A Short Stay in Hell is an odd, compelling novella about an eternity of the mundane

I read — mostly during Sacrament meeting — the novella “A Short Stay in Hell,” (Strange Violin Editions) by BYU professor Steven L. Peck. It’s one of the oddest book I have read, but it’s also so compelling that you can’t stop reading. That’s a reflection of the human urge to hope that a likable character achieves an impossible task.

But I’m ahead of myself. The plot: Soren, a recently deceased 45-year-old Mormon husband and father who lived in Utah County, finds himself in an office, with other dismayed dead persons, with a sardonic demon with an office window that shows demons throwing the “damned” in a lake of fire. It all turns out to be a practical joke. There is no lake of hell. The demon explains that the true religion is Zoroastrianism, a faith and philosophy from Iran.

Zoroastrianism, the demon says, will provide a type of hell, or purgatory, with a test for the “damned” souls, if they pass it, they eventually get into heaven.

In an clever plot twist, Soren, who loved books, is sent to a “hell” derived from the famous short story, “The Library of Babel.” The hell contains finite, yet infinite to the human mind, rows and floors filled with books. Every book that could ever be written is located there, all the same words and pages, etc. Soren’s task is to find the book that contains his life story, stick it in a slot, and enter “heaven.” Given that Soren, our narrator, is speaking after spending infinite billions of years there, the task is more or less impossible.

Soren’s religion, and the expectations he had on earth (spiritual body, perfect body, exaltation, becoming a God) all create interesting dilemmas. Although his body is perfect, it bleeds, and it needs food and drink (there is a kiosk that provides any food or drink and rows of beds on the floors, and showers). This brings consternation to Soren as he realizes that his new God allows coffee and alcoholic drinks. Each floor is populated with the same type of persons, all white, all from the United States, all having died within a certain span of years. As Peck writes, Soren wonders: “I began to think how strange it seemed that I never met a single person of color. Not an Asian, not a Hispanic, not anything but a sea of white American Caucasians. Was there no diversity in Hell? What did this endless repetition of sameness and of uniformity in people and surroundings mean?”

Over time, Soren, realizing he’s unlikely to encounter his earthly “eternal companion,” begins a series of sexual relationships with various women. Some relationships are more intense than others, but they all end. Soren joins “universities” with others confined there, and great excitement ensues whenever one of the books, which mostly contain illegible babble, contain a few words of English.

There is free agency within the confines of Soren’s library hell. One can die, but is always resurrected the next day. One can throw one’s self into the chasm and hope to get to the bottom of the library, but as Soren learns, the bottom is both finite and basically infinite to the human mind. Religious fundamentalism can spring up, and there is a disturbing interlude in Soren’s existence in which a fanatic, appropriately named “Dire Dan,” creates a religion that blends the Inquisition with today’s Islamic terrorism. The fanatics kill and torture others to death, and then resume the beatings when the victims awake healthy the next day. During this terror, Rachel, a companion Soren spent 1,000-plus years with, leaps into the chasm to escape.

Much of Peck’s novella, at this point, focuses on Soren’s own descent into the chasm, and his impossible search for Rachel, and later another woman, Wand. The searches in this hell are fruitless. The area is bigger than can be comprehended. At the end of novella, Soren is a shell of what he was. His search for a meaningful, permanent lover is impossible. It doesn’t fit in with the dimensions there. It’s telling that there are no children in Zoroastrianism hell. That would create chaos that might stay permanent.

At the end, he feels virtually nothing, and admits to having periods when he’s senseless. Living in a finite infinity, even sexual affairs lasting 1 billion years, mean nothing to him. Soren has succumbed to “this endless repetition of sameness and of uniformity in people and surroundings.”

Readers are advised not to look for any deeper meanings to the Zoroastrianism hell created by author Peck. It’s just there, it somehow all matches together, and it just happens, over and over and over. By the end, with every question drained out of him, Soren concedes his sole emotion, his sole motivation, is the search to find his life history book.

