by Grant Ellsworth
“God calls imperfect men to lead his church,” Uncle Hyrum says, “because if men were perfect, we wouldn’t need the church to begin with.”
I’m in the front seat of his sticky, crumb-filled Honda Odyssey. We drive along Virginia backroads. I stare out at the forest.
“You know, I almost lost my faith too a few years back. Fell alllll the way down the rabbit hole: joined the ex-Mormon subreddit, read the CES Letter, watched all the temple exposés on YouTube. And I was so scared to talk to Anna about it, scared she’d leave me, scared she’d take the kids, scared she wouldn’t love me. I wanted to keep quiet, but my shelf was broken.”
We call it the “shelf-breaking moment” because the faith collapses all at once, like an overstuffed bookshelf. Every moment of doubt across a lifetime is like a tchotchke you set atop it, placing more strain on the structure. I was 14 when I first read that our prophet Joseph was a polygamist, in the comment section of a David Archuleta Instagram post. I was 15 when I saw the South Park episode about him, when I learned about the magic stones that spoke to him in a hat. The key is that these are all small things, but eventually, there’s too much weight and the whole thing falls apart.
My mom, one of eleven siblings, asked her youngest brother Hyrum to take me on a drive today. A month ago, I’d told her I was an atheist. She thought Hyrum would have better luck than she had with convincing me against this: he’s a Mormon podcaster now, specializing in faith-promoting content to keep youth in the religion. I sometimes see his caricature-esque “reaction” face on the thumbnails in my Recommended tab.
Hyrum and his wife lived in our basement for a year or so, a couple years back. We never got all that close, though I liked Hyrum just fine. He was warm, bookish. Dorky and kind. Today he was in a purple, short-sleeved button-up, with a gel pen neatly clipped in his breast pocket. I consider him a good man, a man who loves his daughters, a man who seems to want to find something true.
I’m the punkiest-looking he’s ever seen me: torn black jeans, a torn-up triple-XL Utah Utes shirt, big, frazzled waves of blond hair covering my ears. I fold my left leg over my right, bouncing my bare knee on the center console.
Thinking back, I don’t remember much, because the conversation wasn’t particularly memorable. It was around ninety minutes of Hyrum spewing random facts and figures about church history, and I always think of it like the bit about monkeys writing Shakespeare: how he was fumbling around for a perfect phrase, some exact combination of words to flip a switch in my brain, some optimal chain that might re-awaken belief in me. I remember feeling like a project, in the front seat of his car.
In a rare lull in his monologue, I ask, as sincerely as I can: “You’ve done so much research into the church. You know all the stuff I do. Why do you believe now, when there’s so much that makes it easier not to?”
He thinks for a second. “Honestly, I think it’s the only thing that keeps me together.”
With that, the previous ninety minutes made sense. That’s what it’s all about—the channel, this long drive, the hours upon hours of reading and writing he’s done in the world of apologetics—he’s trying to convince himself, too. He’s trying to hold up a shelf, trying to fight gravity.
***
My great, great, great, great grandpa was named David Ellsworth. He was a quiet, mystic man, known for selling dream interpretation services in upstate New York. He nursed his own apple orchard in the Burned-over District, a region named after the huge number of fire-and-brimstone preachers who’d flocked to the area to gather converts, in a time called the Second Great Awakening.
In 1836, Ellsworth was visited by one of the lord’s new apostles, Heber C. Kimball. He’d come across Ellsworth’s farm late at night, seeking shelter from an unseasonable deluge as he traveled across New York to spread the gospel of the new Mormon church. Ellsworth took him in. Kimball had been ordained a leader in the organization by Joseph Smith himself, the child-prophet of America’s newest religion.
I don’t know exactly what happened next. I know that Kimball stayed with Ellsworth for three days. I know that before Kimball left, he asked if he could give my grandpa a blessing. I know that the church’s apostles always carried sacred oil in a vial. I can assume he spread this oil on his hands before placing them on my grandpa’s head.
