The Infinite Future

by Tim Wirkus

  I said, “If you want my temple recommend, you’re going to have to convene a disciplinary council.”

  He said, “I don’t think you want to do that, Sister Kimball.”

  I said, “I don’t think you want to do that, Bishop Ahlgren.”

  I can admit now that this was a tactical error on my part, but I was so sure—and I’m embarrassed to admit this—I was so sure that God wouldn’t let me be excommunicated. I’d thought and prayed so hard about the scholarship and activism I was participating in, and again and again I’d felt it in my heart and in my mind that I was doing what God wanted me to do with my time and my talents. I figured that in the formal setting of a disciplinary council, Craig would feel that too. He’d pray about my situation, and God would tell him that I was not an apostate.

  Needless to say, that’s not what happened.

  The council was an ugly experience. I don’t want to rehash all the nitty-gritty details of what was said—I still have panicky dreams about the meeting—but the end result was that Bishop Ahlgren and his two counselors decided I was, in fact, in a state of personal apostasy. (The phrase “flagrant apostasy” was thrown around quite a bit, actually.) My editorial in the LA Times was only the culmination of a years-long pattern of disrespect, disobedience, and open rebellion against God and his chosen servants. So that was that. I was no longer a member of the Church, and all saving ordinances that I’d received were no longer in effect, they said.

  • • •

  Harriet paused, the snow falling around us with renewed vigor. I could feel my wet hair freezing together. I lowered myself deeper into the warm water.

  • • •

  I’ll tell you (Harriet went on), one of the worst parts about being excommunicated is all the rhetoric of love and caring that gets wrapped around it in an attempt to obscure the inescapable brutality of the act. During the meeting itself, Craig kept saying, “I like to think of this as a council of love. We’re here to help you, Sister Kimball.”

  I’m usually not a violent person, but every time he said that I wanted to hit him with something. I was sitting there alone in a room with four men—the bishop, his two counselors, and the ward clerk off in the corner silently taking notes—who wanted to forcibly remove me from an institution I cared deeply about, who wanted to tell me what the state of my heart was and where I stood before God.

  There’s so much aggression there, so how do you respond when the person doing the excommunicating tries to pretend like he’s just done you a great kindness? It’s infuriating, but if you let that fury show, it becomes all too easy for Church leaders to portray you as hysterical, as another delusional feminist who’s taken leave of her reason and her spiritual sensitivity. On the other hand, if you say nothing, they’ve succeeded in silencing you. You can’t do anything, then, but respond reciprocally, professing love, compassion, and understanding for those who’ve wrongly excommunicated you.

  • • •

  Harriet gave a resigned shrug and leaned back against the edge of the hot tub.

  • • •

  The fallout from my excommunication was not pretty (she said). All of the confidence I’d felt going into the disciplinary council was replaced almost immediately by an edgy self-doubt, which was only aggravated when, right after my excommunication, I lost my job as chair of the Mormon studies program at DSU. Once word of my excommunication got out, the dean of the college pulled me aside and asked me not to come back after the Christmas break. If they needed to, they could find a way to fire me, but it would be much easier for everyone if I left of my own accord. DSU is a state school, so my excommunication should have had no bearing on my job, but Mormon studies programs get their funding primarily from wealthy Mormons, and since wealthy Mormons tend to be conservative on all fronts, my continued presence on the faculty would jeopardize the program’s continued funding. My dean didn’t state that in quite so many words—he couched the issue in terms of how my scholarship would be received now that I was outside the Church, etc., etc.—but funding was the real issue. Everyone was very sorry, he said.

  So was I. This meant that no other Mormon studies program would touch me—I was damaged goods—and at the time, interest from mainstream history departments in Mormon-specific areas was scanty at best. Based on the scholarship I’d produced, I was unemployable.

  And so I was in free fall—jobless, churchless, and soon to be houseless.

  As per Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, that third problem—my imminent houselessness—struck me as the most pressing. Decades earlier, my parents had built a cabin at the mouth of Danish Fork Canyon, where we’d vacationed often when I was a girl. Summers, in fact, we’d spend weeks at a time there, and plenty of weekends during the fall and winter. We’d used it less and less as we’d all grown up, though, and since Mom and Dad had died, my siblings and I only made it down there a few times a year. It was sitting empty, then, when I lost my job, and so, capitalizing on the resources still available to me, I sold my house in Salt Lake and, loading as many of my belongings as I could fit into my four-year-old Celica, I decamped to the family cabin, where I could live rent free until I figured out my next move.

  Those first weeks at the cabin nearly destroyed me. Our cabin is a small one, relatively speaking, well under a thousand square feet—certainly not one of these palatial second homes that people build in the woods these days and then bestow with a rustic moniker that tries to downplay the cabin’s opulence. No, our cabin is a simple one-story, two-bedroom affair with a small kitchen, a single bathroom, a cozy living room, and a wide back porch. There’s an adjacent meadow that, in the summertime, is perfect for pitching a tent or dragging down an Adirondack chair from the porch and just sitting, listening to the rustle of the trees, and watching for birds, squirrels, and the occasional deer. My point is, in the summers, the meadow makes the cabin feel much bigger than it is, or at least less confining, as it more than doubles the amount of usable, habitable space available.