My favorite passage in the novella is near the end, in which Soren, spinning through space in the chasm, with his latest love, Wand, and still retaining a hopeful attitude for escape together, is intimate with his woman. Peck writes: “We made love twice, before making our attempt. We had both fallen so often and so long that we were like creatures of the air, and it seemed as natural as in a bed. For a day I glimpsed what heaven must be like.”

I like this novella, and I’ll likely read it every year or so, searching for meaning in a hell of the mundane. A hell that contains an eternity of the mundane, whether it’s books that make no sense, stairs and floors that never end, mundane mumbling and threats from the other side of the chasm, mundane evil, or relationships that last so long that they become mundane. That’s a pretty effective hell Peck has constructed.

-- Doug Gibson

Originally published at StandardBlogs

Orson Pratt Jr., Erastus Snow, apostasy and excommunication

(Above, Orson Pratt Jr., from Pratt Family Photo Project)

I’ve been reading a lot about Orson Pratt, the early Mormon apostle and leader who almost left the young church over allegations of seduction and adultery involving his wife, Sarah M. Pratt, the prophet Joseph Smith and Smith’s assistant, John C. Bennett. Later, after reconciling his wife’s accusations against Smith and Bennett with his belief in Mormonism, the apostle Pratt often clashed with Smith’s successor, Brigham Young, over doctrines, including who God was and His attributes.

His disputes with Young cost Pratt a chance to be president of the church. His dispute with Smith, and the way he resolved it, ultimately cost him his relationship with his first wife, her belief in the church he sacrificed so much for, and the belief of the children he bore with Sarah, save one. That brings us to Orson Pratt, Jr., the eldest son of Orson and Sarah.

Orson Jr. was a lot like his father. Like his dad, he was an intellectual man who applied reason and evidence with faith. He was also an accomplished musician, talented enough to teach at the university level. Unlike his father, though, Orson Jr. was not able to reconcile his theological doubts with his respect for reason. He became a disbeliever of Mormonism, and in a very public forum in southern Utah, where he had been a member of that area’s theological hierarchy, Orson Jr. told a large crowd that he no longer believed Joseph Smith was a prophet or that Mormonism was the true church. His discourse took place in September 1864, the same month he was excommunicated at the urging of LDS Church Apostle Erastus Snow, who had supplanted Orson Sr., on a mission to England, as sole leader of the southern Utah LDS cotton mission.

In Orson Pratt Jr.: Gifted Son of an Apostle and an Apostate,” published in the journal Dialogue, Richard S. and Mary C. Van Wagoner provide more insight into Orson Jr.’s decision to leave Mormonism. Orson Jr. claims to have disbelieved Mormonism at an early age. This is supported by his brother Arthur telling a reporter that his mother, Sarah Pratt, would secretly teach the children — while Orson Sr. was away on his many missions — to disbelieve in Joseph Smith, polygamy and Mormonism.

Nevertheless, Orson Jr. lived the life of a favored young Mormon son. He married Susan Snow, the daughter LDS leader Zerubabel Snow, was appointed to a Salt Lake City alderman and LDS high council member in his early 20s, played organ concerts privately for Brigham Young and other Mormon leaders and became a prominent music teacher. In the early 1860s he followed his father to the southern Utah mission and was quickly elected St. George city alderman and LDS high councilman.

However, in 1864 Orson Jr. refused a mission call from President Brigham Young, and action that in those days, explain the Van Wagoners, “was tantamount to an announcement of personal apostasy.” Later that year, Orson Jr., writing in the literary journal, “Veprecula,” under the pen name, “Veritas,” argued that faith could not derive from the supernatural, but “must be a careful and patient exercise of reason.” Young Pratt’s reasoning was similar to his father’s earlier declarations that evidence must support faith, but Orson Jr. took a step his father never did — he applied that reasoning to reject his father’s teachings.

