotion but adds showing each dramatic moment about 20 times over so you can relish the shocked expressions on literally everyone in the room, one at a time, and sometimes twice.

And now we also have a Made in Chelsea meets Hip Hop video Jehovah literally casually leaning back chilling with his homies on his bling golden throne in what seems to be an exclusive nightclub with loads of OTT gold leaf and expensive granite if my memory serves me right. My mind boggled at that one – what on earth were the directors thinking?! Unfortunately one cannot book in the foyer which of the 3 new films you are going to get so I’ve only seen that one once so far. I’m still looking forward to catching the legendary third one which apparently has slightly brownish people as Adam and Eve – the only Mormon race revolution we are likely to get in my generation the way things are going. It’s got to be a bit weird when your religion’s holiest ritual is like getting a ticket to see a mystery premier at the cinema and there are going to be a few people in the audience when the film begins thinking “Oh no, not this one…I was hoping it would be the other one.”

And the funniest thing of all is despite all of this they want us to make a sacred promise not to be light-minded or laugh loudly, which I hope still leaves some room for a quiet chuckle. Karl Bath said ‘Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God’ and I just love all the absurdities of the temple films. The journey to the temple is so deadly serious with years of waiting, mountains of doctrinal complexity, probing self-reflection in recommend interviews and a life dedicated to a very demanding set of standards to even get in. Yet when you finally get to it the secret / sacred crescendo of that long journey is a bunch of surrealist amateur dramatics and swishing about in hats.

I just love that – it says, to me at least, ‘Stop taking yourselves so seriously! What were you really expecting?!’ and ‘Look at all these people taking themselves and this whole thing so seriously, but be still and know that I am God…and I definitely have a sense of humour!’ It is like the best and purest virtues of laughter – laughter that releases tension, celebrates the absurdities of existence as a cause for joy rather than depression, and empowers you to stop being afraid of totalitarian systems or leaders. People got up the courage to face down or endure fascist and communist dictators by making fantastic political cartoons and jokes about them. In a Church that now concentrates arguably far too much power in the hands of its top leaders, who have not presented any of their major doctrinal or policy changes to the general membership for a ‘common consent’ vote since 1978, God seems to have made sure there is a built-in release valve from the pressure of their assumed infallibility, strategically placed at the heart of the whole edifice.

At times in the endowment I hear laughter with true humanity and soul rather than the satanic humourlessness described so beautifully in Umberto Ecco’s ‘The Name of the Rose’ and the script of the film of it.  In this story William of Baskerville struggles with a nasty medieval librarian monk called Jorge to find the last copy of a missing book by Aristotle about laughter and humour that Jorge is murdering people to hide from the world. Mormons sometimes discuss what the injunction to avoid loud laughter, which is repeated a few times in the Doctrine and Covenants, means. The conclusion is usually that it means we should not mock sacred things – some things are beyond the reach of comedy or satire and lose their holiness if we are not incredibly reverential when talking about them. This feeds into a lot of LDS cultural norms that get out of hand to suppress honest and open discussion, or people challenging the wisdom of the ‘man-made good ideas, programs or expectations’ President Uchtdorf warned us against in his October 2015 General Conference talk ‘It Works Wonderfully’. ‘The Name of the Rose’ is a perfect book to explore that whole premise in much more depth and perhaps reach different conclusions:

“Jorge: Laughter kills fear and without fear there can’t be any faith. Because without fear of the devil there is no more need of God.

William: But you will not eliminate laughter by eliminating that book.

Jorge: No, to be sure. Laughter will remain the common man’s recreation. But what would happen if, because of this book, learned men were to pronounce it permissible to laugh at everything? Can we laugh at God? The world would relapse into chaos.”

“William: “The Devil is not the Prince of Matter; the Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt….I hate you, Jorge, and if I could I would lead you downstairs, across the ground, naked, with a fowl’s feathers stuck in your asshole and your face painted like a juggler and a buffoon, so the whole monastery would laugh at you and be afraid no longer…to say to all: He was announcing the truth to you and telling you that the truth has the taste of death, and you believed, not in his words, but in his grimness…..God allows you to imagine a world where the presumed interpreter of the truth is nothing but a clumsy raven, who repeats words learned long ago.”

