Educated

My father and I looked at the temple. He saw God; I saw granite. We
looked at each other. He saw a woman damned; I saw an unhinged old man,
literally disfigured by his beliefs. And yet, triumphant. I remembered the
words of Sancho Panza: An adventuring knight is someone who’s beaten and
then finds himself emperor.
When I reflect on that moment now, the image blurs, reconstituting itself
into that of a zealous knight astride a steed, charging into an imaginary battle,
striking at shadows, hacking into thin air. His jaw is set, his back straight. His
eyes blaze with conviction, throwing sparks that burn where they lie. My
mother gives me a pale, disbelieving look, but when he turns his gaze on her
they become of one mind, then they are both tilting at windmills.
I crossed the grounds and held my palm to the temple stone. I closed my
eyes and tried to believe that this simple act could bring the miracle my
parents prayed for. That all I had to do was touch this relic and, by the power
of the Almighty, all would be put right. But I felt nothing. Just cold rock.
I returned to the car. “Let’s go,” I said.
When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies?
In the days that followed, I wrote that passage everywhere—
unconsciously, compulsively. I find it now in books I was reading, in my
lecture notes, in the margins of my journal. Its recitation was a mantra. I
willed myself to believe it—to believe there was no real difference between
what I knew to be true and what I knew to be false. To convince myself that
there was some dignity in what I planned to do, in surrendering my own
perceptions of right and wrong, of reality, of sanity itself, to earn the love of
my parents. For them I believed I could don armor and charge at giants, even
if I saw only windmills.
We entered the Sacred Grove. I walked ahead and found a bench beneath a
canopy of trees. It was a lovely wood, heavy with history. It was the reason
my ancestors had come to America. A twig snapped, my parents appeared.
They sat, one on either side of me.
My father spoke for two hours. He testified that he had beheld angels and
demons. He had seen physical manifestations of evil and had been visited by
the Lord Jesus Christ, like the prophets of old, like Joseph Smith had been in
this very grove. His faith was no longer a faith, he said, but a perfect
knowledge.
“You have been taken by Lucifer,” he whispered, his hand on my shoulder.
“I could feel it the moment I entered your room.”