The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy - Carol Lynn Pearson | Ep. 2122 (Re-Broadcast)

Hello, everyone, and welcome to a very exciting and important week on Mormon stories podcast.

It is Carol Lynn Pearson week, where we will be introducing to our current audience, definitely

one of the most important interviewees ever on Mormon stories podcast, absolutely a top

five favorite of mine in terms of a beautiful brilliant human who's wise, but also one of

the most important voices in the history of 20th and 21st century Mormonism.

Her name is Carol Lynn Pearson, she is a poet, she's an author, she's a playwright, she's written

songs, she has been an advocate for women, she's been an advocate for Heavenly Mother, for

LGBT Mormons, she was an advocate for LGBT Mormons before anyone else was, and she's written

some of the most important books ever in the history of Mormonism, she wrote a book called

Goodbye Love You, where there was an international bestseller, where she talked about nursing

her husband to his death with AIDS, and she was, you know, Oprah Phil Donahue level international

bestseller. She wrote the primary song, I'll walk with you, the lyrics for that, she wrote

the lyrics for My Turn on Earth, the musical, the Mormon musical, she wrote the book The Ghost

of Eternal Polygamy, which talks about how polygamy still haunts us today, she has written so many,

so many important books, and so what we're going to be doing this week on Carol Lynn Pearson

week, we're going to be re-broadcasting two of my epic interviews with Carol Lynn Pearson.

This is one of the earliest video interviews I ever did, it was episodes 173 through 177,

released August 15, 2010, so this goes way back lower than episode 200, we're going to basically

take that full interview that I broke up into like four or five parts, so we're going to

munge it into a single episode, reintroduce you to this brilliant interview with Carol Lynn Pearson,

that's going to be part one of Carol Lynn Pearson week, part two of Carol Lynn Pearson

week is we're going to re-broadcast our interview with her, which was episodes 860 and 861,

where she talks about her book The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy that was released in January of 2018,

I promise you you'll find Carol Lynn Pearson to be funny, wise, witty, brilliant, courageous,

all the things, and then if that weren't enough on Carol Lynn Pearson week,

part three, we're going to have Carol Lynn Pearson back on Mormon Stories podcast,

because signature books is now releasing part one of a four-part series,

it turns out that Carol Lynn Pearson has been keeping diaries of all her interactions

with Mormon scholars, with Mormon general authorities, with Mormon leadership for, I don't know,

50 plus years, and so recently signature books released part one of a four-part series on her

diaries, it's volume one, 1956 to 1990, the book is called The Diaries of Carol Lynn Pearson,

Mormon author feminist and activist, and we're going to have Carol Lynn Pearson back on Mormon

Stories, hopefully with Barbara Jones Brown, and we're going to talk about this amazing new book that's

come out, and we hope to follow this entire series because I can promise you there's a really

important interesting informative history in her diaries. So that's it, enjoy this three-part series

with the brilliant, the wonderful, the wise, Carol Lynn Pearson, part one is my original interview with

her, part two is The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy, which you will enjoy, and then part three will be

bringing her back, and when we bring her back, we hope to have you, our viewers and listeners

join us so that we can y'all can ask her comments, y'all can honor her, you can tell her how much

her work is meant to you, and please buy this book and start reading it, and we can talk about the

book as well, kind of like a book club kind of thing. So please buy the book, kudos to signature

books, thanks for joining us today on Mormon Stories, and enjoy parts one, two, and three of

Carol Lynn Pearson Week. Goodbye, I love you, I'll walk with you, let's circle the wagons,

and it's our turn on earth. Take care everybody, and we'll see you in the show.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm so thrilled that we're doing

this live, so thankful to Community of Christ and to Lindsay, Sunstone, the Opus Stories Foundation,

and mostly to all of you who have come on a Thursday night and are willing to spend some time with

us. And I get to say thank you to John before you keep going on. Thank you for the beautiful music,

thank you to Lindsay, I love you Lindsay, John, thank you for inviting me, I love you John,

don't you ever forget it, and I love your good wife Margie sitting right there, and I love my

friends Kim Turner, and Tamara Wright for taking care of all my emnetitudes, so I can do what I do.