There is a certain irony to Erastus Snow — Orson Jr.’s uncle — leading the excommunication of Orson Jr., given that Orson Sr. had helped convert Snow to Mormonism 30 years earlier in Vermont. In his discourse, Orson Jr. denounced Snow as a man who had actively, but secretly, tried to convince his wife, Susan, to reject him. As Gary Bergera explains in his book, “Conflict in the Quorum: Orson Pratt, Brigham Young, Joseph Smith,” Snow’s beliefs on how to treat unbelieving family members may have played a large role in his desire to punish Orson Jr. with excommunication. In an 1857 LDS general conference address, Snow’s harsh beliefs on how to handle in-family apostasy were recorded: “…Sometimes we may err by being remiss in duty — too lenient in our families, and some of us may be under condemnation by being too careless about transgressors in our families; for if we hold fellowship with transgressors and spirits that are in rebellion against God and that will not repent and humble themselves — if we close our ears to it and go to sleep while wickedness is stalking unrebuked through our habitations, we become partakers in that transgression, and the consequences thereof will stick to us. …”

Snow went on to urge LDS families to send siblings and spouses who rejected the LDS Church teachings away from their families and out into the world, “better this than to harbour them where they were like a viper … corrupting and corroding in the midst of … family.”

The idea that members should cast out every young adult who rejects the Gospel of their parents fit the times of 1857, a time when the LDS church was at its most orthodox, and apostles such as George Albert Smith were sent to all corners of Utah to preach “us against them” fire-and-brimstone speeches; of such rhetoric was the Mountain Meadows Massacre wrought. But it hardly applied to the mild, academically talented, gifted musician, Orson Pratt Jr., who in more civil times would have been quietly released from his callings and left to live his existence outside the LDS Church without the theological stain of excommunication. Orson Pratt, Jr., by the way, lived a quiet, distinguished life in Ogden and Salt Lake City before dying in late 1903. He is buried in Salt Lake City and received a respectful obituary in the church-owned Deseret News. As late as September 1903, the ailing Pratt, who had moved to Ogden for his health, advertised in the Standard-Examiner for music students.

Mentioned in Bergera’s book is the suggestion that Orson Jr.’s excommunication was an attempt to embarrass his father and weaken his influence in the Quorum of the Twelve. According to Bergera, Orson Jr. initially refused to resign from his church position because he feared a “possible backlash for his father.” Also, Brigham Young blamed Orson Sr. for his son’s apostasy, calling his then-senior apostle “at heart an infidel.”

-- Doug Gibson

-- This post was originally published at StandardBlogs

Sidney Rigdon: A brilliant orator who failed as a leader

I have a great deal of respect for Sidney Rigdon. A minister, he was a gold-standard convert for the young Joseph Smith and quickly rose to a leading position in the new Mormon Church. Rigdon walked the talk of early Mormonism. He was a great orator and led many to Mormonism. He also suffered in jail cells with Smith and others and the abuse caused him mental breakdowns.

And, like other converts, he was deeply distressed over the secret polygamy doctrine, more so after Smith allegedly attempted to make his daughter, Nancy, 19, a spiritual wife. This led to severed stress on Rigdon and a rift with Joseph Smith that was never fully healed before Smith was martyred in 1844.

After Smith’s death, Rigdon attempted to take control of the LDS Church. Suffice to say he failed in a power struggle with Brigham Young and was excommunicated in September 1844.

Despite that setback, he still enjoyed a following and in 1845 started the Church of Christ in Pittsburgh, Pa., where most former Mormons there followed him. Despite that positive beginning, within two years, Rigdon’s church would dwindle away, finally dying in a scraggly farm/commune in Antrim Township, Pa. After that, Rigdon, along with his wife Phebe, would live mostly in obscurity, resurfacing late in his life with one more feeble effort to start a church that migrated to Iowa and then dwindled away to nothing several years after Rigdon’s death in 1876,

Why did Sidney Rigdon fail the leadership test? It’s very possible that Rigdon, despite his knowledge of theology, the scriptures and church administration, suffered from mental illness and depression. He was devastated by the death of his daughter, Eliza, and quickly lost high-profile alliances with prominent Mormon dissidents, including William McLellin.

