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Ernest Shackleton, I Am Not

“Are we close?”

I glance up from my phone, in which I’ve been engrossed for the past five hours, scrolling through social media and agonizing over my tiles in Words with Friends.

“Um…”

“You’re supposed to be navigating,” my husband reminds me, a synecdoche for our relationship in that he does all the driving and I forget to do all the navigating.

“Hold on,” I command, switching to the Maps app, noticing our estimated arrival time is only a few minutes from now. “Yeah, we’re close.”

He squints down the road into the distance, studying the rolling terrain in our future. He is apparently – and somewhat rightly – distrustful of my skills with cartography.

“Do you see anything yet?” he presses.

I glance out the window through the late afternoon sunlight, seeing pastures and farm equipment and fields of corn.

“Um…”

“You’re positive this thing is, like, a big deal? Like, it’s something people actually turn out for?”

“Yes!” I retort, offended, reflecting on the sheer amount of time I’ve expended – and the excessively painful detail into which I’ve delved – talking about this event. “It is most definitely a big deal.”

We are cruising down State Road 21 in Palmyra, New York. We are 300 miles from our home in Philadelphia, enjoying our first mini-vacation since our honeymoon severa; years prior. It is a wine tasting cum family visit cum once-in-a-lifetime trip, even though it is only to the Finger Lakes and our lodging is an air mattress on a hardwood floor.

Originally, it was merely a plan to visit some vineyards and check in on my Aunt. We had no specific timeline; we had no expectations other than a few nice Rieslings and a photo by Taughannock Falls. It would have been a perfectly lovely excursion, but there would be nothing once-in-a-lifetime about it.

We are currently in Palmyra, however, because of a Eureka moment of insight I experienced while poring over a winery map. It took only a heartbeat for my limbic zone to birth an entire theoretical plan for an epic odyssey; it took a bit longer to badger my husband until he acquiesced to come. But acquiesce he did, and so I’ve been looking forward to this evening for months.

We are going to the Hill Cumorah Pageant.

Absurdism à la Albert Camus

“The Finger Lakes are right near Palmyra!” I had squealed, looking at him expectantly, waiting for him to share my excitement.

My husband stared blankly back at me, awaiting further context he obviously felt he was owed.

“Duh! Dude! Palmyra?” I repeated, waiting for recognition to strike.

“What about it?” he questioned patiently.

“The Hill Cumorah Pageant, obviously!”

He continued to look confused for a few seconds more, until the proper synapse fired and he finally arrived on the same page as me.

“You mean, like…Joseph Smith and all that?”

“Yeah!” I affirm.

I am already frantically planning – assembling a mental packing list, calculating tolls and gas, wording my request for PTO at work – hopeful this brilliant proposal of mine can actually come to fruition. I am so engrossed, in fact, I do not realize I have neglected to actually vocalize the brilliant proposal aloud.

“You’re, like, having a full conversation in your head with someone who isn’t me,” my  husband remarks, and it is a fair complaint.

I try to slow down, my genetic disposition for hypomania notwithstanding.

“We could go to the Hill Cumorah Pageant!” I reveal dramatically, with all the flair of a parent offering a surprise trip to Disney World to their unsuspecting offspring.

He blinks at me like a befuddled owl.

“You know!” I encourage. “The huge extravaganza every summer where they act out the Book of Mormon right in the spot where Joseph Smith found the Golden Plates?”

“Where who acts out?”

“The Mormons!” I answer with exasperation. “They rehearse all summer for it. They legit come from all over the country. It’s like a spiritual pilgrimage, and the Hill Cumorah is Canterbury.”

My husband regards me dubiously.

“There’s pyrotechnics,” I add, as if that is the missing information which will magically bring him around to understanding, as if that makes anything more clear.

“And you…want to go?” he finally asks. “Why?”

“Because I’ve always wanted to go! The Golden Plates, dude! The Angel Maroni shows up! We’d be in the holy land of Palmyra, New York!”

