“So,” I said, nudging him, “you went to the local Mormon church and said: Here I am! Convert me!”
“No, no. First of all, temples, not churches, and you can’t enter the temple until you already are a member of the church. But it didn’t happen like that, either. I got this insane idea to go and be in the pageant, myself. I’d seen it performed. I saw these hundreds of people, working on it together. And their faith together. And I thought, well, I’ll fill out an application and mail it in and see what happens. I told myself it would be an interesting experience, not necessarily a religious one. And I said I was a church member already, which was wrong of me.”
“They couldn’t check? I mean, wasn’t it all on some database?”
“Probably. Or maybe they couldn’t imagine a non-Mormon taking the trouble to apply, and lying about it. I got a letter instructing me when to turn up in Palmyra, and so I went. And I get to this community college, Finger Lakes Community College, where everyone was staying, and I’m completely terrified they’re going to find out I’m not one of them. But they kept us so busy, right from the get-go, and no one was lurking around questioning anyone else’s bona fides. Everything was superorganized, very structured, and crazy accelerated. You audition, like, on the first day, then you get put into a cast team, and bang, you’re running around from breakfast to bedtime, not just rehearsal but workshops and service assignments. I was cast as a Lamanite.”
“A what?” I said.
“Generic bad guy. Mainly I shook a spear in the air.”
A pair of Dalmatians with a short woman attached came by, slowed, and then veered hopefully toward the sandwiches. They were pulled away.
“You know what’s interesting, they actually recognized me as Jewish, they just assumed I was a convert. They all wanted me to know how much they loved and supported Israel. I probably did more thinking about the Bible in those two weeks than I ever had before. And by then I’d read the Book of Mormon. Or skimmed it.”
I didn’t want to say anything. I wanted him to keep going.
“And then, I started to get this feeling around it, not just all the moving parts of putting on this big show, but the presence of history, and the story of Joseph Smith and the early church, unfolding on the exact spot where it happened—just the meaning of the place, and the undertaking. And there are so many families doing this together, and the feeling of community was really overwhelming.” He paused. “Do you believe in anything?”
“Anything? What do you mean?”
“Any story. Do you believe that Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt?”
I just looked at him. I’d never really thought about whether I believed it. “I guess it probably happened,” I said. “I mean, some version of that.” But the two things, I realized, were hardly the same.
“The thing is, we’re only two centuries out from Joseph Smith, and we have actual artifacts. His stuff, and contemporary accounts. I mean, you can’t visit Moses’s actual tent in the desert and see the exact chair he sat in, and we don’t have a testament from his right-hand man, but it doesn’t matter, because it’s not really about the evidence. At some point it becomes real to you in spite of evidence. You just … stake your life to one particular story.”
“Lewyn, you are making this sound very culty. You realize that.”
“Am I?” He seemed surprised. He took another bite of his sandwich. Then he wrapped up the rest. After a moment he said, “These people, they were so unbelievably kind. Even after they figured it out, they were very decent to me. They called me into the director’s office and they asked me, point-blank, was I a member of the church? I felt terrible. It was the worst I’d felt all that year, which was saying something. And they asked me why I was there and I honestly couldn’t say why. And they asked if I wanted to join the church, was that why, and I didn’t know that, either. And I ended up telling them about Dad, and how he died, and after that they couldn’t do enough for me, so I felt awful about that, in addition to everything else. I was a mess, basically.”
“Were you thinking of converting?” I asked. “I mean, at that point?”
Lewyn sighed. “I’m not sure. I was trying to be open to the possibility. Anyway, I had to drop out of the pageant, but they didn’t make me leave. They kept setting me up with people to talk to, and I spent the next couple of weeks up there, going to the historical sites and doing more reading. Do you know what the Sacred Grove is?”
I laughed. “Lewyn, do I look like a person who knows what a ‘Sacred Grove’ is?”
He smiled, but faintly. “The Sacred Grove is behind Joseph Smith’s house in Palmyra. It’s where he went to pray. It’s where he saw angels. It’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever been. The first time I went there I got lost in it, actually. I was looking for it, and I didn’t realize I was already in it. Very meta. Harrison would have found it hilarious.”
He was right about that, I thought.
“I’d never considered myself remotely spiritual, you know? But when I was in the Sacred Grove, I felt something. I did. I couldn’t have said, Wow, these supernatural things happened here, just as I’m being told. But there was something. Maybe it was just the stillness and the beauty, and that horrible year. I just kept going back to the Grove, and watching the pageant at night. And I met this family from Provo, and they were driving back home and planning to stop in Missouri and Illinois on their way back. You know, to places from Mormon history. And they invited me to go with them. So I did. I left New York with the Kimballs, and I went west.”
“Guess you didn’t miss your little sister.”
“I barely thought of my little sister. I barely thought of any of you. Something was working its way through me. I kept trying to bring my old identity together with whatever that was, but I could never get it to happen.”
A Black woman with a bulldog and a little boy came past, headed for the park and the pier at the bottom of Coffey Street. The boy turned back to stare at us as he walked.
“We stopped in Nauvoo on the way west. Nauvoo is where the Mormons were settled when Joseph Smith died. After that it was where the community set off to Zion, which eventually became Utah. We saw all the historical sites, like the jail where Smith died, and his house, and his grave, and that was all fine. You know, interesting, but not special. But then that evening, I took a walk down to the river. The Mississippi, by myself. And I was looking west into the sunset, and I just felt that same thing I’d felt in the Grove. I didn’t think This is God, or even The testimony is true. I didn’t know what it was. But the peace of it. I just wanted it all the time.”
Opiate of the masses, I thought. But I didn’t say it out loud.
“So I just kept going west with the Kimballs, and they kept talking to me about what they believed. When we reached Provo, I looked around a little bit and then I got a job for a while, at a bookstore. And eventually I rented an apartment, and that became my life for the next year. All very normal. No cult indoctrination, just a lot of reading and conversation. And the next fall I formally transferred to Brigham Young, and I was majoring in art history and making friends. I even started dating a cousin of the Kimballs I met at one of their firesides, though, to be honest, I think she was even more interested in leaving the church than I was in joining it. And I was talking to missionaries all this time, and the Kimballs introduced me to their bishop and he was just this wonderful guy. Everyone was very respectful of my Jewishness, and about Dad. And I did keep moving toward it—I mean, baptism and confirmation. I think I wanted it, some part of me, just never all of me. I think I told myself, you don’t have to rush this.”