When the ailing church moved from Pittsburgh to Antrim Township, Rigdon tried to organize a six-month religious conference, but history tells us that he preached some bizarre doctrines, including a prediction Christ would return to the earth. Before that occurred, the farm was seized.

Rigdon’s last church was called The Church of Jesus Christ of the Children of Zion. The church included female members of its priesthood. Rigdon wrote a pamphlet, an appeal to the Latter-day Saints, but it was directed at members of the Reorganized Church under Joseph Smith III, not the Utah Mormons.

Like many of the original, early church members who apostasized, Rigdon never lost his testimony of The Book of Mormon or the early visions that these church leaders claimed. He spent much of his later life condemning Joseph Smith, Emma Smith — who he called a she-devil — and the doctrine of polygamy. But even then, Rigdon was such an enigma of contradictions. He denounced Smith and his wife vociferously in letters late in his life, but sought Joseph Smith III’s approval soon after leaving the main Mormon church. It’s likely that the rejection he received from the Reorganized church hardened his animosity toward the Smiths.

Another fascinating contradiction of Rigdon’s is his feelings on polygamy. He condemned it as “ruinous to society,” yet it appears that the 1840s’ church Rigdon organized and conducted wife-swapping, according to some members’ recollections.

To a faithful Latter-day Saint, there’s an easy answer to Rigdon’s decline: he apostasized from the Gospel of Jesus Christ. But that’s a cheap answer that requires no thought. He apostasized, but his future life was shaped by his experiences as an early Latter-day Saint. The trauma and betrayal he thought he received must have presented difficult contradictions for a man who shared what he believed to be revelation from God and later saw him lust after his daughter. That would be a tough dilemma to reconcile for anyone. The stress certainly turned Rigdon into a man unfit to lead thousands. (Research for this article includes Richard S. Van Wagoner’s “Sidney Rigdon: A Portrait of Religious Excess,” and “Sidney Rigdon: Post Nauvoo,” by Thomas J. Gregory, BYU Studies, Winter 1981.)

-- Doug Gibson

-- Originally published at StandardBlogs

Emma Hale Smith Bidamon remains an enigma to most Mormons

In the biography, “Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith,” a visit to Nauvoo from Hannah Tapfield King, a Salt Lake City Mormon, to the widow of Joseph Smith is related: “Mrs. King found … “Her mind seemed to me to be absorbed in the past and lost almost to the present … neither does she seem to desire to form any intimacy. … She did not even seem to respond to kindness, but she looked as if she had suffered and as if a deep vein of bitterness ran through her system. I felt sorry for her. ...”

As condescending as Tapfield King’s recollections were, they were kinder than Brigham Young’s, who frequently railed against Joseph Smith’s wife, describing her to Reorganized LDS Church missionaries in 1863 as “a wicked, wicked woman and always was. …” Emma loathed Young perhaps equally. Both polygamy, a doctrine that Emma clearly detested, and disagreements over the resolution of ecclesiastical matters and business dealings involving the wounded Nauvoo church and martyred prophet resulted in permanent animosity between the two.

Emma Hale Smith Bidamon has been rehabilitated in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The crowning occurred several years ago with the release of a film, “Emma Smith: My Story,” which captures the humanity and compassion of Joseph Smith’s widow but pointedly ignores the disagreements and heartaches that left her estranged from Mormonism and an opponent of the Utah LDS Church. Last week, I read “Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith,” the almost 30-year-old biography by Linda King Newell and the late Valeen Tippetts Avery. In light of the slow but steady efforts of transparency by LDS leaders over the past generation it’s almost quaint to recollect that it took a meeting with LDS apostles to lift a mid-1980s ban on having the authors speak to wards and stakes about the biography. When I was a kid Emma Smith was spoken of with a touch of sadness, as a person who had fallen away from the Gospel but would one day receive her full blessings, nevertheless.

