Review
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Title: The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy: Haunting the Hearts and Heaven of Mormon Women and Men
Author: Carol Lynn Pearson
Publisher: Pivot Point Books
Genre: Mormon studies
Year Published: 2016
Number of Pages: 225, xvi, Endnotes
Binding: Quality Paperback
ISBN: 978-0997458206
Price: $19.95
Reviewed by Laura Compton for the Association for Mormon Letters
Once again, Carol Lynn Pearson brings readers a storyteller’s healing touch in her latest work, “The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy: Haunting the Hearts and Heaven of Mormon Women and Men.” It is a work that gathers the stories of more than 10,000 Mormon men and women who, in 2014, were troubled by the reality that polygamy still exists within the Mormon church. As she warns in the introduction, “You will read in this book some happy things, but mostly hard things, sad things, disturbing things. You will see open wounds. But the good news is that hands are at the ready to assist in the healing.” (3)
Two of those healing hands belong to Pearson herself. She’s used them before to tell Mormon stories through poetry, plays, books and music. “The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy” reflects many of the themes of previous work: love, feminism, equality, justice, healing, and the style, theme and subjects will be familiar to her readers. It is a work whose time has come, one which is very much and very clearly Carol Lynn, “wise-woman elder” who notices pain, examines it, addresses it, and seeks to relieve it by urging the community on to better places.
Combining her talents of foresight, healing, storycraft and research, Pearson takes the reader back in time to Joseph and Emma and the beginnings of polygamy, and then brings everyone, including her own forebears, on a trek whose goal is a new Zion. Along the way, there are slogs through muddy fields of despair, dangerous fordings of rivers of rage, and seemingly endless mountains of secret stories to be traversed. There is death and divorce and disappointment. But at the end, there is a place of hopeful rest–a place we’re not quite at yet, but a place we can envision well enough to create if we work together.
How, though, can a principle that was officially abandoned a century ago still affect the hearts and homes and lives of mainstream Mormons? Why is polygamy even an issue more than 100 years after two manifestos disavowed the practice? Because, while anyone found to be practicing polygamy in the 21st century LDS church is immediately excommunicated, “polygamy itself has never been excommunicated. It is still a member in good standing, waiting on the other side to greet us in heaven and causing large injury here on earth. ‘Polygamy delayed’ is still polygamy…. It is alive and unwell, a Ghost that has a dark life of its own–hiding in the recesses of the Mormon psyche, inflicting profound pain and fear, assuring women that we are still objects, damaging or destroying marriages, bringing chaos to family relationships, leading many to lose faith in our church and in God. In spite of its obvious damage, the Ghost is given an honored place at the family table.” (7)
Pearson is here to exorcise that Ghost. In doing so, she shares how she, herself has come to terms with the practice of polygamy: “As I gathered the broken pieces of God, I used only my own authority, only my own relationship with the divine, and the good, small voice that speaks inside me, to appraise them. I threw away many, and I kept many, assembling the bright pieces into One Great Thought. I asked only, ‘Do I see God’s fingerprints on this? Does this little piece feel Godly? Does it speak of love?’…When I picked up the little piece of God-ordained polygamy, I smiled because there was no question. I thanked the God of Love, and I threw that piece away.” (69)
While she rejects it as ungodly, she extends a hand of grace to the one who established polygamy within Mormonism: “I believe that seeing Joseph’s polygamy as an error is the kindest way to evaluate it. And the surest way to correct it.” (70) This ability to reject an error and still admire the one who perpetrated it might be puzzling to some readers who would rather see Joseph excoriated for the pain he caused by restoring this particular principle. Instead, throughout the chapters highlighting Joseph’s foray into and development of polygamy, Pearson shares her charitable love for Mormonism’s founding prophet and for his first wife, Emma. Indeed, her concluding chapter is an imagined opportunity to converse with the Prophet and share a vision with him just before he dies.
The suffering of the Saints beneath the crush of polygamy is enormous. By her own admission, “The stories I have received from those affected by these policies break the heart. These are my sisters, the Mormon widows for whom a heavy blow is added to a terrible grief. These are my brothers, the Mormon men with the love and the courage to marry a sealed widow, believing that it may place them at eternal disadvantage.” (97) Despite the suffering and heartbreak, Joseph is still seen in a charitable light. Why?
Perhaps some of her reasoning and willingness to offer to Joseph the grace of an admitted mistake can be found in this short statement: “Desire–compassion–the celestial business of knitting families together to build his own heavenly kingdom–these appear to be some of the motives for Joseph’s choices in his persistent matrimony.” (69) Throughout the pages of this book, it is clear that love and family are central pillars of faith for Pearson.
Perhaps, too, it is in part due to her own gift for empathy and her ability to build bridges and re-channel anger. There are plenty of reasons to be angry at the circumstances presented by Joseph and his Ghost. “Seeing preventable pain, mine and others, makes me angry.” Pearson writes. “But I know that anger is good only as a fueling station, never as a destination.” (2) This is a reminder to the reader encountering story after story of pain and suffering to try to reach beyond anger and not remain in that place.
One cannot take a healing journey while sitting still with anger. Someone must take the initiative to stand up, say good-bye to blame and anger and move forward to higher ground and solace for the downtrodden and weary. This is what motivates Pearson to continue to heal those she can, to extend a hand of empathy and compassion. “Along with so many other women and men of all cultures, nations, and religions, I have a calling to help the human family cross the plains of Patriarchy and enter the land of Partnership. This pioneering work I was born to. It was written in my bones and rattled around in my head before I even had words.” (3)
Pearson has the words now. Words of wisdom, words of healing, words that call us to repentance and urge us onward out of patriarchy and into partnership. Added to her words are others’ stories which she’s interspersed between chapters. Stories of men and women who have spent years secretly wandering in the wilderness that is eternal polygamy. They have been gathered together and the sounds of their cries demand attention–the attention of readers who, Pearson hopes, will pause to consider what they can each do in their own little corners of the world to create a Zion free of haunting ghouls.
Polygamy “has proved itself to be a destroyer. We–leadership, membership, women, men–are all better than to allow the pain and the stain of polygamy to remain on a church that is so vitally good, so profoundly strong in so many ways, and so demonstrably based on the principle of love….
“When the Ghost is finally banished…,” Pearson writes, “No one will experience apprehension over paperwork that plots out who will be with whom in heaven. All will breathe easily, confident that in the spectacular organization of the family of God, our Father and Mother in Heaven, all of us will receive, with each person we have loved and been loved by, a perfectly designed relationship, with eternal joy in good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over, a connection that our earthly minds cannot now begin to grasp.” (200-02)