Baptism

This weekend my niece got baptized. She is eight years old, and therefore deemed capable of making spiritual decisions of eternal consequence. She was beautiful, looking very much like her mother. Baptism means two new outfits; my niece is every inch a girly girl. Her mother made her the baptism dress, and she bought a frilly white gauzy thing for after. In a home where new clothes are rare, this means a lot.

She was beautiful and excited. The speakers kept on talking to her about choice, and her confirmation blessing talked about all the choices she will make. Two thoughts on this:
a) How can an 8-year-old make choices with eternal ramifications
and
b) How much choice can there be when it is your ONLY choice growing up in a TBM family?

I left the church when I was 22, and that was a choice that I could only make while living 3,000 miles from my believing family. It was difficult to cut through everything to what I wanted. All that year, I would do these meditating exercises where I would get to the core of me. I would take away what school had taught me, what society had taught me, what my family wanted, what my church wanted (that one was always last, and the most difficult to cut through). When I got to the core of me, I was happy. I was a happy idiot.

Describing this to my mormon roommate was an exercise in futility. She kept on insisting that THIS was my testimony, this is what god wanted me to find: the happy, obedient idiot.