Even today, there’s much of Emma Smith that remains an enigma to Mormons. Reading her biography, watching her film, that realization sticks. We know that she married Major Lewis Bidamon a few years after the martyrdom. The film “Emma Smith: My Story,” is eager to inform that 20 years after their marriage, the major, through adultery, fathered a child that Emma eventually raised as her own, even having the mother work in her home. However, if you read “Mormon Enigma,” one learns that Emma’s compassion was extended to her husband. The adultery did not extinguish the pair’s love for each other. In fact, shortly before Emma Bidamon died, she urged her husband to marry the boy’s mother after her death, a request that the major honored.

It’s impossible not to connect Emma’s capacity to forgive her second husband with her recollections of the polygamy that swirled through Nauvoo in the final years of Joseph Smith’s life. As the authors of “Mormon Enigma” relate, her husband was duplicitous to her, repeatedly “starting” and “stopping” polygamy, promising one thing one day and being caught in a lie another day. This is not a condemnation of the Prophet Joseph Smith, who believed that he was commanded, on the threat of death, to initiate polygamy in the new church.

But despite occasional vacillations, Emma strongly opposed it. She endured humiliations, learning that women she provided charity to within her own home, including Eliza Snow, had intimate relations with her husband. As the leader of the new “Relief Society,” she would teach lessons on fidelity between husband and wife to audiences full of women secretly living polygamy. The strength that allowed her to cope with these trials was learned early in her life. As the authors note, “… as a young woman, Emma was physically and emotionally strong, with a streak of independence. ...”

Emma never ceased to love her first husband, nor disbelieve in the Book of Mormon or Joseph Smith’s restored gospel of Jesus Christ. Given what she endured, it’s not surprising that she would forgive her second husband for an offense she must have regarded as similar to offenses committed by her first husband.

If there is a theme to Emma Hale Smith’s life in “Mormon Enigma,” it’s one of endurance and sacrifice. Emma sacrificed her parents mere months after the Mormon Church was formed. That is related in the film, but the biography adds the information that her embittered father, Isaac Hale, contributed information against her husband in “Mormonism Unvailed,” the very first anti-Mormon book.

The degree of anger, and violence, against Joseph Smith and the young church is related as effectively in “Mormon Enigma” as it is in “Rough Stone Rolling,” Richard Bushman’s biography of Joseph Smith. Whether in Kirtland, Far West or Nauvoo, there was something about the LDS faith, its bloc of members, and its charismatic first prophet that elicited passions — pro and con — beyond the norm. Whether it was Doctor Philastus Hurlburt, former apostle William McLellin, or former Nauvoo insiders John Cook Bennett or William Law, the disagreements that led them to leave the church resulted in angers that cried out for violence against Smith, his church and its members, leading to murders, spats between armed men, and forced expulsions. In fact, it was a common newspaper editor, Thomas Sharp, of Warsaw, Illinois, who is chiefly responsible for whipping up the sentiment that led to the murders of Joseph and Hyrum Smith. Their martyrdom did not satiate his anger. Years later, when the Nauvoo temple was torched, Sharp, who likely arranged payment for the arson, described it as a “benevolent act,” recounts “Mormon Enigma.” (In another anecdote from “Mormon Enigma,” Emma encounters the detestable McLellin — part of a mob — stealing valuables from her home. When Emma asked why the former apostle is stealing, he replies, “Because I can.”)