I cannot help but snicker with the last sentence, because, well…it’s absurd. The entire thing is absurd, and the provenance of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is absurd, and the events in the Book of Mormon are absurd – let alone the staging of those events on a hill in the middle of nowhere for an audience of thousands – so of course I want to witness this absurdity first-hand. It’s the same reason I appreciate campy horror and crappy disaster movies for their unintentional hilarity; it’s the same reason I ascribe to the Absurdist branch of Philosophy à la Albert Camus.

“It’ll be so fun,” I whine. “Latter-Day Saints in their natural habitat!”

He does not look convinced, so I gesture him over to the computer and highlight a line of text on the official Hill Cumorah Pageant website. “Do you see? Cast of hundreds, ten-level stage, full orchestra?”

I point to another heading on the screen. “Soundtrack sung by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, it says! They go all out for this.”

“I really doubt there was a soundtrack during biblical times,” he comments, and I have a quick vision of Joseph Smith, complete with his own bumbling theme song, lurching up the Hill Cumorah in the dead of night, his steps set to the dulcet tones of a glockenspiel.

“Just wait,” I assure him. “You’ll see.”

Good without a God

I am avidly and bizarrely interested in Mormonism, a denomination to which I do not belong, nor have any intention of ever belonging.

I am also an atheist.

I’m a Secular Humanist, to be specific. It is a guiding ethos and a school of thought to which I ascribe that is best summarized by the tagline “Good without a God.” It is a motley crew of those brave enough to loudly decry the existence of God in this “Christian nation” of ours. We are human beings who nonetheless value kindness and honor and altruism during this, our single shot at a meaningful existence while living on a rotating rock flung through space billions of years ago at the dawn of time. In 1997, Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Timequake, “Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.” That is obviously the only conclusion I, too, can draw after failing to resolve the God Paradox and the presence of evil in this world.

I came to Humanism after an undergraduate education and a failed doctorate which involved far too much Nietzsche to be good for my mental health. But there was this one time in grad school – one time when I was alone in the Midwest, missing my soulmate back home, sinking into depression, unsure about my path in this life but also unable to endure the psychic pain that is undiagnosed mental illness for too much longer.

Sometimes, sheer force of will just isn’t enough.

It was right then that I met a pair of missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. They were polite. They respected my personal space. They proselytized. I listened. Most of my interest was because the basic doctrines of Mormonism are a pretty wacky ride, but there was also a piece of me that needed the benevolence, needed the attention, needed the company. It was a formative time to witness such a level of austerity and faith; it left a mark. Years later, you can imagine my delight to learn – thanks to the stage musical Book of Mormon and an eerily-accurate episode of South Park – that every far fetched claim dropped by those young missionaries was indeed a genuine tenet of the Mormon faith.

I walked away from that encounter with a free copy of the Book of Mormon, the memory of a somewhat awkward bus ride through Champaign, Illinois, and a fascination with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints that would stay etched into my memory with indelible ink for the next two decades.

Welcome to Pageant!

“Ok, now we’re really close,” I pipe up, chagrined into actually following the GPS directions on my phone rather than gazing at Instagram.

“Good,” says my husband. “This drive is getting long.”

I open my mouth to disagree, but do not get a chance to finish the sentence. Coming around a bend, it becomes immediately clear that we are here – though, “here” is a relative term, because the pastures and cornfields and rolling hills out my window look exactly like those we’ve been passing for the last hour.

“Look!” I pronounce. It is an unnecessary proclamation, due to the throngs of people walking along the road and the multitude of cars parked in tidy rows in a giant, adjacent field.

“Jesus,” he voices.

“Quite literally,” I add, and snicker at my own wit.

It takes a few more seconds to reach the field, and then – as we signal and slow to join the line of vehicles waiting to turn right into the ersatz parking lot – only a few minutes more to reach the entrance and the first of several parking attendants.

“Welcome to Pageant!” he exclaims with a sunny smile, greeting us with a wave à la the Mickey Mouse Club during the Golden Age of Capitalism.