“In that face, deformed by a hatred of philosophy, I saw for the first time the portrait of the Antichrist….the Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God or of the truth….Jorge feared the second book of Aristotle because it perhaps really did teach how to distort the face of every truth, so that we would not become the slave of our ghosts. Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from the insane passion for truth.”

Perhaps one of the hidden gems in the endowment, which says truly wonderful things about embracing all truth, not just bits of it, is this insight – that in a world where we only see the truths of God ‘in a glass darkly’ we must always be prepared to have our assumptions about even the most revered doctrines about God turned on their head. We cannot make any of them our idols or fully trust them – they must all be susceptible to laughter and even mockery to remind us that no human yet knows the whole truth, and any of our most cherished beliefs could in truth be ludicrous and laughable distortions of the real truth we will one day discover.

As the Radio Free Mormon podcaster expressed so brilliantly recently in his episode 17 ‘True Believing Mormon’, Joseph Smith was very assertive that Mormonism should be literally defined by embracing all truth from any source, and should avoid the limiting written creeds of the apostate Christians which build walls around their doctrines and understanding that they cannot break through. Joseph pointed out that the scriptures only damn people for not having any faith, not for believing too many things, so he intervened to defend members on trial for apostasy because they had added beliefs to their Mormonism that made other leaders uncomfortable. He really valued freedom to think outside the box as not just a right but absolutely essential if we are ever to get to really know as much as God.

As he discusses with Benedictine Jorge, William is a Franciscan monk, his order founded by St Francis who famously did counter-intuitive, disruptive and comical things like preaching to the animals to challenge the pharisaical orthodoxies of his age that were crushing the flower of the gospel in his Church, as President Uchtdorf would put it. He and many other religious reformers like the prophet Hosea who married a prostitute and gave his poor children crazy names, Isaiah who walked around naked for 3 years (or at least in his undies according to more prudish Christians who can’t cope with Isaiah 20) and Elijah who lay in the street for over a year playing with tiles and a skillet, cooking his food with dried human poo and burning his hair, all used irreverent humour and attention-seeking public performance art to challenge their societies’ assumptions. They physically demonstrated that real religious truth is not in the things religious people make sacred and impervious to laughter.

Maybe that’s one of the things God wants me to remember and represent when I go to the temple. For some reason I often turn into a disruptive klutz when I step through the front door, accidentally upsetting the equilibrium by outrageous faux pas and slapstick physical humour. I cause a kerfuffle by making it into the temple chapel in a short sleeved shirt before being hurried out by alarmed attendants to change into a long-sleeved one. The last time I was doing sealings was for my diligent temple-worker mother in law’s ancestors and I could feel myself going into a visual tunnel as I knelt at the altar. I thought I could tough it out – it’s not the kind of thing you want to interrupt – but ended up passing out on the altar and came too, legs akimbo, slumped on the floor with my horrified wife calling my name and hoping I hadn’t died. I just don’t seem able to do dignity.

I recently went to a Christian bible seminar in London with a dear friend who I met at Christian Union at university and introduced to Mormonism. He reminded me that at his endowment on the way up to the prayer circle I tripped over and literally fell flat on my face on the floor. It says everything you need to know about what a calamity I am at the temple that I had completely forgotten that even happened. How do you forget a humiliation like that?! It’s like inviting Harold Lloyd or the Keystone Cops in an old silent movie inviting me to the House of the Lord to turn it momentarily into a house of disorder, like the Lords of Misrule that William of Baskerville appreciated.

