A true believer leaves the fold
Written: Jul 18 '04 (Updated Feb 13 '06)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Laake's interesting writing style and brutal candor.
Cons: A whole lot about sex... maybe a bit too much information.
The Bottom Line: This book is one woman's truth. I would urge anyone who reads it to supplement it with other sources of information about the LDS faith.
|
|
|
| knotheadusc's Full Review: Secret Ceremonies - A Mormon Woman's Intimate Diar... |
Ten years ago, I picked up the late Deborah Laake's 1993 book Secret Ceremonies, probably because I had encountered a couple of Mormons when I was a college student and was curious about the religion. I don't remember much about that first reading, which surprises me since I just reread the book after ten years and found it to be a page turner the second time around. Ten years ago, Deborah Laake introduced me to a faith I would come to know better once I met my future husband, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS).
I remember reading Secret Ceremonies back in 1994, retaining a little bit about the extensive information that Laake included about garments and meeting an LDS couple who served in the Peace Corps with me. I mentioned to them quite innocently that I had read this book (although I don't think I even remembered the title of the book or its author). They knew which book I was speaking of and told me that I shouldn't have read it-- that it did not include factual or realistic information about the LDS Church. After talking to this couple, I felt chastened for having stumbled across Secret Ceremonies. After all, they were very nice people for whom I had and still have a great deal of respect. And then two years after my return from overseas, I met my husband, Bill, who was at the time, a practicing Mormon and newly separated from his ex wife. Bill's ex wife is still a practicing Mormon and his children are also being raised in the faith. Since our non LDS marriage, Bill has told me a lot about his experiences with the church; some of his experiences were good and some were bad. He's now inactive and has plans to formally resign from the faith. After reading the reviews of several other Epinionites, I decided that I wanted to take another look at Secret Ceremonies. I'm glad I did. I see it through different eyes and with more understanding now than I did ten years ago.
Secret Ceremonies begins with Deborah Laake as a young student at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, Utah. She writes in Chapter One, page 1
I knew I was the sort of girl to whom romantic things had always happened and always would. I knew it because I possessed good legs and lovely dresses, but I also could sense that the future would be perfect...
I find this passage somewhat puzzling given the outcome of Laake's life. In this book, Laake reveals the failure of three marriages, a descent into mental illness which included two hospitalizations, excommunication from the LDS Church, and a suicide attempt. Indeed Laake died by her own hand in 2000 after a bout with breast cancer with which she was diagnosed in 1994. This is far from what most would consider a "perfect future". But the book starts with an idealistic voice, as Laake writes of a relationship she'd had with a serious returned missionary named Robert-Peck, a man who had initially been attracted to Laake because of her free-spiritedness, but was ultimately repelled because of it. Laake establishes that the rules and standards at BYU were plentiful and stringent; nevertheless, as a young student, she was secure in her faith. She had been raised to embrace the faith and go to BYU in search of a husband-- even though her guidance counselor at her Florida high school had told her that she could have had her pick of a number of top notch colleges.
Laake writes that she became extremely desperate to be married. One of her roommates had turned twenty-one and was considered somewhat of an old maid until she finally got engaged. Laake was afraid she'd wind up in the same boat, since "Mormons believe that only the married are allowed to enter the Celestial Kingdom of heaven" (50). Laake writes that Ernest Wilkinson, BYU's president at the time (in the early 1970s), had urged students to pair off and marry as soon as possible. She quotes Wilkinson as having said
"With approximately seventy-five hundred returned missionaries on our campus, this is by all odds the largest, happiest hunting ground in the world, and their success is attested to the fact that approximately two thousand of our students marry each year" (51).
Moreover, church authorities urged students to marry and speedy marriages were encouraged in the mission field, where young Mormon men and women served to baptize non members into the LDS faith. According to Laake, missionaries were encouraged to be married within six months of their return home. Laake's own parents had agreed to pay for BYU so that Laake would have the chance to meet and marry "her own kind" (51). It was no wonder that Laake felt pressured to marry twenty-seven year old Monty, a worthy holder of the priesthood and her brother's roommate. Monty and Laake began to date, and Monty immediately asked her to quit her job so that they could spend more time together. Monty had told Laake that she was the right woman for him, yet he frequently criticized her for trivial things- her clothes, her family, even her kisses and what he considered to be an overly hearty appetite for food. Nevertheless, Laake writes that Monty seemed vulnerable and unable to live without her.
Monty proposed while he and Laake were sitting in a battered car. Although Laake was unable to picture herself with Monty, she found herself unable to refuse him because she so wanted to be engaged. Her initial plan was to become engaged and then break the engagement when it got to be too threatening. When he presented her with the ring, it felt like a lead weight on her left hand. Although she didn't love Monty, Laake eventually felt that she had to marry him when he told her that he had prayed and it was revealed that he and Laake should marry. Around this time, Laake spoke to another Mormon bride asking her if she loved her husband. The bride said that she didn't-- she was "taking it on faith." Laake seemed to get the idea that she could learn to love Monty.
Laake then very accurately describes in great detail temple ceremonies that she completed in the process of marrying Monty. I know they are accurate because I read passages aloud to my husband, who has been through the ceremonies himself. He finished some of the sentences I was reading aloud for me. Laake describes getting temple garments for the first time, an event that seemed to represent imprisonment for her, especially when it came to her sexuality. And then later after the ceremony, Laake and her new husband, both virgins, tried to have sex for the first time. The garments got in the way, hindering them in their clumsy efforts toward intimacy. Laake called her mother the morning after her nuptials and declared that she had made a dreadful mistake and wanted an immediate divorce.
