Posted by:
reasonabledoubt
(
)
Date: February 02, 2012 05:00PM
I've shared a lot of these stories individually with people before, most notably my TBM wife, but I've never written them down before. Having joined the message board here a couple of weeks ago I decided to give it a go, spending a couple hours this morning to do it. In retrospect my mission experience sounds like a farce -- but it was all very real. I guess many of you would attest to the farcical nature of your religious dealings when still involved in the LDS church.
I was called to serve in the Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic mission in the summer of '89. After a few months of being out in the field it became obvious that there was a huge amount of exaggeration on the number of discussions being taught each week. Mention Mormonism to the cabbie while on the back of a Cub motorcycle whisking you across town? 1st Discussion! Hey you, have you seen the book before? while thumbing a copy of the BoM in your hands. Another discussion! etc., etc..
And this doesn't even touch upon the very likely (saw some evidence of this) falsification of baptismal records by a completely sociopathic Elder who through his good acts of lying rose through the ranks to be our Zone Leader and then AP before some indiscretions finally brought him down. This is the same Elder who admitted to us all one night that he'd never experienced a "noctural emission." Gee, I wonder why? lol This missionary, when he was our zone leader, preached "Work hard, play hard!" I kid you not. Apparently some of this "play hard" involved he and some other missionaries playing topless volleyball at a beach resort further down the coast. I was not there, but it was mentioned, and I'm not sure why a member or fellow missionary (can't remember who it was) would fabricate a damaging story of this nature.
My companion and I started talking about the constant pressure to report good numbers and get baptisms because we were one of the top five baptizing missions in the world, and how we knew that Elders weren't being honest, and that we had in fact bumped our numbers up a little bit to keep apace, but probably not to the level of others. We mutually decided that in order to make sure we were teaching the gospel for the right reasons that we would no longer report our numbers at the end of the week, and explain why when we were inevitably asked why.
At the end of the week there we were at the Zone Leaders house, operation "Righteous Motivations" fully underway -- or so I thought. The Zone Leaders had (accidentally?) left open the binder where reports are logged and I saw plain as day that my companion had gone behind my back and reported our number of discussions, and that he had reported more discussions than we had actually taught. On top of that he told the Zone Leaders that it was my idea to not report numbers. I had told the Zone Leaders of our decision to not report numbers earlier in the day and they had just kind of shrugged their shoulders and said something to the effect of "Good luck kicking against the pricks." No arguments from me if they thought my mission president was a prick.
The next morning my faithful companion informed me that he had spoken with the MP and that he had been instructed to tell me that if I didn't change my attitude that my companion was to pack my bags for me. True story. At no time did the MP want to talk to me personally about my "attitude problem." My companion had also told the MP (in a phone call the prior day, it would have had to have been, from the ZL's house), that I slept in many mornings and didn't study the full amount of time required of us. This was funny, as my companion arose each morning at the same time that I did, and studied the same amount of time that I did, and never made an effort to change either activity, in spite of being the senior companion.
It was a betrayal on all fronts like I'd never before and since experienced, and left me with a physical pit in my stomach for days. We had a Zone Conference coming up that weekend, and I eventually decided to tell the MP exactly what was going on and why I felt and acted the way I did, and maybe I would just go home. We were all supposed to have individual interviews with him. Well, as it transpired, my MP was a very good speaker and during the course of his speech to the zone I felt humbled (remember, I wasn't doubting the church through all of this), and decided that I'd be better off just playing the missionary game as they wanted it to be played. During the interview he didn't ask me about what had just happened the previous week, just if I'd been having any problems with masturbation.
From then on out I just played the game, fudging numbers upwards and filling out the weekly time line reports of how we spent each hour of our lives (on which I literally logged the times that I went to the bathroom, as a joke, which they never brought up with me, lol). Okay, I did eventually quit filling out the time line reports, but never caught flack for that.
With various companions I went swimming in fresh water underground caverns (the day after baptizing someone there), swimming in the ocean, had televisions right in our bedrooms, as well as any other number of fun activities I could recount (p day trips to the casinos for marathon sessions of craps and blackjack was always fun). Listening to whatever music that I wanted to, etc. I mean, I got it, all of those rules were there just to stop us from eventually fornicating, right? I, at least wasn't messing around with girls, so what was the harm in adapting the rules so that I could preserve my sanity, right? (I can't speak for all missionaries, though, there was one Elder in our district who had a seriously delusional companion (I know this because we attended the same high school, he being a couple of years my junior, and while on a split with him he told me all of these outlandishly ridiculous stories about how the cutest girl in the school (a girl in my home ward) secretly had a crush on him (he was not good looking or popular, and as I'm showing, delusional) -- he literally had these entire narratives in his head that he was telling me about how he was foiling the actual boyfriend of this girl, playing pranks on him etc. and of the secret love they shared. ) -- this Elder would leave this companion with members, or whoever, or nobody? while he would spend time with girls. Such was the bizarre environment in our district at this time that this Elder told us about how he'd spent a day with a girl, ending with him in a movie theatre with her, making out, and that he felt so good that he went home and prayed, thanking the Lord for letting him have such a wonderful day. I am not making this up. Yes, he was one of our regular craps table partners, lol),
The most epic of these missionary excursions occurred during New Years when I had about six months left to endure (remember at the beginning of your mission when all you could see was a black void spreading out in front of you for two years?). I was a senior companion in a remote village that had one other companionship, one of whom was designated as the district leader. It came to pass that we both had medical issues that required us to go to the capital city, Santo Domingo, so we left our junior companions together and took the bus to town. My medical condition was an intense swelling and pain in my shoulder which was brought about by a shot I received for my original problem, an elbow I'd tweaked while learning to throw a curveball while practicing one day with a farm league baseball team in our remote town. I actually got to play in a game against another team. My arm was already trashed at that point because of the pitching lesson, but I played right field and had a double, single (as I like to call it, after my ground ball hit the lip at the edge of the infield and bounced up into the air away from where the shortstop was anticipating it to go) and a walk. I never played high school baseball so that was pretty fun. Anyway, lol. After arriving in Santo Domingo, we found out from someone (I don't remember who, either a zone leader or an AP) that some missionaries were renting a room at a 4 star hotel in Santo Domingo for New Year's eve. By claiming we'd missed the last bus out of town that day we were able to attend the New Year's bash. I don't remember the exact number of days involved with our trip to the capitol, but I believe it was at least 4, and ended when our companions called HQ to find out where we were, lol. There were about a dozen of us crashing in the one hotel room we'd rented -- 3 or 4 sets of zone leaders from all of the capitol city zones, the APs, and us. In the room we watched movies and college bowl games, being New Years. Downstairs we shot craps and played blackjack (not the first or last time many of us did this, as I mentioned before), while wearing New Year's hats on our heads, blowing party whistles, and acting in a celebratory manner with the other guests at the tables, though we did politely decline the flutes of champagne being passed around.
