In the earlier Jay and Michael stories, they--but mostly Michael--struggled with overwhelming depression and the fear of falling apart. That is not this story. Now, having come through such things, the two of them witness a world which itself has gone mad. So the earlier stories were about the madness and healing of Jay and Michael. This concluding story is about two people who have been healed confronting a world that is mad. If Rossford stories are the joke with the immediate punchline, then Jay and Michael stories are the joke that you have to walk away from for a while and will get later on, maybe even on a second reading.
“You guys have an awesome apartment,” Nelson noted. “I’d like to do some of this for my place downstairs.”
“You can take some stuff,” Michael said. “We’re not using it all.”
Jay frowned at him.
“You’ve hardly been living in this place two month. You don’t know what’s being used and what’s not.”
“Yeah,” Nelson said, to Michael, “and it’s still not quite your place yet.”
“Of course it is,” Jay protested loudly. Then, sipping his coffee he said, “No, Nelson’s right. You gotta live here a little more than two months before you start trying to give my shit away.”
Jay had heard of Rulon Nelson long before he met him. He knew that Michael had struck up a friendship with a Mormon missionary, and Jay thought that was kind of interesting because he thought all religions were interesting and would have loved to pick a Mormon’s brain. Often he would send questions through Michael for Elder Nelson to answer. There was another Elder, but Michael had decided he wasn’t as bright and never said his name.
“He wanted me to get baptized,” Michael told Jay.
“Of course he does,” Jay said. “That’s what they’re around for. They’re making more…More Mormons.”
Jay had given a half smile over his half joke.
Because James Strickland never thought for a moment that Michael would get baptized or join another church, when one Sunday he said that he was going to hang at the Mormon church—that’s how he described it—Jay said, sensing a grand field trip more than a conversion, “Mike, if you love me you’ll take me too.”
Now the effect of being called Mike by Jay was the same that most people would feel if you used the long form of their name, because Jay had never ever called Michael anything buy Michael.
“Well, I’m sure they’ll let you come. Actually, I’m sure they’ll want you to come.”
“I can’t believe I’m doing this. I can’t believe I’m excited to do this.”
“I think we have to get dressed up,” Michael said.
“We can be dressed up, but I’m not wearing a fucking tie. I’m done with that.”
Since they had left Saint Ignatius, Jay was very serious about never wearing a tie.
“I’m going to do a little research. I don’t want to look ridiculous.” Jay decided.
“It’s nothing like Big Love,” Michael said.
“No,” Jay sighed. “I don’t suppose it is.”
Michael picked up Jay Sunday morning around ten and started to explain how things worked, but Jay knew most of it already. Of course, Jay had told a fair amount of it to Michael. Mormons lived in wards. Where you lived determined which meeting house you could go to.
“Did you know technically Catholics are like that too?” Jay threw in. “We just kind of ignore it now.”
Because there weren’t many Mormons in Lassador, the meeting house was divided among two wards and one ward met at a certain time and the next ward met at another.
“And never the twain shall meet?”
“I get the idea,” Michael said as they whizzed up Dorr Road, passing even the mall and entering into the land of sparse subdivisions and office complexes, “that if you woke up later, or had to do shit early and came to the other meeting it would be frowned upon. They seem pretty fucking regulated.”
The Elder Nelson Jay had met was an almost grim looking, tall, narrow figure in a dark suit. He stood beside a stockier, handsome boy in a fawn colored jacket and, despite the fact that Redmond looked more fun, more light and All American, there was something mischievous behind Nelson’s eyes so that Jay understood why Michael liked him. No, Jay thought, the lanky fellow didn’t really belong here. Or at least, he belonged here as much as Jay and Michael did.
From a distance, the meeting house looked a bit like a funeral home, and the top of it had a long white spike rather than a cross. The place was very modern with a carpeted hall that led to a coat room, and everyone was dressed up, but dressed up. The main sanctuary was a room with a bare stage and podium. Jay thought the place looked like an unfinished church, and they sang a song he didn’t think was very good and then almost immediately had communion, which is to say the congregants had communion. He and Michael passed it down and Jay, who never went to church anyway, frowned to see Wonder bread and little cups of water passed down the rows.
It looks like they do everything just to be a contrary to other Christians as possible. It’s the damnedest.
Jay tries to assess things with an open eye, as if he isn’t a Catholic, but an anthropologist who’s never seen any religion before. The best he can get to, though, is being a Catholic who doesn’t believe there’s something wrong with being something else. He can’t quite get to this being an equal even if it is an opposite thing to what he was raised in. Mormonism looks too cheap for one thing, and paradoxically costs too much. And there’s a lot of crying. This is Fast and Testimony Sunday and a lot of people are getting up in their Sunday best and telling stories that end in, “And I know the Church is True.”
