2. Cult-ural Experiences

We were on a bus speeding down a highway, headed for the countryside in Sweden. 


I sat in one row, my younger brother sat behind me.


We were both white Americans.


In the bus, there were approximately another hundred lily-pale Swedish teens. 


And one Tongan. 


We glided along the highway in the tour bus, leaning over seats and listening to the high-paced Swedish lilting like music around us.  We here we are on our way to a Church-themed Swedish retreat for teenagers called Youth Conference. 


The drive would take just over 3 hours, so we settled in. I pulled out a sketchbook. 


My brother and I don’t speak Swedish. We were here because our father was teaching as a guest at a Swedish University, so our parents had signed us up for this Conference hoping we could have a “cultural experience.” 


The Tongan sat with us. His name is Enele, but he told us to call him by his nickname Enos, the name of a Book of Mormon prophet. He spoke Swedish, English, Tongan, and a little bit of Hawaiian.


But he talked to us most about the Gospel. 


“How many times have you read the Book of Mormon?” He asked, draping one arm over the empty seat beside me and looking back at my brother.. 


“As a family?” my brother said, “I don’t know, maybe three times?” 


“No, you,” he clarifies, “How many times have you read it?” 


My brother shook his head, “Not all the way through,” he said, “it’s really long.” 


Enos nodded and chuckled, “It is long!” He said, genially. His smile was serene and constant. His large frame filled the seat and his large laugh filled his body. He was sitting next to my brother behind me but he was leaning on the chair next to me and I could feel his laugh shaking through both seats. 


He wasn’t slender or blonde like the Swedes around us and he wasn’t the type of person who would stand out as a model, but there was something magnetic about him. His broad-lipped smile felt warm, soft, genuine. His brown eyes sparkled like they were constantly joking. His cheeks puffed out into smooth copper hills of mirth beneath his eyes. I couldn’t stop staring at him.


In the middle of that pale-skinned, hormone-charged bus, he shone like the sun with warmth and ease. I felt awed by this and also awkward. At 15, I was “underage” to be dating by Church standards which I interpreted to mean that I also shouldn’t be thinking about a boy’s lips or magnetism either.


Besides, I was trying to stay grumpy at my parents for sending me away on this adventure. So, I look fixedly at my sketchbook instead. 


Enos jostled my seat to get my attention and leaned over, “what about you?” He asked, “how many times you read it?” 


I shook my head, “I haven’t,” I admitted. 


“You never read?” Enos asked me again, still smiling.  He cocked an eyebrow at my brother and I, “Neither of you read the whole thing yet?” 


We shook our heads again. 


“I read it six times,” Enos said, holding up fingers to show us, “five times in English, once in Tongan.” 


I glanced back at my brother with raised eyebrows. Our family culture was all-in on church stuff, but this level of piety ran circles around us. 


“Why?” My brother blurted, “It’s so…boring.” 


Enos laughed, “You believe it don’t you? You know it’s true?” He sobered back into his catlike smile. “And it’s the history of my people,” he said, “I need to know who I am so I read the Book of Mormon and it tells me. I don’t live with my people now, but I carry them with me. And I carry this with me.” 


He reached into his bag and pulled out a worn book of black-leather and faded old leaf pages


“I take it everywhere I go,” he said.   


“Oh.” 


My brother and I nodded. I am impressed. Impressed by his fortitude in reading through the entire thing and impressed that he had done it in two languages. I was also most caught by Enos’s description of “my people.” I had spent my entire life wondering what the next move would be. We always seemed to be moving and flying to different places. So, I had never really had a people, never really had a place. I was suddenly filled with a longing. Could the Book of Mormon give me that gift too?


“So,” Enos continued, looking seriously from me to my brother again, “I challenge you and you to read through the whole Book of Mormon.” 


He laughed.


We laughed.


 “Okay.” 


“But I’m serious!” He threatened, “I’ll find out somehow—don’t know how, but I find out if you don’t follow through. You read it all the way through. Cover to cover. And you do what it says. You pray about it, okay? Find out for yourselves.” 


We sobered. 


“Okay,” I nodded, “I’ll do it.” My brother agreed.


Enos clapped, “Yess-ah! That’s the Spirit—the Spirit of God all the way. Then, you will know it’s true like I know it’s true.”


I smiled. He was right, I thought. I did need to get my own testimony like that. “Okay.”


I dropped my gaze back to my sketchbook. Enos followed. “Whatcha drawing?” He tilted his head to get a better look, “Ohhhhh,” he said smiling broadly again, “Some lips, huh? Muah muah muah!” 