What follows is the story of Laake's first disastrous nine month marriage and the beginning of her serious troubles with church authorities. Indeed, Laake sought counsel from several different male sources on how to make her life with Monty better--her brother, her bishop, and her psychiatrist. One of the main problems Laake seemed to have is that she was sexually unfulfilled. She and Monty used lambskin Trojan condoms provided by Laake's father, who was surprisingly liberal about birth control. Laake had asked him to talk to Monty about birth control and Laake's father had given Monty the condoms, but he'd told the man that at a dollar apiece, the condoms were expensive and should be reused. Laake describes in great, lurid detail how she and Monty reused the lambskin condoms after washing them out in the sink.
Ironically, it was her psychiatrist, a member of the church, who had introduced Laake to the concept of masturbation to orgasm. He had simply asked her if she had ever masturbated to orgasm when she complained of her dissatisfying sex life. Masturbation is forbidden by the church, but Laake became addicted and writes about her obsession with masturbation and sex in great detail. I got the sense that she had been denied so much in the way of sexual freedom that she had gone somewhat crazy once she discovered the ability to masturbate-- a perfectly natural and normal activity, but something she had to hide, lest she be censured by church authorities. Beyond her marriage with Monty, Laake endured two more marriages that ended in divorce. They are also chronicled in Secret Ceremonies.
I've read other reviews of Secret Ceremonies and it's been interesting to see the range of responses this book has gotten. Some people flat out pan this book because they believe that Laake has presented information about the LDS church that is not true. My husband confirmed that the information Laake included in her book about the ceremonies and laws is all true. To those that say that Laake has made up her story, I submit that this story is Laake's personal truth. I've heard enough of my husband's stories to believe that Laake was telling her version of the truth. To those that believe that Laake is self-pitying, I submit that while Laake may have been self-pitying, she was also mentally ill. I, by the way, did not perceive her tone to be self-pitying. To me, she seemed to be hopeless and frustrated because of her situation. To those that believe that Laake should have left the church sooner than she did, I submit that it's not easy to leave the LDS church, particularly when a member's family and friends are all members. Members of the church are discouraged from associating with apostates; to just quit the LDS church is not a simple affair. Quitting the church often means that the non-believer will lose contact with friends and family. In my husband's case, he has to face the fact that if his three children decide to marry in the temple, that neither he, nor I, nor the children's grandparents will be able to attend the ceremony. Non members are not allowed to enter the temple. Quitting the church also has eternal consequences which Laake also explains; according to the Mormons, as long as everyone in the family believes in the LDS gospel and is a member in good standing, the family will stay together in the afterlife. Those who are not members or who have failed to remain true to the faith will be separated from their families in the afterlife. To reject the church is to reject one's family, both on earth and in the afterlife, so I don't blame Laake for staying for as long as she did.
The late Deborah Laake had an interesting writing style. She used colorful similies and metaphors that made her account vivid and sometimes funny. Laake was also brutally frank in this account. This is an aspect of her story that could turn some people off. I found it refreshing. Granted, this book is not about LDS theology or doctrines and it does lack specific details on those subjects, but I don't think it was meant to be about what Mormons, in general, believe. It's my understanding that Laake meant for Secret Ceremonies to be an account of her experiences as a Mormon woman who felt oppressed, particularly by the men in her church. For those of you who have ever wondered about polygamy in the LDS church, I will share with you that Laake addresses it in this book and shares how polygamy is handled in the afterlife since it is neither legal in the United States nor officially endorsed by the LDS church.
Now for some negatives... Laake did seem awfully obsessed with sex, and reading about her obsessions grew tiresome after awhile. Laake wrote her account as if she were awakening from a long sleep and wanted to chatter incessantly about a new pleasure she had found. Some might say that she included so much about sex because it sells. I don't believe that. Laake included information from the many interviews she had to endure after her divorce where many church authorities questioned her about her sexuality. She was asked about whether or not she was a virgin when she married, whether or not she had been unfaithful to Monty during her marriage (and later to her second husband, Lowell, who was not a Mormon), whether or not she'd ever received oral sex, and whether or not she was living a chaste life after her divorce. Sex was relevant in this book, but it was heavily overstated. Obviously, Secret Ceremonies is also not going to be an unbiased account of life as a Mormon woman. Those who are active in the church and believe strongly in the faith are not going to like this book.
I read a large portion of Secret Ceremonies aloud to my husband, and he was impressed with Laake's story-- but he is what his ex wife and other members of the church would consider an apostate. He has asked me to add that the ceremony that Laake described in her account has been changed somewhat. For example, Laake writes of "penalties" for revealing the temple secrets. This was part of the ceremony when Laake took part in it back in the 1970s, but now this part of the ceremony has been stricken. In fact, a number of things have changed since Laake's day as a True Believing Mormon, but what she writes of the ceremonies remains the truth as it was in her day and is documented to be so. Laake herself also writes about some of the changes that have occurred since her departure, including the changes in the ceremonies.
In the paperback edition of Secret Ceremonies Laake includes an afterword that reveals the reaction that members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints had to her expose. Of course she was immediately excommunicated, and Laake includes stories of how she was treated by church members after the book was published. When she appeared on talk shows or at book signings, large numbers of church members would protest and participate vigorously in the audience participation part of the show in an attempt to discredit Laake or simply drown her out so that she wasn't heard.
I realize that some people have strong feelings against this book. As someone who is married to a man who has had direct experience with the LDS church and as someone who has seen some of the fallout associated with his departure, I can't be so quick to dismiss Deborah Laake. Her message isn't pleasant, and I will concede that she was evidently a woman who suffered from mental illness. But being mentally ill doesn't necessarily preclude someone from telling the truth. And once again, I believe that Secret Ceremonies was Deborah Laake's truth.
Recommended:
Yes
|
|
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.