I can assume that the blessing went something like this: Oh God, the Eternal Father, I ask you to bless this man, for his hospitality, his openness, his work ethic, his time. Please bless that he will feel thy spirit and see the Book of Mormon as true scripture. Please open his spiritual eyes that he may see all that you have blessed him with. Amen.
From his diary, I know that my grandpa saw a vision in his bed the night Kimball left. God commanded him to join the burgeoning mass of Saints in Kirtland, Ohio. I know that he wept for three days. Pulled by a force he didn’t understand, with his family in tow, he traveled west to his new home, where Joseph would soon dedicate a new temple to the Lord. Across the northeast, the Lord’s new sheep were all being pulled towards this spiritual core, this cluster, expanding exponentially.
I know that my grandpa said he saw another vision on the day Joseph dedicated this temple: he saw angels circling the building’s windows, saw pure white fire pouring from its roof, like a release valve for something cosmic under pressure, like plasma blasting out of pulsar jets.
***
One of the more interesting theological innovations put forth by Joseph Smith was his insistence on material theism. He said God had a body made of real matter. He said heaven was a place you could touch—with a big enough telescope, you could see it; with a fast enough rocket, you could fly there yourself. He said there’s a star, called Kolob, that shines on Heaven, like Sol does earth. He said a sun shines down on God, too.
Joseph denied ex nihilo (‘something from nothing’) creation. He told the saints that the universe’s matter, both in heaven and on earth, is eternal, without beginning or end. Every act of God and every miracle healing and every word spoken in tongues is a physical process, too: particles of spirit, moving through hands and consecrated oil. Faith is a tangible thing, a gathering of these undetectable pieces.
***
My shelf only took a week or so to collapse. It was junior year of high school, I sat with my new friend Gray in the student lounge on these plump orange pleather chairs. He was my first friend at my new school in North Carolina, my first never-Mormon friend (we sometimes call them “neverMos”). We’d become friends through osmosis, the way you do in a small school: started as seatmates in AP Lit, built a rapport over Kendrick’s new album and its unexpected electronic influences. We started going to Cookout for lunch, we’d both get the burger tray with hush puppies and a corndog, plus a big Cheerwine. He’d keep the cup after lunch and tear its ridges over the course of pre-calculus class.
I tell Gray about my brother’s upcoming wedding in Salt Lake City. At the temple. I tell him it’s a sacred ceremony reserved for endowed adults, and I’m not quite sure what happens in there, yet. You can’t get endowed until you turn eighteen, and you have to be a member of the church in Good Standing.
“Wait, so if you get married in the temple, I can’t go in?” Gray asked.
I will always remember this as the moment, which is odd, because I don’t think this should be the moment. It’s a fact I’d always known, a truth I’d always understood. But it’s different when you’ve made a really good friend, and you’re a highschooler who thinks you’ll stay close with these people forever, and you imagine Gray not being part of the wedding party, you imagine him out in front of the temple, and you realize that this feels sadder than you thought, that this feels arbitrary. When I think about heaven, I think about it like a big party with everyone I love. A party where Gray isn’t stuck outside, leaned up against limestone-etched symbols on the Salt Lake Temple for hours, picking cuticles and fidgeting in thick-framed glasses. Heaven is a big hot ball of everything, like a dinner party in the middle of winter, with a sweaty brow from curry steam and warm bodies and fog obscuring the aspen trees outside.
I went home that day and snuck up to my bedroom. With the carefulness and caution of a pre-teen googling porn, hunched over my phone in my creaky twin bed, I searched YouTube for “Mormon temple ceremony” videos. I found one and hovered over the URL. I paused: this was the precipice. When I watched this video, I would immediately, canonically become dirty; I would be desecrating something sacred, ruining a moment for a future faithful version of myself, a moment he ought to experience first on his wedding day. I could never experience that with my spouse.
I clicked play on a video called “Hidden camera footage of Mormon temple ritual.” I spent twenty minutes watching it in silence, kept watching as the winter sun went down and my room turned dark.