  When I first arrived, though, it was the dead of winter, and the combination of freezing outdoor temperatures and aggressive internal despair kept me under effective house arrest. I moved my suitcases and boxes from the car to the cabin’s second bedroom, brought in the groceries I’d picked up from town, started a fire in the living room’s iron woodstove, and then I pretty much fell apart. Slumping down on the sun-faded living room couch, I started mentally replaying every decision I’d made that had brought me to this sorry state.

  In a distant part of my mind, I knew that I should be doing something other than sitting around and thinking, but every other possible course of action, even something as simple as making myself a sandwich, seemed too frightening, too fraught with peril to attempt. So instead I remained in the cabin’s compact living room, huddled on the threadbare couch, where I stared through the glass door of the corner woodstove, trying to ignore the jangling panic that ran just below the surface of my thoughts as the flames inside the stove steadily consumed the wood that I fed them.

  I was convinced that I’d made a terrible mistake, scotching my chances for personal salvation forever. I couldn’t be a hundred percent certain that Craig had been wrong to excommunicate me, because I’m not sure we can ever be a hundred percent certain about anything, so I tormented myself with the possibility that I’d been eternally cut off from the presence of God.

  I’d intended to use my time at the cabin to compose an article I’d been researching for several months—a piece on women and the priesthood in the Nauvoo-era Church—but writing was out of the question. Not only could I not focus on any one thing for more than two minutes at a time, but my computer had also broken somehow during the trek from Salt Lake. When I switched it on I was greeted with an unintelligible garble of symbols followed by a flashing black-and-white screen. It was beyond my meager abilities to fix the problem, even under the best of circumstances. Given that making a sandwich was currently b
eyond me, taking my computer to be repaired or shopping for a new one was entirely out of the question.

  During this time, to their great credit, many friends and associates called and offered to take me to lunch or on a vacation or to just come sit with me, any one of which would have been a great help, but I felt so internally out of control, so contaminated somehow, that I turned them all down, telling them I needed some time alone to process everything. Obviously, that was the last thing I needed—I was on such dangerous ground, and looking back now, if I’d gotten any worse, I’m not sure what could have happened.

  Things didn’t get worse, though.

  One night, I woke up in a panic, as I often did, but instead of pacing the living room to calm myself, I decided to go out to the deck. Wrapped in all my blankets, I stepped out into the bracing midwinter night. The sky was clear, the air so cold I could feel my nostrils freezing together. I walked a few circuits around the deck to keep warm. The movement helped. I felt warmer and happier—or more precisely, less terrible.

  Even today, there’s a pretty good view of the stars from that deck, but back then Danesville was so small and isolated and dark at night that you could see absolutely everything from the deck, or that’s what it felt like. Staring up at the bright jumble of stars above me, I tried to pick out a constellation or two. There was the Big Dipper, obviously, but aside from that one, I just knew names—Virgo, Sagittarius, the horoscope constellations, basically. I did seem to remember something about following the handle—or was it the cup?—of the Big Dipper to find the North Star, and so I spent a good ten minutes trying to find it, and even narrowed the search down to a few extra-bright candidates, but I couldn’t be sure about any of them.

  What did occur to me, though, was that I’d just spent ten minutes focused on a specific task and hadn’t thought once during that time about my bleak situation. As I exulted in this minor triumph, a further thought occurred to me: I think I could write something tonight—a sentence, maybe.

  A few days earlier when I’d gone to the cabin’s storage closet for an extra blanket, I’d noticed on an upper shelf, partially concealed behind a stack of board games, my dad’s old portable typewriter. He’d brought it up to the cabin one summer with the intention of writing his life history, but that plan had been interrupted when Mom had had a heart attack. With her failing health, and then his own, he’d never gotten around to the life history, and the typewriter had languished in the closet of the cabin.

  That night, then, after coming inside from the porch, I pulled the typewriter from the closet and set it up on the kitchen table. What had seemed so feasible out on the porch, though, proved another matter in practice. I’m normally a fast writer, able to produce a competent draft of a twenty-page article in less than a week. That night, though, the process was agonizing. I just needed one sentence—one subject, one predicate—but the ghost of my excommunication flittered out from behind every word I tried to commit to paper. I imagined Craig D. Ahlgren’s voice telling me that by writing this article I was distancing myself even further from God and the principles of righteousness. What if he was right? And even if he wasn’t, the arguments I was making about women and the priesthood in the Nauvoo Church weren’t going to bring me any closer to rebaptism if the article was published.

  It took all of my effort to stay seated at the table. Finally, though, just before dawn, my mind wore itself out and muscle memory kicked in to compose a drab, boilerplate introductory sentence that would do the job just fine. I’d done it. And so I stumbled off to bed and slept.

  The next night I repeated the process. After waking in a sweaty panic, I stepped outside to say a brief hello to the Big Dipper, and then took up my post at the table and wrote another sentence. This time, it took me two and a half hours instead of four, and I only cried once. I did the same the next night, and the next night, and the next, and by the sixth night I had written a long introductory paragraph for the article.