There is a woman in a gingham that looks half Little House on the Prairie half Dress Barn, and she is talking about her children and her medical bills and her one son with the club foot and while she is weeping it winds to how good God is and she finishes saying, “I know that the Church is Restored in its Latter Days and Joseph Smith is a Prophet and I know the Church is True.”
A short man in a checkered shirt stands up and talks about raising his kids and how much he loves them and how people don’t understand what it means to be a father or care for children and how he’s so glad he’s in a church that cares about families and, he says as he cries into his hands, he knows Joseph Smith is a prophet and that the Church is True.
And then they sing another hymn. The first one was pretty bad and it is out of Jay’s mind. This one he has heard before, and he does not sing it at first, but reads the words.
“O my Father, thou that dwellest
In the high and glorious place,
When shall I regain thy presence
And again behold thy face?
In thy holy habitation,
Did my spirit once reside?
In my first primeval childhood
Was I nurtured near thy side?”
The whole time, by him, Nelson had been singing in a sonorous but Jay thinks, difficult to achieve, bass. Now, knowing the tune and able to sing, Jay sings in his tenor and feels Nelson switching, his voice becoming broader and more relaxed in a higher key.
“For a wise and glorious purpose
Thou hast placed me here on earth
And withheld the recollection
Of my former friends and birth;
Yet ofttimes a secret something
Whispered, “You’re a stranger here,”
And I felt that I had wandered
From a more exalted sphere.”
After that there were two different classes and they could go to one or the other. Then after that class, the men met to a priesthood meeting, and the women met for something called sisterhood. The class and the meeting were good, but Jay doesn’t remember what they discussed. He felt like the root material they studied was not important or true, but everyone was talking about their prayer life, their fasting and their devotion, and Jay felt, “These are wonderful people. This is much better than being in any church I went to before. If only we could come every once in a while and then not have to sign onto their beliefs!”
After the priesthood meeting, it was time to go home, and they had spent about three hours in this church, which was a bit much.
“Are you coming back for Fireside?”Tristan, a cheerful, redhead asked.
Michael opened his mouth in surprise, but Jay said, “There’s more?”
“Oh,” Tristan said with a touch of sarcasm, “there’s always more.”
There was a gym with a divider that was pulled to make two rooms for the priesthood and sisterhood meetings and as the rooms were reopened and kids came out to play, Jay climbed onto the stage and sat beside Nelson who was swinging his legs, and they looked out on everything.
“You think it’s stupid, don’t you?”
“What?”
“All the people crying. The music, the way that the church isn’t impressive looking like yours. You think it’s stupid.”
“Now, all of those things are the things you just said,” Jay said. “I didn’t say anything, and I doubt Michael did either.”
“Yeah,” Nelson said, looking around doubtfully at the gym rafters. “But I can’t get Michael to get baptized and I doubt I could get you baptized either. Smart people never really join. We never get people who think. And I’ve never made a convert.”
“I think,” Jay tried to find a word that was true, that did not condescend, that got to the heart of what he’d seen, “that this is a place all of these people need, full of all of this human hope… and sorrow. I think there’s something real here.”
“But you don’t think the Church is True?”
“I don’t even know what that means. I doubt you do either.”
“That there are churches, and that’s fine,” Nelson said, “but that this is the One Church, established by God by which the world can be saved. That this is the True Church.”
“Well, that’s patently untrue,” Jay said without a thought.
He did not even look to see the expression on Nelson’s face.
But of course, Nelson was right. To be un nuanced was to get it right. Even in Catholicism it was the most un nuanced positions that were the official ones. To stray into euphemism and metaphor or believe that the prayer before the Virgin Mary was no better and no worse than the worship before Kali’s image at the ashram down the road was to walk into heresy. The Mormons didn’t just have golden Bibles, they had a god who was a physical man living on a planet called Kolob. They had pre existing spirit families in heaven that all migrated down to earth to be born as your real family andmarriages that could turn into multiple marriages and would last in an eternity where a man might become God himself. They had a lot.
Jay had grown up with wafers that became saviors and wine that was blood. He had been raised in a most unbiblical assurance that the Virgin Mary was not only always a virgin, but had been taken to heaven body and soul and wore a crown on her head and not only this, also walked to Purgatory every Saturday to bring back suffering souls. No, Orthodoxy was not the absence of imagination, but the overabundance of it, the confusing of poetry with fact and fascism while condemning people to believe in someone else’s fantasies.
“Elder Nelson,” Jay said to Rulon, “your ideas about what matters are just going to kill you.
“Maybe,” he suggested, “you should try looking for a better definition of truth.”