Through all these trials, Emma Smith endured. The trials led to the early deaths of several of her children. Fleeing mobs, she led her family over frozen rivers to safety, visited her husband in jails, took in LDS refugees, and frequently handled business matters in her husband’s frequent absences. “Mormon Enigma” details a quiet, determined stoicism and a self-confidence among Emma that led to her easily taking responsibility and leadership of the newly formed Relief Society. As noted in “Mormon Enigma,” LDS women provided testimonies and blessings for the sick. As “Mormon Enigma” notes, Joseph Smith did not seem to disapprove of these priesthood-parallel activities by the Nauvoo women.

After her husband’s death, “Emma stayed aloof from public debate over the question of leadership in Nauvoo,” write the authors of “Mormon Enigma.” She probably favored Nauvoo stake president William Marks, who opposed polygamy (and sealed his own fate when he defended the exiled Sydney Rigdon). As the authors note, there had been no serious disagreements between Emma and Brigham Young prior to the martyrdom. However, the business dealings, resolution of church assets and debts (Joseph Smith died leaving Emma $70,000 in debt) and squabbles over the Nauvoo holdings, including the hotel, initiated the animosity between Emma and Young.

Polygamy sealed the separation. The Utah Mormons, eventually called Brighamites,” resented Emma for not following the main body of Saints to Utah. Her re-marriage to Bidamon, a non-Mormon, was akin to blasphemy to Young and others.

Emma, in turn, resented Young for maintaining polygamy in the church. It was a doctrine that Emma eventually regarded as false, and likely she blamed it as the chief cause of her husband’s death. After a brief hiatus from Nauvoo, she returned to the city, placated anti-Mormons, such as Sharp, who regarded her with suspicion, and resumed her life, taking care of her children, regaining control of meager but needed assets in Nauvoo, taking care of her slain husband’s ailing mother, Lucy Mack Smith, and marrying Bidamon, who despite his infidelity apparently enjoyed a loving relationship with Emma and her children. He was referred to as “Pa Bidamon.”

As the authors note, Emma regarded her oldest son, Joseph Smith III, as an heir to her first husband’s ecclesiastical honors. She supported the founding of the Reorganized LDS Church and her eldest living son assuming its leadership. Living in Nauvoo, as “Mormon Enigma” notes, she greeted “Brighamite” visitors from Utah cordially, but retreated to a cooler atmosphere if they wished to debate Mormonism with her.

Late in her life, she had to deal with the mental illness of her youngest child, David Hyrum, born a few months after his father was martyred. The realization that plural marriage in Nauvoo had been a reality, something David Hyrum apparently learned while on a RLDS mission to Utah, may have exacerbated pressures to his already-ailing mind.

In her later years, Emma denied completely the existence of polygamy in Nauvoo. This further angered Utah Mormons, who knew she was not telling the truth. Newell and Avery posit that Emma may have been using code words to separate polygamy from “the true order of marriage,” which they note, LDS leaders who secretly practiced polygamy once used. In any event, her denials were accepted by her sons, including Joseph III, although they certainly later discovered the truths of polygamy in Nauvoo. As the authors note, the RLDS leader received letters from the hectoring McLellin on his father’s polygamous past, telling Joseph III that his mother Emma could verify them.

Emma Smith, the movie, barely spends 30 seconds discussing polygamy. It’s like a spot easily wiped away. But, despite the best efforts of “Mormon Enigma” and other research, how polygamy led to Emma Hale Smith Bidamon’s life after her husband died still leaves much to be discovered. Certainly, her many experiences before Nauvoo, including helping her husband translate a significant portion of The Book of Mormon, motivated her positive reactions to persecutions and caused pro-and-con turmoil after the introduction of a church doctrine that repelled her.

In short, what we know of Joseph Smith’s wife is that she was a compassionate woman, a leader, with a stoic independence who endured much without losing her essential humanity and ability to react, love, and reform unfortunate situations. She merits her current rehabilitation in Mormon circles and we need to learn more about this fascinating woman, and consider that in the case of polygamy, she was correct 45-plus years before the LDS Church leadership on the subject.

-- Doug Gibson

Originally published at StandardBlogs