I don’t want to describe the contents of the ceremonies, because I worry that describing these rituals would make it sound funny. A spectacle to ogle and jeer at, which is probably how most twenty-year old boys would react. The rituals involve silly costumes and rote performances, odd physical movements, adults playing pretend. But it’s not funny to me, and I didn’t want to laugh, because I was watching the end of my faith. Faith and shelf and spirit collapsing. As a kid, you imagine the temple contains something spectacular: a glowing orb of light, people levitating, holy fire pouring out of your grandpa’s cracked lips. But it was just another room. This couldn’t be the same temple David saw erupt in sacred flames.
I watched every temple video I could find.
Then I read, falling down the exact rabbit hole Hyrum had described. Falling is the best way to express it: uncovering this conspiracy that the world had kept from me felt like fission, crackling in my chest, like barreling down a waterslide, like jumping off a bridge and falling in a gurgling creek.
***
Earth’s inception was the result of slow, gentle organization through gravity. At first, everything was just little specks, burst out from the cores of ancient stars, dissipating in a vacuum. Gravity pulls the specks together, gathering begets more gathering, and gradually clumps begin to form. Atoms feel the pull of the thickening strands, they pile on their weight. The mass gets hotter, the crowding more intense, unifying disparate particles into a single, hot glob of magma. Slowly, it rounds its edges, as the increased mass leads to increased gravitational pull, growing and growing until a planet forms.
The scientific term is “accretion.” Grandpa would’ve called it divine organization. Creation, inheritance. Old begets new.
I am from David, as Earth is from the scattered dust.
***
The night I left the church, I stood in the doorway of my parents’ room at 7 p.m. on a Sunday night. I hovered for a while, just beyond the frame, barely in their line of sight. I listened to their ceiling fan wobble and timed my breaths to the buzz of cicadas outside. After an eternity, I crossed the threshold, and I told them I had something to say:
“I don’t want to be Mormon anymore.”
As the words came out of my mouth, I realized they were wrong. I meant to say that my faith had died. I was mourning that death, and I needed comfort.
Instead, because I said the first thing, we fought. I felt how all of us were trying to grasp onto anything. My father insisted I’d been smoking weed, that I was quitting church because I liked pot. My mother hypothesized that my friend Henry had been bullying me about the church, I was leaving because I was embarrassed. I was the second-youngest child of four, but the first sibling to leave the church. This was new for all of us.
I remember ugly-crying with them. I remember my mom’s face: gaunt, sullen, despondent, like I’d sucked the spirit right out of her. I remember how blindingly bright the room seemed, even as the sun began to set, as if I’d set free the spirit particles from my chest and they’d burst out into the room like lightning bugs. Generations of gathering, blown up by a sixteen-year-old kid, two years older than Joseph was when God told him to found his new religion.
After that night, my mom didn’t speak for three days. She laid out on the couch in the living room, covered up with a blanket she’d quilted herself, sitting Mormon shiva for the death of her son. I locked eyes with her every afternoon coming home from school. We said nothing.
***
Joseph Smith died at thirty-eight, pierced by bullets, executed by a mob who burst open his jail cell in Carthage, Illinois. He was shot while jumping out of the second story window. He slumped over the balcony, exclaiming, “Oh lord, my god,” and fell to the grass outside, dead before he hit the soft earth.
In a doctrinally controversial speech given a few weeks before this death, Joseph Smith radically altered the scope of his new theology with a declaration: “As man is, God once was. As God is, man may become.” God was once a man like us; if we follow his commandments, we can be exalted in this way, too. With this proclamation, he created a lineage of deity: God begets God.
***
David followed the saints westward after Joseph’s martyrdom. He pulled himself across the plains with three new wives, nine kids and a knapsack of apple seeds. He spent the rest of his life wandering settlements in the Deseret territory, teaching wide-eyed pioneers to grow fruit trees. Nobody knows where his body is buried exactly, but his kids say he’s beneath one of his apple trees, somewhere in one of his orchards, laying down gnarled roots.