I cannot help but smile back. He is so friendly – so genuine, so seemingly guileless – that it comforts me, like stepping into the sunlight, like watching kittens romp.

“Thank you,” we respond in unison.

“Which direction will you be going on the way home?” he questions, seemingly very excited for our response, gesturing simultaneously to both the left and the right like a scarecrow of Oz.

“We’ll be going left, South on Route 21,” my husband supplies, and the attendant nods sagely.

“Ok, you’re going to want to drive down this way, and then park along that fence, next to the lady in the red shirt,” he explains. “Then you’ll be able to head right out!”

He offers this amenity with all the pomp and circumstance of Christmas morning, and – unbeknownst to him – it is actually a gift, to two Philadelphians accustomed to the parking chaos that defines the narrow colonial streets and boisterous sports stadiums of our home city.

We thank him again and he ushers us along, already beaming in preparation for the welcome he ostensibly plans to bestow upon the SUV behind us. The lady in the red shirt cheers us on from outside the window as we pull up against the fence, a silent pantomime of pride and joy that we are all apparently on the same page regarding this whole parking situation. I stare wide-eyed at the size of the field, the sea of cars in a spectrum of Crayola colors, the people spilling out of the lot and towards an open pavilion several football fields away. Then I glance across the road and do a double take.

“Wait, are those…protesters?”

Surely they can’t be, surely these are people with signs and shouts and surly faces who are not protestors, because what the hell is there to protest about here?

Plenty, it would seem, and Mark and I stare in silence as we stretch the last five hours of the car ride out of our stiff muscles.

“You’re going to Hell,” reads a piece of posterboard affixed to a wooden stake. “God’s wrath = 9/11!” announces another in screaming shades of yellow and red. There are multiple signs reading “Thank God for Dead Soldiers,” which even I cannot fit into whatever wonky belief system has these demonstrators so enraged…but everyone has opted for Comic Sans as the font for this vitriol, and that somewhat lessens the negative impact of this whole sentiment.

It is members from the Westboro Baptist Church, it turns out, and they are entirely and unsurprisingly “on-brand” – in that whole “We Hate Literally Everyone” kind of way.

“God is your enemy!” shouts a portly man wearing an American-flag t-shirt. “America is doomed!”

“But, like…do they even get who they’re protesting?” Mark asks rhetorically. This vigilante crew of Christians has indeed failed to read the room correctly in any sense of the phrase. Even the missionaries stationed along the fence are watching the protestors with expressions of exasperated patience, like a mother anxious for the children’s bedtime but determined to keep the smile on her face until the bitter end.

“This is probably the least effective protest I have ever witnessed,” I decide, and we turn our backs on the Westboro Baptists to follow the sinuous chain of devotees streaming towards the Hill Cumorah like Mecca.

No Man Knows My History, Except for Fawn Brodie

So, yes, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints endorses a third testament to the Bible wherein God communicates with some rando dude back in 1820 and instructs him to establish the true Christian church, because every other attempt by every other religion is just gettin’ it wrong.

And yes, an angel appears to explain to this dude that, by the way, the early Israelites cruised across the Indian Ocean to establish the Americas way before any indigenous populations were even around, and – surprise! – the Garden of Eden was actually here in suburban Missouri all along. And, yes, the angel leads this baffled marionette to the Hill Cumorah, where all of these truths have been documented in an ancient Egyptian language on plates of solid gold. And yes, rando dude digs them up along with some “seer stones” he uses to translate the gospel – apparently something only he is able to do. Then God commands dude to put the golden plates back underground, and no one seems to have ever seen them again.

A convenient coincidence, I suppose, but no matter.

And finally, yes, rando dude publishes these revelations on someone else’s dime, preaches to the masses, gains followers, gains enemies, becomes embroiled in scandal, is killed by an angry mob – and at some point, slips the practice of celestial plural marriage into an 1835 publication of divine revelations, entitled Doctrine and Covenants. It’s all in historian Fawn Brodie’s brilliant biography about Joseph Smith, and – according to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints – every word of this outlandish tale is the truth.