Enos laughed. My brother laughed. I flipped a page and pulsed with embarrassment.


I hadn’t really thought about what I was drawing. But I felt caught. I had indeed been drawing lips all over my sketchbook: large, puffy, smiling lips. 


“It’s all right, no shame!” Said Enos, grabbing my shoulder with a playful shake. Even at 14, his hand was solid and heavy. I had never seen a hand like that.  “we all friends here,” he said.   


That night, I got ready for bed in a dormitory stuffed with slender Swedish girls. They spoke to each other and occasionally threw a glance or a question towards me, the American. I kept to myself, feeling adrift and not just because of the language barrier. 


My people. 


Who were “my people?” 


I didn’t have much language for understanding race, settler colonialism, or even for Mormon history. I knew vaguely that my ancestors came from England and Scandinavia and that they all looked like me. I knew lots of my ancestors had been Mormon since the 1800s. My parents were Mormon, my siblings were Mormon. Our family friends were all Mormon.


So, Mormons were my people. 


The Book of Mormon was not about my English mormon ancestors though, it was supposed to be about Ancient Mormons—Native American Mormons. Also, Mezzo American Mormons? And South American? And Polynesians? I hadn’t really thought about that before—how it was supposed to be actual history. 


To my teenaged Mormon mind, those distinctions and nationalities were abstract and faraway—just barely visible. More practically, my world consisted of three types of people: Pre-Mormons, active Mormons, lazy Mormons (inactives), and Anti-Mormons.


So, if Mormons were my people and the Book of Mormon was a history of Ancient Mormons, could the Book of Mormon be a history of my people as well? 


I didn’t know like Enos seemed to know, but I wanted to find out. While the Swedish painted nails and groomed each other, I borrowed a Book of Mormon from a nearby shelf and opened it to the title page. 


Okay, I thought, Cover to cover.


Youth Conference lasted only a few days. Our trip to Sweden, only a few weeks. 


It took me months to slog through the Book of Mormon for the first time. 


By the time I finished, I was back in the states, back in a room of my own, back with my own bedding and my own lamp and my set of scriptures. They were not as well worn as Enos’s, but more worn than they had been when I left them at home to go to Sweden.


I turned the last page and closed the book. Then, I fulfilled the commitment I made to Enos and knelt down. I prayed to know if it was true. I asked if I could trust this book to bring me to my people. I asked if it could give me a certainty about who I was too.


When I stopped praying, the room was dark and quiet. 


Not what I expected. 


I tried again, making my prayer shorter this time and trying to sculpt my words to sound like King James English, because according to my leaders that’s the kind of English God liked best. 


“Heavenly Father, wilt thou please show unto me the truthfulness of these things?” 


The room stayed dark and quiet. 


Feeling worried that I had done something wrong to mess up the experience, I flicked my light back on and re-read the passage at the end of the book: a passage known as Moroni’s promise, named after the last character of the story:


“I exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father in the name of Christ if these things are not true and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost.”


I knelt down again, attempting to clear my mind of distractions and expectations about what kind of truth manifestation god would be sending. I didn’t need a pillar of light or a choir or angels or a dove or anything—just something noticeable—something that I could know was not me talking to myself. I fumbled through the prayer for a third time,

“Heavenly Father, thou knowest that I have faith in Christ, please in the name of Christ, tell me if these things are not true.”


I waited. 


And waited. 


And waited. 


Nothing.


I turned off my lamp again and climbed into bed feeling discouraged. Why hadn’t it worked? It had worked for Enos. Although, now that I thought about it, he hadn’t exactly told us how he had known it was true…just that he knew. 


I cast about my mind for answers. I thought about the stories in the Book of Mormon. Prophets that God would free by causing an earthquake that killed the guards but not the prophets, Prophets who could live through fire, Apostles who were made immortal by Jesus, compasses that worked only if the users were faithful…


What if it’s not true? 


The thought stopped me cold and I was instantly afraid. Was the devil trying to tempt me? Was I under attack? Was Satan trying to stop me from finding the truth? From being with my people? What had I done wrong to be unworthy of an answer and to expose myself to this? Was this some kind of test? Maybe if I passed, I would get the manifestation of truthfulness that I wanted? 


I gathered my will power. No, it’s probably just that I have weak understanding, I reasoned. I probably haven’t read the scriptures enough. Starting tomorrow, I committed to myself, I’m going to read the Book of Mormon every day until I do have a testimony of it. 


I lay in the dark and the quiet a long time after that. 


Waiting.