By: David McMullen
To this day, I am still surprised that I ever was a Mormon missionary. This is not a fact that I am necessarily ashamed of, but if the entirety of my life were to be put out for an open public consideration, this is one part that I wish would remain a dusty curiosity in a corner of that display, nowhere near the centerpiece. But missionary I was, out there in Utah with an assigned doppelgänger, knocking on doors, pretending it’s completely natural to be one of two guys strolling up to strangers’ neighborhood barbecues in church clothes toting a piece of Bible fanfiction and a restricted sexuality.
Missionary work typically involves the same tasks every day, beginning with an early rise and a mad rush to get ready for the rest of it. I guess our message to share was just that important, and not a second could be wasted. Much of a missionary’s schedule is set in stone; we’d wake up, work out, rinse off, dress well, and get to morning planning (8:00 was Jesus’ preferred time). Morning planning, while supposed to fill thirty minutes, would usually take either three seconds or an hour; it really just depended on how much time had already been filled with appointments. Thankfully, missionaries have a lot of meetings with each other, so many times that open time would already be filled. Yet, on some black days, an entire sixteen hours would need to be planned with activities worthy of the Lord’s Anointed.
One morning, Elder Merriam and I found ourselves in this quandary. It was a Wednesday, which meant that we couldn’t go out and run errands (tasks reserved exclusively for Monday),
and we didn’t have any inter-missionary meetings that day either. This is a morning we would have to work.
“So, Elder, what do you think?” I asked.
Elder Merriam was new to the mission and had only been there for a few days. For a missionary’s first twelve weeks, they are considered trainees, and whoever they are paired with is their “trainer.” That was me, and since I didn’t have any ideas of my own about what to do that day, I figured it was the right time for my companion to learn how to plan. After some prayerful consideration (guessing, in other words), we decided to spend the morning knocking on doors in a neighborhood on the east side of Logan. We had not had much luck in meeting many people in town yet and hoped this morning would be different.
After daily planning was an hour of personal study, and this is what I lived for. For two years, my life was full-steam ahead, do-this, don’t-do-that, go-and-do, sixteen hours a day, six-and-a-half days a week. At my little fold-out desk and plastic chair, though, my mind was free to wander when I would let it. The words from the Book of Mormon I had to internalize about white pre-Columbian Native American Christian patriots became removed from the context of weekly meetings and church sermons and existed in a more abstract, democratic space. The alarm on our shared phone pulled me out of that groove. Recently, our mission president had invited, or told, all of us missionaries to spend at least half of our personal study time in our teaching manual, titled Preach My Gospel, where we memorized our talking points to the letter. Afterward was companion study, a time when Elder Merriam and I were supposed to discuss the concerns of the people we were teaching at the moment and how we could potentially circumnavigate them. Since we weren’t teaching anyone at the moment though, we had a long hour ahead of us and had to find other ways to pass the time.
“Why did you join the church?” Elder Merriam asked at one point. Evidently, he had caught wind that I was not a lifetime Mormon, and had been taught and baptized by missionaries in the previous few years.
“Things just got better for me after I started to live it,” I said simply.
“Like, how?”
This was a question I had gotten used to answering at this point. Being a missionary in Utah meant a few things. First, it would mean that I would be surrounded by a lot of other Mormons who love to care for their missionaries (I personally put on 60 pounds due to their hospitality). It also meant that I would have to share the story of how I joined the church with nearly all of them. Because it was told so many times, the story for me took on the quality of a word that is either repeated too often or stared at too long: it lost all meaning, and became a series of disconnected symbols. If Elder Merriam asked this question a year ago, I would have given a long-winded recited speech, one which I had refined through months of retelling. By this day, my answer had changed.
“I just think it works.”
This was the best response that I could give at this point. Two years before, when I was getting into the Mormon thing, I would have said that I joined the church because I believed that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God, or that the gospel as taught by Christ himself had been restored to
the world by his hand. After all, I was initially a happier person, and filled with purpose when I first joined the church, and those reasons which they gave me had to be why I felt the way I did.
But things had changed. I was living the way my mission president and the rulebook told me: I worked hard all day, I hardly thought of home and I didn’t masturbate. Yet, I had ceased being successful, and I had ceased being happy as a missionary. Success, by the way, is determined by how many baptisms a missionary gets. The church will say that the more important success is how much a missionary wants to baptize, not necessarily how many they get, but every time my mission president complimented a missionary, he was sure to cite their personal statistics to the rest of us.
It was also taught that righteous living brought righteous results. In fact, a common phrase barked out by us circus animals was, “obedience brings blessings, but exact obedience brings miracles.” Therefore, if one wanted to baptize more people, the solution would be to live the mission rules a little more strictly. If someone had any questions about this, the next answer from our president was that it came from a church authority, who acts with direct revelation from God. That should answer any proceeding questions. But it wasn’t working for me. I had lived in such a way that allowed the mission president to trust me enough to train Elder Merriam, yet the baptisms still weren’t coming. Days became long as we walked through the hilly neighborhoods we were assigned to. Without any teaching appointments, our time was spent knocking on doors, like we would be doing this particular morning. Every missionary, though, soon comes to find out that just because they hope to find people home, it doesn’t mean that they will find people home. Some days, we went to lunch having talked to no other people besides ourselves. Times would get desperate, and I’d welcome talking to anyone about anything.
