From Joey Honey’s blog that ties into my earlier post about looking for community within the Catholic church compared to my previous life as a Mormon:
I wandered around Salt Lake City’s “Temple Square” for about an hour while my friend got married inside the Temple, into which I, as a non-Mormon, was not allowed.
“Hello! Welcome to Temple Square,” the attractive pair of South American girls said, simultaneously. They were ’sister missionaries’, serving their ‘mission’ in the US as tour guides in and around the Temple complex.
I guess my aimless shuffle and the iPod nubs sticking in my ears identified me as a non-Mormon. They asked me where I was from, et cetera, and asked me what I thought of their Temple.
..
They looked a little confused. “That tells you something, though, right? Christ said that you shall know a tree by its fruits. My life is very blessed, I have so many friends and my family is strong and happy, and it’s on the strength of this testimony that I bear witness to the truth of the Gospel.”
I was deeply jealous of the sense of community they all seemed to share. They seemed like genuinely happy people, close families and happy marriages, good friends and a supportive extended social network.
My rebuttal, in my head, was fierce: “Most of my friends think I am a little on the scary side. They worry about my unhealthy obsessions. My family goes to church but few are very serious and several have fallen away completely. I have lost several beautiful girlfriends because of my insistence on non-compromise as far as religion goes. The people in my church are for the most part intellectually lazy and morally loose, and they are nearly all unfriendly and cold. Where their personal prayer-life exists at all, it is often only a few notches above rank superstition. The history of my religion’s hierarchy is largely one of utter depravity and powermongering. If I hear about my Church in the media, it is sure to be an embarrassing and enraging story of abuse and negligence. I go to church alone, and I leave church alone. I suffer all this because I’ve taken great pains to research every religion on the planet, including yours, and I’ve decided that the teaching of the Catholic Church is true. I didn’t get any new friends when I made this decision, no one greeted me at the door, I didn’t magically become a better person, and my family is just as screwed as it has always been. So don’t talk to me about strength of personal testimony.”
My actual response was more tempered: “Well, ‘nice’ is nice, but it’s not exactly the same thing as ‘true’, is it?”
They smiled wanly and offered me a Book of Mormon.
I declined.
May 8, 2007 at 3:14 pm
To update that post: I have since found many friends in the Catholic Church, though it’s still of a different quality from the community that I see at other churches. I have made it a mission to be as ridiculously embarrassingly outgoing as I can at church. I don’t mean fake smiles, I just mean introducting myself to any and everyone. It seems to work, not for myself so much, but other people are able to meet through me and then they become friends, that’s how you get the community-ball rolling.
-Ben aka “Joey Honey”
June 11, 2007 at 7:36 pm
i just came across your site when i did a google search and found your site so intriguing. as a fellow catholic convert, i studied lds doctrines for a few months last year and came to the same conclusion as you did that the BOM wasnt true. it was very frustrating meeting with missionaries and having them ask me what i felt about certain passages and continually asking me if i wanted to be baptized. panicking i would always reply that i would rather read the ENTIRE BOM first before making any decision. their reponse was to tell me “if you have eaten one piece of the pie and know that it is good, you dont need to eat the whole pie to know that the entire pie is good.” i was shocked that they were kind of speeding up the process and the immense pressure i felt to be baptized and to just do it. this was so alien to me as i compare it to catholic conversion in which you have to take classes for almost a year prior to your baptism in order to fully understand the faith into which you wish to enter into. what a difference!!
August 9, 2007 at 12:05 am
That’s great, Ben. If it’s not too late to say, “Welcome”.
Olive, the pie thing… I could answer that it might be wise to dig around in a pie first ’cause there might be rocks baked into the other pieces! heehee