1. Boxes

Early in the 1820s, a boy from New York was telling ghost stories: stories about a ghost guarding a treasure in a box of stone in a nearby hill. 
 
The boy was simple but also brilliant in his own way. He was charismatic and cheerful. He was tall and relatively handsome, but had a slight limp, which made him more approachable. He knew the fervor with which his neighbors lusted for aboriginal silver from the New England burial mounds and he knew just how to excite or dampen that fervor, as needed. He also had a stone, by which he claimed to scry lost things, the past, and even the future.


As the boy told the story over the years, the story became more elaborate and more specific: the ghost was tall, bearded man and dressed in a breast plate. A sword hung by his side. His throat was slit like a freemason and he was still, even now, hundreds of years later, covered in blood. The treasure he guarded was gold. And not just any gold—an ancient record. Golden plates. The ancient writing was untranslatable by any in the world and the gold alone was worth a fortune! The ghost had beckoned the boy to fetch them, invited him to translate the record, and foretold the great value of the forthcoming book to the world. 


When the boy tried to retrieve them, though, the Ghost was there to challenge the boy’s worthiness, sometimes sending him flying with a supernatural punch. Twice the boy came down the hill emptyhanded. But the boy was determined and persistent and he promised his listeners: he would get those plates! And they would be put on display for all to see, for a price, of course. 


The ghost told to come with his brother. But his brother died. He was told to come with a certain friend, but the friend hinted that he didn’t believe the boy’s story. The ghost told the boy someone else would go with him eventually. The boy would find out later. 


In 1826, the boy did find someone. At this point he had grown up. Now 21, he was a witty conversationalist, an imaginative storyteller, fluent in all the popular New England spiritualities, and a paid seer for hobby treasure diggers. After one such dig, he stole away a dark-eye daughter of a well-to-do huntsman from the mountains of Pennsylvania. She was willing enough to be seduced. Safely out of reach from her relatives, he begged her to marry him in a private country parish. 


She did and in doing so gained a position both as his wife and as his confederate for fetching the plates. 


She went with her new husband to the hill. Her husband did not all her to accompany him to see the stone box or the ghost. She was told to wait in the wagon. So, she waited and prayed for him as the dark hours of the New England autumn stretched on. Finally, she witnessed him running breathlessly down the hill…still emptyhanded. 


He had left the plates in the hollow of a tree, he said, for fear of thugs or thieves. He would return later and retrieve them. They went home.


Return he did. Later. On foot.  He returned in the evening with a the item wrapped in cloth. He passed it through the window to his mother, still breathing heavily from running from more thugs and thieves who had wanted the gold, he said. It was also light enough that he had been able to run miles through the woods with it tucked beneath his arm while punching away the ruffians. His family must keep it secret, keep it safe. 


The bundle was about the same size and shape as the tin-plates used by the local metalworkers and about the same weight, although accounts of the weight vary. 


It was also kept hidden. The Plates could not be seen, said the youth, on pain of death and destruction from God. So his quavering family guarded the bundle, fluttering beneath the importance of being placed as guardians of such a precious deposit. The town talked while the youth had a custom box made. The cloth bundle was then carefully transferred to this new box home. And his obedient family never, ever looked inside. 


The youth guarded the parcel himself with visionary vigilance. His scrying warned him, he said, when thieves were likely to come out and search for them. Once, when a party of scrying neighbors set out to find the plates, they discovered the specialized box and opened it only to discover a quantity of sand. 


The youth sniffed. Of course, he had know they would be coming. He had removed the plates and filled the box with sand simply to throw them off. 


He promised viewings to his growing entourage of curious followers: his wife, his uncle-in-law, hi father-in-law, his benefactor scribe. They never did see inside the box. And they never lifted the cloth.


After a few years, the youth published his book: “the Book of Mormon” by Joseph Smith. 


It was…an utter flop.


The plates never did go on display and Joseph’s scribe and sole investor was now destitute. 


In an attempt to recoup, Joseph used his stone to scry a solution: a buyer for the copyright to the book would be found in Canada, he said, if his scribe would be faithful and go there. 


But no buyer was ever found. 