This particular neighborhood was laid out in a grid, and up and down these blocks were lines of small, ornate old brick homes, each similar to the others, but unique in its own way. One had half-moon windows above its doorway. Another had its entranceway at the top of a small spiral staircase. Rather unpleasantly, one home in the neighborhood was a charred shell, looking like a home, but more like one’s death portrait. Apparently, it had happened when the person who lived there set fire to it, intentionally leaving themselves inside. Details about it could hardly be siphoned from the members we knew around there, but it was understood that this person had “personal struggles.” The house was supposed to be demolished, but its date was in limbo. This had been the case for years.
Since it was a weekday morning, almost no one answered their doors. It didn’t help that it was also fairly cold. Logan is known for this. Like New Orleans in Louisiana, Logan also sits at the bottom of a natural bowl, although instead of being below sea level on the coast, it is in the center of a range of mountains. These steep peaks trap the cold air inside, turning the town into a foggy refrigerator like it was that day. A wintry haze hung over the street. Although my knuckles had become raw from knocking in the cold, and I had become very bored with our work, I was having some fun watching Elder Merriam operate. After more than a year of preaching our message, I didn’t even feel like talking about the stuff anymore on a casual level, so as part of his training, his new role was to lead the discussion at the door, and our goal for improvement that morning was for him to sound like less of a robot. Recently, I had noticed that he started every contact with the exact same hul-LO! and handshake.
But I had been just the same way. I don’t think I felt confident at this thing until nine months in. I remember on one of my first days, my trainer had brought me into a home, started a conversation, then completely shut down, leaving us all in an awkward silence that seemed like minutes until I recovered. I still didn’t feel very skilled at teaching with only a few months before I went home, but it didn’t bother me that much anymore. As a trainer, all of my attention was supposed to be on my companion.
“Maybe our baptism is around the next corner!” he said with gusto as we turned towards our next row of houses. I smiled, though with the same irony as a parent at their child’s innocent but short-sighted remark. We strut up to the front door of the next house, I lay with one back handed knuckle the familiar bum-ba-bum-bum-bum, ba-bum on its surface, and wait.
The sound of what happened next is what I noticed first. I didn’t distinguish it as anything peculiar at first, maybe a crowing bird, but at some point, I noticed that it did not stop. Elder Merriam didn’t seem to, though, and performed the next knock himself. My attention stayed on that sound. As I listened, I began to recognize it as a human voice, but one which spoke with a very odd bounce. I got my companion’s attention and waited. It was definitely getting closer, so we peeked out from around the porch at who could be making this noise. It wasn’t hard to distinguish him from the frosty white glare. He was dressed in a bright orange Denver Broncos jersey over saggy blue jeans with an orange snowcap. As he walked closer to us, he held out his arms in an open embrace.
“Brethren! Hello!” He called in the bright style of a game show host. As he neared, I could see that he was not much older than us. His pale skin was pockmarked, and that his eyes could hardly be seen under the brown hair that branched from beneath his cap.
“I am St. Michael, of all denominations, and a fellow believer needs your help. John the Baptist lent me his wings so I could share the news.”
People yelling out random things to screw with the missionaries is nothing new, even in Utah. My favorite was “see-eer stones!” from a passing car as we walked near the Utah State University campus. Another person once simply yelled “Brigham Young!” at us. I waited for him to burst out laughing and run off, but he didn’t. To break up the increasingly awkward silence as well as the monotonous morning, I decided to engage with the show he was putting on. “What news?”
He went on to explain that a woman, while pointing to a house further down the street, had a problem that only two missionaries could fix. Even at the time, I didn’t believe at all in who he said he was, but I thought there could be something for us in his story. After all, we had hardly talked to anyone all day, so any task would spice things up. I looked towards the house, but before I could get any more detail out of him, St. Michael had managed to pull out his phone, start another conversation, and walk away.
“Fruity Pebbles, my favorite!” I heard him say, and then he was gone. With nothing else to do, we went directly to the house. We knocked at the front door and waited. The wait was shorter than expected. In fact, I did not think that anyone would answer at all. Not two seconds after we knocked, the door was thrown open. A backdraft of Marlboros and dust hit us like a runaway train. On the other side of it, a short, thin, middle-aged woman stood, her brunette hair frayed out like a frizzy mane. Her skin was browned and wrinkled, but it was her eyes that I took particular notice of. They bulged out of her head like ripened fruit and darted around like a latch was loose. Maybe this woman really needed something after all. “We heard you could use some help.”
“I have something in the basement.” “What would that be?”
“A demon.”
