Say More: At Last She Writes It

No. 18 | June 2024

photo by Cynthia Winward

Descending into Desert

by A. E. Johnson

*TW: child abuse, kidnapping*

When I was five years old, a wild tale circulated

amongst our church community. It involved a young girl who had been kidnapped, supposedly, and had been driven out far into the Southwestern desert. It was assumed that the kidnapper’s intent was to molest and murder the girl, and this part was spoken in hushed horrors. But for some unknown reason, so the account goes, the kidnapper left the child unattended for a period of time. Seeing this scene, God, in his all-knowingness, found this girl to be particularly angelic and pure, and was distraught that she might come to harm.

They said a man showed up and gestured for the girl to follow him. She did, walking some distance behind him—for it was understood that they were forbidden to speak to each other. The man walked her back into her home town, and eventually to a grocery store parking lot where she would soon be recognized. As the man began to leave, the girl asked to know his name. “You know my name,” he responded, and walked away, disappearing into the horizon.

The story concluded with everyone nodding in agreement. This had to be John the Beloved, apostle to Jesus himself, blessed to walk the earth until Christ’s return, now bidden to rescue a girl from ruination.

---

I was unworthy now, my logic went, but I wondered, could I change my appraisal?

---

This story bewitched my little mind. I kept it on repeat for months. It seemed vital to decipher its codes so I might know how to manage my own situation. The story revealed that a girl could be treasured by God—so much so that she was saved from corruption—and I desperately wanted to be saved too. You see, by this time I had been ruined many, many times by a trusted priesthood leader, whom I both loved and feared. I now understood that since God had not stopped it, he had seen impurity in me. I was unworthy now, my logic went, but I wondered, could I change my appraisal? Perhaps. Once achieved, God could bestow powerful protections upon me, and that seemed worth any price. And so this tale propelled me into decades of hyper-vigilant repenting, trying to change God’s mind about me. Impurity, mine: unfortunately, it wasn’t a new revelation to me. By five it was an old hat—one that my parents had placed upon me from my earliest memories. I forgive them for it.

They were products of their own time and childhoods. It does not, however, reverse that their limitations imposed a nearly fifty year penalty that I served faithfully without parole. My yoke included years of therapy, with a dozen therapists, digging for a root evil to excavate. When one therapist could not find it, I moved onto another. I threw in endless offerings of devotion and repentance: fasting, prayers, doubled tithing, offerings paid with credit cards, weekly temple visits, restitution letters filled with money plus interest for taking an extra lollipop from an office jar as a child, confessions to perplexed bishops who were not prepared to counsel me on how much meat, exactly, is prohibited by the Word of Wisdom, or if going over the speed limit on occasion made me a dishonest person, unworthy of a temple recommend. I yanked every weed, toiling the ground, back and forth, over and again.

It wasn’t all bad. Much of the work I was involved in allowed me to develop sound health practices, and a mind that looked for opportunities to serve and grow. It certainly helped me to avoid dangerous side trails that I wasn’t equipped to travel well, especially because my wounds encouraged extreme thoughts and behaviors. But, all these good projects were not transformative. Instead, they were intermittent distractions from the agonizing pain of feeling so flawed that even God could not tolerate me. What I think I really needed was for my parents to show up to say: “It is enough. You are good. We didn’t know it when you were little. We are sorry. It wasn’t your fault.” Because it turns out that the god I was trying to make peace with most of all was my parents.