In fact it seems I have actually been called by God to be that funny guy. My patriarchal blessing was given to me by a holy poet for whom I will always be grateful. He turned 90 this year. It says “I bless you with a joyful heart, that you shall bring balance and true relaxation into your life and the lives of others with a merry quip and a happy thought, so that all things be not solemn and dark…for the gospel is not a grey and forbidding thing when taken in the round…..your Heavenly Parents rejoice over you; sometimes they are anxious; and indeed they do chuckle on occasion.”

So what some of my concerned family members see as my worryingly reckless and irreverent responses to overbearing pompous General Authorities or other things they hold sacred doesn’t come out of nowhere. As an 18 year old I was introduced in the most solemn way my religion allowed to the idea of humour being an essential ingredient in the gospel, and one of the divine attributes, like the young novice Adso is by his older and wiser mentor William in ‘The Name of the Rose’. I was told to remind everyone, like William does, that truth does not have the taste of death. (…Death Eaters! Harry Potter reference! Tick.) And who gets told in their patriarchal blessing that Mr and Mrs God are actually for real laughing at them?!! Seriously?! Best. Blessing. Ever. My apologies to everyone with really boring ones.

As well as all this frivolous…or deeply profound…light relief, I love how the temple provides us a rare opportunity to be deadly serious – sombre, earnest, philosophical. To put aside all the clutter and trivia that overwhelm modern adult life and contemplate the nature of existence and the universe and our place within it. To make the most serious commitments possible before God and His angels.

I loathe how temple work for the dead is a massive waste of time and money and a diversion from helping the living. Surely Jesus cautioned his disciples “Let the dead bury their dead: but go thou and preach the kingdom of God.” (Luke 9:60). Some Mormons become total fanatics, neglecting family duties, missing family events and failing to be present to nurture their grandchildren to hide away in a place they cannot go, constantly repeating time-consuming rituals and “repeating words learned long ago.” I should add, since I have mentioned her, that my amazing human dynamo mother in law does both temple and family spectacularly and goes the extra mile with both. I’m not talking about you Mummy in Law! (She’s a true redhead – you can’t be too careful.)

I love how the temple teaches and reminds me, and makes me prove that I really believe, that every person matters. Vicarious temple work is the pure love of Christ in action, casting bread on the waters without necessarily expectation of reward or immediate gratification or gratitude from those you help. An extreme Zen discipline. Like the cloistered monks and nuns who never interact with the people in the world but devote themselves to making everything better, as they see it, through the service of ritual and prayer for the living and the dead.

Mormons can be the absolute best at rallying round to help people who need us, even if it is expensive, difficult, inconvenient, exhausting, or neglecting our families whose needs are greater. We don’t even need to know them or be related to them – we will turn up, step into their lives, and carry them for a while. I am convinced that at least some of that powerful and ennobling instinct which truly ministers to the living and builds Christ’s kingdom in their lives comes from what the experience of family history research and temple work for the dead teaches us – that every person matters. Their parents matter. Their children matter. Their great grandneices twice removed matter. Their time in history matters even if it was a time when God seems to have turned his face from the world. Their nation matters. Their language and culture and unpronounceable names from a place completely different to our own matter. And we don’t need to have any prior personal connection with them whatsoever for them to still matter just as much as anyone else. The ultimate attribute of deity is unconditional self-sacrificial love for ‘even the least of these my brethren.’

So, for me, the endowment with all its random ingredients and irreconcilable contradictions is a metaphor for the Church as a whole.  It is earnest, well intentioned, flawed, treated as communicating ancient unchanging truths yet reviewed and reformed with each new generation to better fit the social norms and cultural values of the current generation. It is capable of elevating your mind and soul to the heights of love and compassion and wonder at the grandness of existence in our extraordinary world, yet obsessed over small details of clothing and conformity to a long list of rigid lifestyle and ideological requirements before you are permitted or trusted to fully participate. It is expansive and small-minded at the same time. It is silly nonsense in fancy dress; it is the deepest truths. It really does have to be seen, perhaps over and over again through a lifetime, to be believed and understood.

For the Love, Loathing and Laughter of the Temple Endowment published first on http://ift.tt/2wQcX5G