With blinding tenacity though, Joseph pivoted from author to religion-starter. He used the book as the bedrock of evidence to his scrying (or rather, his “revelatory” power). In testament to his personal magnetism, 30 people signed on to this venture. And in 1830, they plunged ecstatically into baptism and a quest to build an American Zion. It was a venture that would take their loyalty, their faith, their money, and eventually much, much more. 


That was all a long time ago now. 
Almost 200 years. 
Who cares? 
A lot of people don’t, I guess. 
But I do.
I grew up with that book: grew up believing it, grew up believing Joseph, and grew up believing that everything Joseph had said would bring me to God. 


…


Now, it is 2026. 
There is a box in my room too. 
It sits just by my desk, covered in a red cloth, so that most of the time I can pretend it isn’t there. 


Sometimes I open it. 


Sometimes, it even sits open for a few days.


And then…I close it, as if a guardian spirit is here with me too, challenging my courage, my worthiness. 


My guardian spirit has never punched me, not physically anyway. Still, I wish someone would come with me. I could use the company.


The contents of that box are records too and they are my own.
They are not made of gold.
There is no sword. No breastplate. 
No midnight scampering with ruffians.
No fake floorboards.


No one cares that they are here.  


Except me.


I care because…
I wrote them. 
I saved them.
Now, I want to translate them. 


But I am also afraid. 
I have a lot of questions.


What happened to me? 
Am I just stupid? 
Was it all a lie? 
How did I get here? 
Where did I come from?
Who am I really?
Why did this happen?
Why do I still hear voices?   


I want the answer to those questions because I think they will give me clues about the answers these questions:


Where do I go from here?
What do I want, really? 
Who do I want to be? 
And really, what is going on with these voices? 


These answers—that solidity of being that comes along with knowing those answers—is worth its weight in gold. At least, to me.
But what if I find emptiness? 
What if there is nothing down there? 
What if I open the box and discover that I was just a dumb docile sheep of a follower and it’s just as simple as that?


How can I live with that? 
Sometimes, I think it might be better not to know and just move forward. 


But the ghost of who I was is always the way. I can’t discover who I am now without knowing who I was and I can’t know who I was without facing these  reminders of how deeply, how earnestly, how completely I believed the boy Joseph, his books, and his claims to greatness. 


It’s embarrassing now. 
But it is true. 


I was a true believer in all of that. 


And now? 
I don’t really know. 
Who am I? 
What am I? 


When I lived a life besotted by Joseph, I always knew the answer to those questions—I knew because I was told. I “knew” because I chased after the feeling of knowing with a dark and desperate hunger. I “knew” because I built the box for my faith with my own hands.
I “knew” because I couldn’t imagine what it meant if it were not true.


But when I stopped hustling to make things true, when I stopped assuming that the precious cargo from Joseph’s boxes was mine to guard, I realized that the seemingly solid truths…were not what I had believed they were.


In other words: 


When, I lifted the lid on my faith. 


I found it was full of sand. 


I realized something else though—
that if the knowing, the voices, and the value of my faith hadn’t come from Joseph’s box of Joseph’s ghost or Joseph’s book, then…
They couldn’t be taken away by Joseph’s deceptions either.


In other words:  
I realized that the deep well of my spiritual life had not come from ancient New York. It came…
…from me. 


This podcast is about seeking. 
I hope it can also be about finding. 
It’s about translating records: the records of who I was into answers for who I want to be.
It’s about stories and storytelling.
It’s about believing and letting go and reinventing who we are 
It’s about boxing and unboxing the cosmos. 
It’s about spirituality and about visions and about warm fuzzies and cold facts.  
It’s about all the funny, sexy, silly, dumb, mean, inspired things we humans do to make meaning. 
It’s about really terrible prejudices, really weird ideas, and the really beautiful people that made me.


Most of all, it’s about finding each other so that we can stop losing ourselves. 


In that way, it’s about you too. 
You believe things.
Big things. Weird things. Terrible things. Beautiful things.   
I bet, some of those things would like to come out of their boxes 
…and be seen. 


I hope maybe you’ll come with me. 
I hope we both discover some new things. 
I hope that whatever you discover sets you free. 


For my part, whatever happens, whatever I find, I just hope…I can stop living in boxes.