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| My First Scriptures |
As I approached my teenage years I became aware that daily scripture reading wasn’t just a good habit, in the LDS worldview it is a commandment from God. I was afraid if I didn’t read my scriptures daily I was rebelling against God’s command so I became very strict in performing my daily reading no matter how late I was getting to bed. This need to be reading was reinforced by the popular and repetitive challenge from LDS leaders to read the Book of Mormon from start to finish within certain time frames. You could barely finish reading the Book of Mormon due to the challenge of one leader before some other leader would reissue the challenge. Scripture study was viewed as synonymous with reading the Book of Mormon. I felt that the Book of Mormon was true because I had always assumed it was true and felt that God pointed that out to me when I prayed about it in the classic Mormon fashion. Always assuming something isn’t the same thing as it being so, but I was satisfied enough to keep enjoying it the way I always had before.
As I entered my teens I had read the Book of Mormon so many times that it became less meaningful through sheer repetition and reading from the bible felt much more meaningful. I still felt I had to follow my leaders command to read the Book of Mormon daily so I doubled my scripture reading time so I could start to read both from the Bible and Book of Mormon regularly. My scriptures became so well used that the vinyl carrying case fell apart and was replaced by a black canvas bag with a special compartment for extra study materials.
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| My Seminary copy and Black Canvas Case |
Starting around age 14 I started attending a daily Sunday School class in Mormonism called “early morning seminary” and received my second copy of the LDS scriptures, an all in one volume (or Quad) in a Burgundy cover. The purpose of this second set was to allow me to have a copy in the Sunday school room to be used there and virtually nowhere else, so I never became very attached to this copy. I never succeeded in memorizing the scripture passages expected in this Sunday School class but I took pride that I didn’t just read the assigned selections but I read the entire text while keeping up with the class. I was able to keep this up until in the year we were studying the bible we got to the book of Isaiah. Mormon’s put a special emphasis on Isaiah being important but most of the Mormons I have talked to are positively terrified of it. It is common to hear people say they only read the parts from Isaiah that are copied into the Book of Mormon and even some skip those parts. When our class reached the Book of Isaiah we spent one day talking about how to read Isaiah and then skipped the entire book. That wouldn’t do for me, I wanted to read everything. Isaiah scared me too, but I took it slowly and prayerfully, reading the same passages over and over again until I felt I had some level of understanding. I became passionately involved with the text and would get into a zone of contemplative worshipful reading. I could only zone in like that if I had a quiet place to study, so I often found myself staying up late at night after the rest of my family had gone to bed to have time to study without any distractions. This drove my family a bit crazy, especially when I suggested they should hurry to bed so I could get on with my night of scripture study and journal writing. No one thought to buy me ear plugs or noise isolating headphones to help me study earlier in the evening, so I just stayed up late, sometimes very late.
This was a very dark time in my life and emotionally these late night study sessions became extremely important to me. I learned to write from practicing in my journal. I learned that even if I was afraid to trust anyone else in life I could still trust God. I had a sense of spiritual rebirth and developed a sense of a personal relationship with Jesus while contemplating the suffering servant passages in Isaiah, particularly chapter 53. The spiritual practices of scripture study and journal writing are probably the main reasons why I survived my teenage years without attempting suicide. In fact, I directly used them as a tool to escape from a cycle of child abuse that intensified after I started homeschooling.
