Day 58: Dear god! Is this a law of chastity lesson?!

Here are some things he decided needed telling to a room of 20-somethings, Mormons, singles, men and women:

1. There were people sitting among us with STDs (so he’d learned from personal worthiness and/or…

Day 73: To your husband

You sit in a theater-like room together, listening to a voice of authority — male, official-sounding — making promises to you.

If you’re a man, you’re on track to be a king and high priest to God.

Day 51: What am I saying?

Q: So you think you never believed — just wanted to?

A: Some stuff, yeah. The Book of Mormon. Life after death. It was like watching a movie — I had to suspend my disbelief.

Day 66: From “the church IS true” to “the church WAS true”

The Church is fallen. So clear to me now. What began with a Google search for a (faithful) explanation of a Book of Mormon anachronism led me to something — a blog — called Pure Mormonism.

Day 61: Reading my patriarchal blessing now

Two pages, single-sided, folded in eighths — though the final fold happens at an angle so that when the blessing opens, the bottom crease of the top left quadrant slants up and to the right, where in the middle of the page it meets a new crease that…

Day 72: Food poisoning, January 2014

My story always hinges on this moment: propped up in bed, painfully sick but no longer vomiting, saying goodbye to a friend about to leave on his mission (for the second time). He says (or I hear), “It’s not worth living half a life,” and my future — of temples and…

Day 52: Common religion

It was like we were inventing religion on the fly.

Or like common law — the way judges create new law by interpreting the old. Every unorthodox word from the pulpit, every oddball ward activity, every instance of letting things slide — it was us, rank-and-file…

Day 62: Swaying

“You think it’s possible you’d ever stop believing?” He flips his hair, focuses his gaze on me.

I in turn focus on lots of things that aren’t his gaze — seats filled with drab commuters, a blurred tunnel — and straddle a quickly widening chasm.

Day 55: Left alone

It said just leave me alone.

His body, folded over in its metal chair, swaying as though pacing, side to side.

The lesson was Adam and Eve, and at the crux this: God gave a commandment they were supposed to know to break. Why would he ever?

Day 56: Ted

It started with me visiting him, there in his basement studio apartment, the one he hardly left, its air heavy with the smell of a human un-ventilated and un-run.

But it only started that way. Whether the weather or the meds or the slow dawning awareness that others knew he was…