Needless to say, by the time we returned to our remote village my fervor for spreading the gospel was at an all time low. I attribute some of that to the medications I was on for the pain and swelling I was experiencing. I'd been in the same village for 4 months with a new companion I'd started "training" the month before (we did lead the zone in baptisms that month-- unfortunately? lol I think they thought are success meant we should stay there indefinitely) Transfers occurred later that week and I was certain that I was going to be transferred -- I can't remember the logistical logic now, but I knew that if one of us wasn't transferred that month that I was going to be stuck in the same village for another 2 months. Neither one of us was transferred. I was pretty disappointed at the prospect of trawling the same streets I'd become overly familiar with for an additional two months, so for the next week we wandered the streets and I'd sit down in any pick up game of dominos that I could find. By that time I was an excellent domino player (if you've never played 2 on 2 team dominos, you may not realize that it is a game of strategy and skill), while my mostly mute companion (boy, was he not much of a talker -- as a matter of fact he usually walked several paces behind me saying nothing whenever we were out and about) stood there watching us. I actually talked my parents into giving me some additional money (if only betting NBA games with the local bookie had gone better) so that I could get a custom made domino table made for my birthday, complete with slots for holding your dominos and holes cut in for drink cups (I did forbid our neighborhood friends from putting their cups of beer or alcohol in the cup holders though -- for appearance purposes I made them set them on the ground while we played).
When it came time to turn in our weekly numbers, I truthfully reported zeros on all counts, with an additional note that I didn't really feel like doing any more missionary work until I got a transfer. Well, that brought the zone leaders up to our village, of course. I told them the same thing in person, and they were just like "okay, whatever!" and talked about how they liked driving up to our village anyway because they enjoyed driving fast on hilly, curvy, mostly unoccupied roads. That is literally the last thing out of their mouths before they leave us, bragging of the kilometers per hour they reached on the way up. Be careful, I said, the roads will be slick! Well, it had been raining, and during the course of their need for speed they rolled their mission car off of a wet road, causing it a significant amount of damage. They, thankfully, were okay.
A couple of days later I decided I'd snap out of my funk and get back to missionary work, but by then it was too late -- I was called later in the day and told to pack my stuff as the APs (yes, the very same), were coming to get me to transfer me to a new companionship in Santo Domingo, where I was demoted to being a junior companion. Perfect! I always hated being a senior companion, because the senior was the one responsible if the companionship was "underperforming." I never wanted a leadership position of any sort during my mission -- the less bureaucratic bulllshit I had to deal with as a missionary, the better.
The mission president gave me a tongue-lashing, of course, telling me how much money I'd cost the mission because of the car accident that was a direct result of the zone leaders having to come see me (I had to bite my tongue on that one). He also read me some BoM scriptures about missionaries being spat on and persecuted, etc., and did I just want to go home? No, I said, I'll be a good boy from here on out. And I mostly was.
My new companion was a pretty nice guy, and we worked well together -- well enough that after a few months I was made a senior companion again, and actually trained a new missionary the last month of my mission, where we baptized a bunch of people the first week and then I took the last few weeks off, sending him off on splits with ward members while I went with other ward members to play pick up hoops, tennis, and as usual -- the casinos!
By the time it was over I'd almost gone home twice (growing up in a 99.5% mormon town full of wealthy priesthood holders was a pretty good deterrent for not going home -- the scorn and embarrassment would have been mucho grande), but somehow I'd survived. I even felt moved enough to share a tear-filled testimony in the meeting of departing missionaries, and gave a humdinger of a homecoming talk replete with interesting stories and probable miracles (church miracles being what they are -- a version of the telephone game where a perhaps improbable event becomes a miracle by the time it's been recounted a dozen times).
And then...the gradual loss of faith until I became an atheist about 10 years after returning. I guess I should have seen it coming. I dropped out of seminary my senior year -- it was conveniently my last period class in a Utah high school, so some friends and I simply cut to go hang out at the local arcade where I honed my pinball skills. I failed with a big fat "F" (or did BYU give out "Es?", "Is?"-- I don't remember anymore) the missionary prep course I took at BYU. I guess showing up for only the first day and never going back or cracking the sillybus (sic) again had something to do with that. I never even wanted to go on a mission, in spite of thinking that I always would. Such was my strong desire to go on a mission that I waited until I was 20 do it -- and I only attended about half of the available semesters at BYU prior to doing that. Playing golf 8 hours a day was a fun substitute for one of those semesters.
So yeah, that was my missionary experience, and I kind of feel that it is an accurate microcosm for the church and the way that it runs as a whole, don't you think?