But all of that is only surface-level interesting when it comes to my preoccupation with Mormondom. It has more to do, I think, with witnessing ecclesiastical evolution in real time; it has more to do with the nature of faith. It definitely has to do with all that Nietzsche I read in school, and how I have come to regard religion, human nature, and moral values through that lens, somewhere beyond good and evil.

And it’s mostly because we Americans love to root for a home team.

USA! USA! USA!

Besides its origin story – which, admittedly, is the stuff of which bad acid trips are made – the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is unique for another reason. Conceived in a time of “homegrown” spiritual beliefs in the desolate Appalachian region of the infant nation, Palmyra was rich with divination, dowsing rods, and grassroots preachers in the early 1800s. Traditional Christianity, it seemed, had gone a little rogue amidst the isolation and trauma of establishing a new life in upstate New York. It was a difficult and lonely existence, and the new citizens were perfectly situated to fall sway to the glamour of a new divine leader and the allure of a new ideology.

Mormonism is the very first “American religion.”

Unlike other Abrahamic religions, which have been practiced for hundreds of generations and thousands of years, Mormonism did not exist until 1830. It is possible to track the whole life span of this denomination, from its conception to its spread to its current methods of practice. The whole history of the Church of Latter-Day Saints has been captured in the annals of written record, and it makes for an interesting juxtaposition with regard to American history.

That is to say, there is no need for conjecture when it comes to the Mormon Church. There is no guessing what ancient aphorisms have been whispered down the lane and lost in translation; there are no assumptions about its Founder’s intentions. The tenets of Mormonism have been documented from the very beginning, effectively eliminating many of the questions and discrepancies that define the older denominations, those which stretch back so far that most of the important details have been lost to time.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is uniquely American, a one-of-a-kind product that only a very specific set of circumstances could have produced. And so, ever since my chance encounter with two painfully-polite, stereotypically-blonde gentlemen out on a mandatory mission, I have regarded the Mormons with a certain reverence – despite my atheism, despite my Nietzschean distaste for organized religion, despite its inherent absurdity.

Because isn’t it always kind of cool to be there in the very beginning, watching something bloom when before there was nothing in the ground at all?

There’s PYROTECHNICS!

Sunset approaches, and the Mormons are f*cking ready for it.

Neat rows of chairs stretch in every direction, stretch as far as the eye can see, impeccably constructed around central aisles that bring to mind the church sanctuaries of my youth. Every chair in Palmyra must have been stockpiled to make this seating plan a reality, and – if the hundreds of blankets littering the grass behind the last row of chairs are any indication – it is still not enough. There is art and music and singing and costumes; there are stalls hawking refreshments. Children dart around in a manic melee while their parents lounge against the seats and greet old friends and unpack picnic baskets brought from home.

And above the entire scene stretches the Hill Cumorah.

It is somewhat anticlimactic.

I mean, it is indeed a hill, and a hill’s hill, at that. It is a dome, and it rises dramatically from the flat ground that surrounds it, and there can be no mistaking which topographical feature we are here to celebrate. But it is also just a hill, and try as I might, I cannot imagine anything ethereal about Joseph Smith stumbling up a grassy knoll in the middle of the night.

“So,” my husband states as we spread out our blanket, apply mosquito repellent, crack open a few bottles of water. “This is…why we’re here?”

“Just wait,” I reassure him. “Wait for the show. There’s pyrotechnics!”

We people-watch and chit-chat as the sky grows darker, subtly calling one another’s attention to particularly-blonde missionaries or families with identically-dressed broods of 5 and 6 and 7. Our jest involves neither mockery nor malice; it is more that we are starstruck, enamored with our proximity to this exotic phenomenon and delighted to be directly on its pulse.

