The New Bishop

Now that B. and I have been married and in the family ward for several months now, it's probably time I scribbled down some thoughts on the new bishop.

I've had some great bishops over the years. And I think I've probably had just as many loonies, stinkers, sociopaths and overall egomaniacal delusionals. One bishop would frequently stand behind the pulpit and raise his hands in describing how we'd all be lifted up as a Zion people at the last days (when he wasn't inappropriately probing temple recommend seekers on matters outside the scope of the prescribed interview questions).

Another bishop (of a singles ward) made "passionate kissing" a favorite topic of sacrament meeting discourses, denouncing any kind of labial engagement between single members that was more sexual in nature than what they would do with their own mothers. He didn't seem much to mind that his position on chastity, with its resultant disqualification of over a third of the elders quorum, meant that the remaining elders carried home teaching loads of over ten households per companionship (reward, apparently, for being unwilling, or, more commonly, simply unable, to enlist the physical affections of the opposite sex).

I could go on about the zany exploits and perverse and alternatively misguided words, actions and intentions of the others, but I have some work to get to, eventually.

The bishop of our new-found family ward has demonstrated a proclivity to the bizarre that ranks him among the weirdest and most troubling priesthood leaders I've ever had. His favorite subject: Sarah, the fair-skinned, blonde haired, blue eyed, large breasted wife of our father Abraham.

Indeed. The spiritual leader of our ward, the only man who holds, in the eyes of the church, the keys to presidency, revelation and prophecy in our ward of Zion, is actively preaching, in Sunday School, Elders Quorum and Relief Society, that Abraham married an American porn star. Not only that, but, to the point, a porn star so dedicated to him that she was willing to give her life for him by sleeping with Pharaoh. Evidence, of course, of a celestial marriage. In fact, those attributes constitute evidence of the only celestial marriage our bishop is aware of in the accepted canon of scriptures of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

He does, of course, have the obvious ecclesiastical advantages of being a rather successful corporate executive, president, no less, of a small media conglomerate here in town. If our Father so blessed him to live in a mansion currently valued by the Clark County Assessor at exactly $1,151,151, does his lurid doctrinal fantasy-land really matter? Does his wife's bizarre food fetish (comprising weekly, multi-ton ward free-for-alls of fruit, vegetable, flour and other stuffs, arriving from locales as fun and interesting as Siberia) matter, either? Does it matter enough to drive me away, again, from a church I can't, for the life of me, manage to stay away from?