***
Kolob is considered holy in Mormonism, as is the sun. Early temples were engraved with cosmological images: moons, stars, beaming suns chiseled into granite. In Mormon afterlife theology, the kingdoms of heaven (e.g., the ‘levels’ of the afterlife) are named for the cosmos: the celestial, terrestrial, and telestial kingdoms. The glory of the sun, the moon and the stars. In Mormonism, God is quite literally a celestial body.
Today, we know that stars are our creators. These massive engines take the scattered elements of space, light gases like hydrogen and helium. and slam them together to create heavier elements. The slam creates a release of energy, which keeps the stars burning. These elements condense into carbon and oxygen, then into neon and silicon, until they finally turn to iron, which is so dense that it can’t collapse even one bit further. Then, most of the time, they explode: blasting new, richer matter back into the void. This is called a supernova. Things disperse until gravity gathers them up again, to form new stars and planets and moons.
If Joseph Smith were alive today to hear this explanation, I imagine he’d still call this holy: the sun, our Creator. He’d smile, and say he was right all along.
***
I wear a pine green apron, holler at my friends rushing through the front door, chill radiating off the big coats they wore to my place for a dinner party. I stir a big pot of curry. I made a flan and I let everyone know. Tonight’s a celebration: I’ve gathered all my friends, my covert ex-Mormon buddies, now that we’ve all finally graduated from BYU. We can have a party without worrying about getting expelled. My friend Rosie brought a pretty red bottle of wine she got for five bucks, she liked it for the watercolor art on the label: a woman in a poofy dress, lying in grass, staring in awe at a big gas planet. I stop and hold it in my hands. I uncork it, we clink glasses and sip it.
We fill up on rice and curry, gulp more wine. I take the flan out of the fridge and flop it on a wooden tray with a mess of spoons. Together we commune, ransacking the chilled, eggy firmament. Afterwards, we’re all hot and stuffed, so a friend suggests we sit out in the freezing backyard. We do.
I look at the stars, and I slump down under a big oak tree. I feel the hard bark on my back. David and his gnarled roots below; heaven above. Ancestry, in each of these. The older I get, the more I see the cycle: gathering begets scattering begets gathering. God begets God, stars beget stars.
I’ve known these friends for just a little while, and it won’t last much longer. Ironically, I’m moving to Chicago, back to the same Midwest that kicked my grandpa out two centuries ago. Tonight, though, we’re all in the same backyard, with full bellies and slurried heads. It’s cold but my ears feel hot. Gathering begets heat, heat begets creation. In this way, I think of every drunken dinner party as a divine act, and I wonder what Joseph, or David, would say to that.
The further I get from the church, the more I feel it in my bones: how my body was not created as much as organized. Built by matter blowing up and accreting, forming eukaryotes, forming fish and apes and David and myself. Astronomy, biology, physics—all expressions of the same idea, in different words. An understanding of how we’re put together. Of how it’s all organized.
We don’t die as much as scatter, and this is a sort of immortality. David gathered with the saints and brought me here, to this backyard, before he died; now, he fertilizes the ground beneath a fruit tree in the Utah Valley, his faith leeching into bark and worms and apple meat. When I lost what I once called faith, it didn’t disappear. It’s still out there, somewhere, like the gas blown out of old dead stars. I imagine it in windowpanes, pouring light into the red line, or in the tips of Lake Michigan’s rolling waves, in the sound of my mom calling to ask how routers work, in the back of a sedan with my new Chicago friends, in the aroma of Japanese curry on fresh white rice.
I don’t know how God would feel about the life I’m organizing. I don’t think I’m his favorite son, but I hope he realizes I’m doing what he taught me. I want him to call it good. I want to call it good.
______
Grant Ellsworth is a writer from Utah, who moved to Chicago and then New York. He's been published in HAD, Maudlin House, and Fish Barrel Review, among others. You can find all his published stuff at www.gant.foo, and you can follow him on Twitter @gantisdant.
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