This wasn’t the first time I’d heard this, and it certainly was not a typical complaint, but it never meant anything more than just one scared Mormon. Elder Merriam looked at me sidelong with startled eyes, though whether this was at the notion of a demon actually causing a ruckus in the basement, or at this woman’s potential as a threat, I never got the answer. But this situation, real or not, was beyond his level of experience.
After a few more questions about what had been going on, we got a firm confirmation from her that this was indeed a demon we were dealing with. As she told her story, I couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for her. She seemed desperate, and was begging for our help. Thankfully, as the Lord’s servants, we had just the solution, and we followed this tormented sister down into her basement.
Looking back on this moment, a million thoughts should have been running through my head, and none of them should have led me there. Any number of threats, beyond a demon, could have been waiting for us. But the reader must understand that the missionaries are a blessed people, consecrated by the Lord’s official servants to be protected by legions of angels should harm come their way, so bad things happen to them only some of the time. As we descended the narrow steps, this woman informed us of the events that had been taking place inside of her home.
Apparently, for the past few weeks, a “spirit of contention” had arisen amongst her family with many petty arguments springing up between them. On top of that, every time she had to go into the basement, she always felt like she was being watched, and at night, she could swear that she heard noises coming from down there. Worst of all, she claimed that she saw it yesterday, and it was very angry.
Though it wasn’t the first time someone told me a demon was in their house, the concept was still new to me. When I was a child and was afraid of the dark, I did imagine bloodthirsty monsters waiting in my closet or under my bed, poised for the moment that my back was turned or my eyes were closed. As I got older, these nightmares faded into memory, and monsters only existed in movies, but in the world of the Mormon church, they never went away. Joseph Smith claimed that he once contended “face to face” with the devil. Early Mormon leader David Patten stated that he had an encounter in the woods with the biblical Cain, who had taken the form of Bigfoot. My own mission president in 2019 said literally that Satan was real, and that he and his minions were the monsters under our beds that we feared as children and should continue to fear as adults. Fortunately, the worthy men of the church (at least the white ones until 1978) hold the Melchizedek Priesthood, the power, and authority of God, which has the capacity to exorcize any unclean spirit. A fantasy is often more alluring than reality.
When we opened the door to the basement, I couldn’t see anything at all. It was dark and not much of it really could be seen, except for a few small mounds of clothes, which sent up an air of mildew and cigarette smoke that fumigated the cramped space. Dutifully though, I shielded my eyes like a sea captain and peered into the void.
“Don’t you see it?” The woman asked.
After a moment, I confessed that I didn’t. I turned to the shaking woman who was still very much afraid. Slowly, she raised a feeble finger and pointed it past my face. “It’s right there.”
Trusting her, I followed her direction, and I squinted my eyes real hard, but I couldn’t see any demon. A sudden thought then entered my mind, and that was that. This situation with this woman was similar to us in our teaching appointments. We would point others to verses of scripture, and certain chains of logic, in hopes that they would see things our way, and do what we need them to do for us. Was this woman really any different, though she was not on our side of the fence? What does that say about what we were doing out here? The irony of it all made me let out a chuckle, the first time I had laughed or even genuinely smiled for weeks. “What’s so funny?” The woman snapped.
“Nothing ma’am, I’m just not scared of demons.”
“So you see it?”
“Oh, I see it. It’ll be out of your hair in a moment.”
Her eyes lit up. “What are you going to do?”
“Offer a blessing.” I turned to Elder Merriam, who was in a stupor, looking as if he had no idea on how to act in this situation. “Can you pull out your handbook, and turn to the section on blessings?”
“S-Sure,” he said, fumbling around in his shirt pocket.
“All we’re going to do,” I said to the woman, “is say a specific prayer. That’s what Elder Merriam is looking for now. It’s nothing wild, but we do have to follow the steps.” He handed me the small white handbook. “Now, all of us need to get on our knees.” When we had, I went on.
“I will say it, and while I do, I will raise my right hand to the square,” — I put out my arm like a crossing guard, lifting my hand straight and tall — “and Elder Merriam will do the same. I will also ask him to close his eyes, and you should as well, Sister, like you are saying a prayer. Are we ready?”
They both gave me the nod, and I proceeded with the spontaneous exorcism. All the while, I kept my eyes fixed on the spot the woman pointed at.
“In the name of Jesus Christ, and by the power and virtue of the Melchizedek Priesthood in which I hold, I command whatever harmful or malicious forces that may occupy this home to speedily depart into outer darkness, and to never return, so long as those that abide here live by the covenants which they have made. Amen.”
“Amen,” they both echoed.
The woman opened her eyes and exclaimed. “It’s gone! It’s really gone! Thank you!” Her eyes shone with grateful tears.
I humbly smiled and bowed my head. I hadn’t seen anything, not even for a second, but at least this woman was relieved. The missionaries had done it again. The demon was gone, though I don’t think it was ever there. Just an empty promise. Like St. Michael returning with a message. Like my mission president’s claim that following the rules brings success. Like the things we would teach to the people in Logan. Like the things the missionaries taught me back home. Like all of it.