Leaving the Saints How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith

Chapter 1: Room at the Inn So there he stands, not five feet away from me. He looks almost unchanged since the last time I saw him, ten years agofabulous, for a man now in his nineties. His features are still sharply cut, his sardonic smile and turquoise eyes as bright as ever. The only difference I notice is that both his hair and his wiry body have thinned a bit. His trousers (probably the same ones he was wearing a decade ago) are now so baggy he's switched from a belt to suspenders. A Shakespearean phrase pops into my mind: ". . . a world too wide / For his shrunk shank." From As You Like It, I think. That's something I seem to have inherited from this little old man in his shabby pants: a tendency to produce random literary quotations, from memory, to fit almost any situation. I don't do this on purpose; it just happens to me. The same way it happens to him. Despite the fact that we've rarely had a significant conversation, I know that my father understands the way I think, probably better than anyone on earth. "Well, well, well," he says heartily, opening his arms. Hmm. This is new. Back when I knew him, my father wasn't the open-arms type. But, then, neither was I. I go forward and hug him. It does feel odd, but I've been practicing hugging the people I love for years now, and I get through it. "Hello," I say, and stop there, at a loss for words. I can't bring myself to say "Hello, Daddy," but I don't know what else to call him. "Daddy" is the only title by which I and my seven siblings ever addressed him. "Dad" would sound disrespectfully casual, "Father" too formal, his given name completely bizarre. I settle for repeating "Hello," then gesture toward the easy chair by the door. "Please, sit down." He sits, and I'm startled by another eerie jolt of familiarity: This man moves just like I do. Nervous as I am, scared to death as I am, there is something unspeakably poignant about the fact that my posture and carriage are echoes of his. It's been a long time since I encountered so many of my own chromosomes in anyone besides my own children. "I thought this day would never arrive," my father says, still wearing his most cheerful smile. "I thought you'd never come to your senses." He assumes I've come to recant. He's wrong. I'm here for two reasons: to sew up the loose threads I left hanging when I fled my past and to make sure, as far as I can, that my father isn't afraid to die. If his model of the universe is correct, there must be serious retribution awaiting him in the afterlife, and in case this belief worries him I want to tell him I don't share it. The God to whom I pray is all parts unconditional love, no part vengeance or retribution. I once read that forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a different past, and I reached that point a long time ago. But forgiving is not the same as obliterating memory. As Santayana wrote, "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." This is something I do not want to happen. Not to my father, and certainly not to me. "Oh, I stand by everything I've said," I tell my father as I sit down on the sofa a few feet away from him. "That hasn't changed at all." His expression turns from cheer to scorn in a heartbeat. "Ridiculous," he says. "Utterly ridiculous." Those sky blue eyes flash toward the door and I feel my throat tense with the fear that he's noticed it&Beck, Martha is the author of 'Leaving the Saints How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith', published 2006 under ISBN 9780307335999 and ISBN 0307335992.