  Each writing session grew less and less harrowing. Bolstered by this minor progress, I gained more and more confidence until, after a month, I was writing a full paragraph every night. Bit by bit, that confidence carried over into the daylight hours, and I was finally able to restore some semblance of order to my life. I bathed every morning. I fixed meals for myself. I found a set of snowshoes and went for long, restorative walks in the woods every afternoon. Before long, I was even sleeping through the night, and my work on the article became a regular daytime habit rather than a 3:00 a.m. coping mechanism.

  And so I finished my article. I finished it, and I revised it, and I drove it into town and photocopied it at the grocery store. Then I sent a copy off to the editor of Dialogue, and a few months later it was published.

  From there my life started to come back together. I’d been dabbling in translation work for years before my excommunication, and now I pursued it more aggressively. I let my contacts in publishing know that I was available to take on a heavier load of projects, and while it would be an exaggeration to say the work poured in from there, I translated quickly and competently enough that before my savings ran out completely, I was earning enough to keep afloat. It helped that I didn’t—and still don’t—pay rent. In fact, my career wouldn’t be possible if I did. I’m sure my siblings aren’t thrilled that I’ve squatted at the family cabin for all this time, but none of them has explicitly asked me to leave, so I continue to squat.

  My approach to religion in the ensuing years has been similar. In a development as surprising to me as to anyone else, a few months after I moved to the cabin, I decided I wanted to go to church. I hadn’t been since my excommunication, and although part of me felt like I might burst into flames if I stepped into a wardhouse, I sorely missed the weekly opportunity to worship with the saints. So, one Sunday morning I jumped in the deep end and showed up for sacrament meeting at the nearest ward in Danesville.

  I was nervous for the whole drive over there, pulling my car over and nearly turning around four or five times. I worried how people might treat me when they found out who I was. More frightening still, I wondered if, on occupying holy ground, I would feel more acutely alienated from God than ever before.

  As soon as I walked into the chapel, though, I knew I would be fine. There were the rumpled young men setting up the bread and the water for the sacrament. There were the harried young parents, already seated on the long, padded benches, frantically shushing their noisy children. There was the organist, playing upbeat prelude music whose bouncy pep was at odds with the general grogginess of the early (for a weekend) hour. I felt completely at home. No one in that congregation knew who I was, and for seventy minutes I could be just another worshipper.

  After the meeting was over, the ward’s bishop, excited to see an unfamiliar face, tracked me down and introduced himself.

  “Marty Cox,” he said, pumping my hand, his round young face aglow with enthusiasm.

  I told Bishop Cox who I was and said that I’d been recently excommunicated. Unbothered by this information, he told me he was glad to see me here and he hoped I’d make myself at home in the ward—they’d love to have me.

  True to his word, he and the other members of the ward were nothing—or almost nothing—but kind and supportive. For instance, in Sunday school that first day, a woman about my age sat down next to me and asked how long I’d lived in the area, how long I planned to stay—the typical getting-to-know-you questions.

  “You should know,” I said to her before she could ask me anything else, “that I’ve recently been excommunicated.”

  While I recognized that this was an awkward conversational salvo, I felt a compulsive need at the time to inform people of my official standing with the Church so that nobody felt tricked into associating with a known apostate. My new acquaintance—her name was Laura—took the revelation in stride, though.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, and then invited me over for dinner.
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  During the fifteen years since then, it’s been more of the same from the people in my ward. They’ve brought over soups and casseroles when I’ve been sick or overworked; invited me to birthday parties, barbecues, and bridal showers; attended presentations I’ve given through the local historical society; read books I’ve translated and articles I’ve written—really, they’ve been so generous, so lovely over the years. Only occasionally have a few opprobrious ward members gone out of their way to remind me of my fallen state, of my need to renounce my apostate ways. But ultimately, those types are in the minority.

  It’s funny—by this point, with nearly twenty years of turnover, a lot of the congregation doesn’t even know I’ve been excommunicated, although I’ve certainly not forgotten, because the inescapable fact remains that I am technically not a member of the Mormon Church, no matter how many Sunday meetings I attend. Although that’s also something that, to their credit, several of the successive bishops in my Danesville ward have tried to remedy. Each time we discuss rebaptism, though, the sticking point is that the reinstatement of my membership would require a clear renunciation on my part of the offense that got me excommunicated. Since I still don’t believe I ever committed an offense worthy of excommunication in the first place, the situation remains at a stalemate.

  In theory, at least, it is possible that the Church could acknowledge that I was wrongly disciplined, and then I’d be back in, free and clear, but my church isn’t one that makes apologies, so I’m not holding my breath. In any event, by this point in my life I don’t believe it’s up to other people to determine my standing with God. That’s not a power I grant to the Church anymore, so if they decide not to acknowledge their mistake . . .

  • • •

  The steam curling up from the surface of the water wrapped itself around Harriet before a cold breeze dispersed it into the night. She half shrugged, half shivered.