My mother hated not being in control. I loved being obedient but hated being strictly controlled and could never really function well trying to do anything exactly like other people did them. My mental anatomy as an autistic is different enough that I often need to find my own ways and times to learn things. Unfortunately my mother had a strong need to believe she was perfect and she was very sensitive to other people questioning or acting outside of her perfect ideas and needed me to learn things on her time table instead of mine. She often yelled at me demanding to know if I thought she was stupid because I wouldn’t or couldn’t do things exactly her way without having a prolonged discussion about why and how. I recall one memorable incident when I washed some dishes in a different order than she thought was correct and she came into the room screaming at me, asking how dare I rebel against her when she had never even specified the order in which to wash them and had no reason to need them done in a specific order. Everything was black and white, good or evil. If you really wanted to be good you would do everything she expected right the first time. If you failed to be her version of perfect on the first try it was because you weren’t really trying because you were a bad person. My assumed evil personality justified whatever she found necessary to force compliance. At this point in my life I was larger and stronger than she was so she virtually always resorted to emotional manipulation and abuse. She moved quickly from offering rewards to offering punishments to trying to damage or even crush your sense of self esteem in hopes that you would start performing the task at hand correctly to prove her wrong about how worthless you were. Once when I begged for time to learn my daily chores without dramatic punishments because I wasn't trying to be lazy or rebellious but simply needed more time to learn how to remember everything and my parents told me that they felt if they didn’t take me strictly in hand I’d end up just like my brother, by which I think they meant a college dropout with no job and no girlfriend living in the basement. Due to my unique circumstances, I took it worse than that and became very scared of myself.
Among the many things she didn’t like, my staying up late to read my scriptures and write in my journal weren’t on her approved list. She didn’t like that I was sleep deprived. She hated that I used my journal writing to emotionally cope with life instead of pouring out my soul to her as if that idea made any sense at all. She didn’t understand why I needed peace and quiet to enter into intense contemplative scripture study. I don’t think she saw my scripture study as any different from doing my math homework which she expected me to be able to do while she indulged in screaming matches or worse against my little sister who she treated in the much same way as she treated me except with differences resulting from my being so much larger and stronger. In any case my mother started a campaign to try to stop me from writing in my journal or reading my scriptures at night. I decided that thought there was no chance I could defend my dignity when it case to the normal chores or school work, there was a real chance I might undermine her opinion of me when it came to my scripture study. I determined to make a point to fight her on this one issue where winning might mean something.
So the fight was on. She’d prowl into the basement where I would study at night or look to see if I had lights on in my bedroom. She tried to monitor and punish me more and more strictly until my father found out what was going on. Suddenly something clicked. Their evil rebel son wasn’t rebelling to sneak off to be promiscuous or use drugs or hang out with gangs or any other notorious evil. He was rebelling… to worship… in the tradition of the family faith. I intentionally used my worship behaviors to create a situation that made the emotional abuse look and feel absurd. It broke me out of the cycle of abuse and created a space where they respected me and became almost willing to bend over backwards to accommodate my life and needs. Things were still black and white but now I was considered to be good instead of bad. Unfortunately my victory didn’t apply to my little sister who they generally still viewed as deserving what she got even when I tried to explain otherwise. Life worked best when I depended on my parents for as little of my emotional or physical needs as possible since my mother still had trouble with things she didn’t control and was not above hurting me in dramatic ways just to get revenge for some annoyance years gone by without stopping to think about what she was doing. Like killing my pet hamster by pretending to forget to buy clean bedding for it until it died of infection to get revenge for the way my ADD had been really horrible before I started medication for it in third grade. She explained that she had always needed me to know what it felt like to raise an obnoxious person like me but hadn’t realized that her actions would result in its death. Overall though, my gamble had paid off.
Unfortunately it also felt like the most cynical thing I had ever done. I intentionally used a pious behavior that had been an honest act of worship to manipulate someone into doing what I wanted. I felt intensely ashamed of my actions and stopped being able to enter the intense contemplative mindset I had enjoyed before while doing scripture reading. It felt more like I was just reading words rather than communing with God, though I still needed peace and quiet for even what I had left. It wasn’t until the last few years that it occurred to me that since the scriptures are supposed to be for our benefit, why would God feel I had betrayed a trust by using them to escape from child abuse?
One way or another I kept reading that brown bonded leather set of scriptures until grime from my hands accumulated on the cover, the binding broke, and the pages started to fall out.
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| My original scriptures were loved to death. Click to see my footnote highlighting. |
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| Example of the study aids in a modern study bible |
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| My new bible |