When my husband and I discuss the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, it is not with derision but rather with fascination; not with pretension but rather bemused wonder. This pageant represents an entire culture, an entire movement, an entire school of religious thought with which I was once completely unfamiliar, but with which I am now engrossed. Here at the Hill Cumorah, I feel austere; I feel holy by proximity. It is dazzling to see so many Mormons in the flesh, and – even more remarkably – they appear to be dazzled by our presence here right back.

I know this because cast members have been roving the crowd this entire time – in full costume, in full makeup, in full character. They discuss the run of the pageant and the highlights of this year’s show; they pose for photographs with audience members and sign shaky autographs. It is part of the tradition, part of why this seminal event draws so many faithful Mormons to Palmyra in the dead of summer every single year, and I can’t even complain about the Fourth Wall being broken when I see how much literally everyone is enjoying the experience.

“Hi! Welcome to pageant!”

A tall man in robes and sandals plants himself before us, flanked by children and young adults of varying heights. The woman at his side – someone I believe I am entirely safe in assuming to be his wife – is dressed in a brightly-colored sheaf, her hair under a headscarf and her dusty feet bare. She, too, beams at us, and again…I am struck by how genuine all this cheer seems to be.

“Thank you!” I respond with equal enthusiasm, charmed to have been chosen by this fictitious figurehead from deep within the Book of Mormon, feeling like I do when the overstimulated cat at the raucous house party deigns to sit on my lap. 

“Are you enjoying yourself?” he continues.

“Yes,” I affirm, and it is true, if only for the people-watching opportunities. But now I am enjoying my conversation with a real-life Live Action Role Player, and at the risk of sounding ignorant, I hesitantly ask, “Who…who do you…represent?…from the Book of Mormon?”

The man brightens further and hugs his children to his sides.

“We’re Lamanites,” he says with pride, and I nod as if that is what I suspected all along.

“The Lamanites came from Israel and settled the ancient Americas, along with the Nephites. The Nephites started out as the most righteous, but they turned to decadence and debauchery, so they lost God’s favor. Then Jesus Christ appeared…”

This explanation is getting a bit long, given that I was expecting something more along the lines of, “I’m Martin and I tend sheep,” but now I’m in way too deep not to finish hearing the entire backstory behind the Book of Mormon.

“…and the warring stopped! They came together as the children of Christ and lived in peace for two centuries!”

“Wow,” I say, wondering – as I often do upon hearing this tale – how the boat ride from the Middle East must have gone.

“Then the Lamanites revolted and eventually destroyed all of the Nephites,” the man says as an afterthought, and I wince. 

“Are y’all Mormon?” the woman inquires with a welcoming smile. I am about to refer vaguely to some vestigial branch of my Christian childhood – certainly not about to bring up Secular Humanism – when my husband pipes up.

“No, unfortunately, we’re not,” he says apologetically, and I cannot help but stare at him in amusement. This is the first time I’m hearing that he apparently regrets not being a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints; this is the only time I’ve heard him apologize for rejecting the opiate of the masses.

The more I think about this confession, the funnier it begins to seem, until I am biting my lip to keep the mirth off my face. Meanwhile, the entire family has bestowed upon us a pristine (and free!) copy of the Book of Mormon, and is bidding us farewell to go backstage and prepare.

“Is there any chance we could get a picture with you?” I blurt out, apropos of nothing, not even sure where this urge is coming from – but it is the same urge I felt when I saw a pair of Catholic priests offering “Ashes on the Run” outside of a Center City Starbucks one Ash Wednesday in the mid-2000s. It was something that had to be documented; after all, it was not an experience that would likely be repeated many more times over the course of my life.

“Of course!” the Lamanites bubble, sounding thrilled to be asked, sounding thrilled by our interest, sounding thrilled because they are Mormons and Mormons are nothing if not imbued with meaningful purpose.

We pose for a quick photograph, then settle back on our blanket as the sun continues to set and the stage before us grows ever dimmer. And then suddenly…there is light. There is a lot of light. There are stage lights and luminaires in the wings and spotlights on center stage. Actors pour onto the set, brandishing lanterns, shining flashlights, holding battery-powered torches aloft.  

“In the beginning…” booms the narrator over the extensive PA system, and we are off to the races with thousands of the faithful right beside us along for the ride.

Like a High School Production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (that I Would Not Have Missed for the World)

Yes…there were pyrotechnics. Yes…there were towering sets and quick costume changes. Yes…Jesus showed up. Yes…it was the entirety of the Book of Mormon, resplendent with golden plates and the angel Maroni and all the times Joseph Smith had one-on-one convos with God. It was all there.

And it was kind of like a high-school production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

Don’t get me wrong, those Mormons went hard. They committed. To the players on stage, their Fourth-of-July sparklers were spewing white-hot fire like the breath of angry dragons. But no sparkler lasts forever, and no sparkler is ever really a substitute for the explosions, the columns of flame to which we’ve grown accustomed seeing Kiss and Metallica.

The ensemble tended to freeze up between numbers. Ascending to Heaven involved bulky harnesses and a rickety pulley system.  The colored lights were really just normal lights draped with tinted foils. No one had any idea how to hit a mark. And the narrator spoke in a monotone. 

But you know what else?

The pageant is – and always has been – free and open to all. Lord knows how difficult it is to scrape together a show even with a proper budget, so I have nothing but respect for the choreographers and stage managers and children dressed as goats who went into this experience knowing their only compensation would be the love of the Lord.

And therein lies the crux. The Hill Cumorah Pageant is not about great monologues or great production numbers or even historical accuracy. It is about belonging to something greater than yourself, about finding kindred spirits who share your values and your hope for the world. The Pageant is the manifestation of all that good will, a communal creation to inspire and through which to be inspired.

Now, please don’t get me wrong – there is a whole host of things I would like to see change within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and they all have to do with tolerance and basic human rights and love being love for all capable of love.

But as I saw first-hand, the Pageant is a strange little sliver of folk religion, left over from a time when we were just finding our way as a nation, a coming-of-age ritual for any Latter-Day Saint. It represents something more than the sum of its parts, something that has been shared by countless other Mormons over the years because it has a draw like a magnet.  

“Well…what did you think?” my husband questions cautiously, as the final flourish from the trumpets dissipates into the air and the audience explodes into applause.

“I thought it was totally underwhelming!” I exclaim with glee. “Such a build-up with very little ROI. That poor conductor! And the Book of Mormon gets REALLY long in the middle.”

“So…are you disappointed that we came?”

I stare at my partner, baffled.

“I loved it. It was overblown and poorly-executed and the sound was terrible, but how freaking cool is it to have seen it, even once?”

I stand to stretch my legs and gesture to the top of the Hill Cumorah.

“Golden plates, dude! Golden plates right up there!”

“Except there were no golden plates,” he hastens to remind me.

“Of course there weren’t!” I agree. “And the Garden of Eden wasn’t in Jackson County, Missouri! But they wanted to act out the Book of Mormon, and by God, that is what they did.”

I pause.

“They didn’t act it out particularly well,” I add. “But that is entirely beside the point. The point is we were here.”

And so we gather our belongings and trek back to the car – which, predictably, is perfectly parked to get us going on our way in the correct direction – cracking Andrew Lloyd Weber jokes and mentally rechoreographing the closing number we’ve just witnessed. We will spend the rest of our mini vacation wine tasting in the Finger Lakes and visiting family, before returning to the drudgery of office jobs and Capitalism. But whenever that drudgery starts to get me down – I bring to mind the earnestness and authenticity and unadulterated joy of a bunch of Mormons putting on a play, and I cannot help but smile.

Epilogue

Premiering in 1937, the Hill Cumorah was staged annually for over 80 years.

It ended for good in 2019.

It was an otherworldly spectacle while it lasted – Vegas without the showgirls, Coney Island without all the rides – and I am super grateful I got to go once in my lifetime before it ceased to be all it had become.

I would not have missed it for the world.