And we thank the Community of Christ for being so Christ-like as to welcome us here, thank you.

Let's give everyone a round of applause.

So those of you who follow Mormon Stories podcast will know that this is not the first time we've had

the dear Carolyn Pearson on our program, we definitely did one of those epic four or five hour

interviews with Carolyn, and we're not going to be retreading a lot of that ground from that interview,

but we are going to refer all our newer listeners to that episode, and we'll say that it's definitely

one of the most important episodes we've ever done, so if you haven't checked that out, pause this,

go listen to it, then come back and finish listening to this interview.

Carolyn has been important to so many of us for so long.

I don't know if it's doing her adequate justice to call her the myangelo Mormonism.

Do you like that? Is that okay?

Well, that would be way okay, with it it would be true, thank you for the thought.

No, we named our second child after my angelo, so we have deep respect for her work,

but when I read her writings, I feel like she's every bit worthy of that title and more.

Her books are so wonderfully written. I don't know that I've ever read a more

inspiring and thoughtful and wise authors, Carolyn. So Glad Lindsay was able to plug those books.

Today, we're here to plug an amazing book, and not the plug, but to explore.

I am to encourage not only everyone to purchase this book, but to read it and to share it.

I think it'd be kind of cool to read Greg Prince's introduction or sort of description of this book,

because from Greg Prince, this is actually saying a lot.

Greg Prince wrote, rarely in the history of Mormonism, has a literary work become approximate

cause of a shift in the way the institutional church sees itself, interprets its past or charts

its future, with Juanita Brooks's Mount Meadows massacre and Lester Bush's Mormonism's Negro

doctrine in historical overview being on the very short list. Now, Greg is not necessarily known to

be effusive in his praise, but he writes, the ghost of eternal polygamy has the potential

of joining that list, blending her personal passion and insights with the voices of the respondents

to her massive survey. Carolyn Pearson has hit a home run in her quest to illuminate both the

damage that Mormonisms de facto practice of polygamy continues to inflict and the route to a

better, more humane place. Those who truly hope for eternal polygamy or who resent any call to

institutional reform will be upset, but countless others will rejoice that she has shown a more

excellent way. I have to admit that I stopped reading Mormon books a long time ago just because

I kind of got bored and maybe it's a little bit of avoidance, but I've had this book for a while

and I haven't read it, but over the past two days I read it and I'm just telling you this is

an amazing book, it's important and it's super powerful and I just can't say enough about the

importance of this book. How many of you have read it? Raise your hand. All right, good for you

about half of you. The other of you have some work to do. So let's dig right in. So Carolyn,

you have a long history. 40 books, is that right? 40 plus books.

She can't play and small books and humor. Yeah. So poetry, plays, books,

but what you've often been known for, Carolyn is the author, she wrote My Turn on Earth,

the lyrics for My Turn on Earth, right? And the story. And the story. The wonderful hymn,

if you don't walk as most people do, some people walk away. That's hers as well. I won't. I won't.

Yep, that's mine. And of course, Liz has already mentioned her book, Goodbye, I love you.

And Carolyn, in my realm, has been really known as an advocate for the LGBT community for decades and

decades. So there was a point a couple years ago where she was like, hey, I'm kind of putting

a little bit of the brakes on that effort and I was like, oh my gosh, how can that be possible?

That's kind of, you're going to write out in the sunset on your LGBT work. And she had

something else in mind. So tell us just a little bit about why you decided to do this

as your next, if not final work or at least book. Did you say this is your final book?

Oh, no. Okay, good. Okay, good. So as her next book.

And I don't recall exactly what I said to you, John, but the fact is that I was born

into this world with women's issues. And then I married into gay issues and had an opportunity

because of that to do some very important work for our LGBT people.

But along the line, I continued to do my work for women, a lot of things. And especially

that DVD that Lindsey held up Mother Wolf the morning, 16 women throughout history and search

of God, the mother, very, very important. But I felt that there was something further

that I wanted to do for women. And it just kept coming at me as sort of the major issue

that needs to be handled before we can move on to other things of how to bring women

more centrally into the LDS church. Because this concept of eternal polygamy I think gets in the way.

And it haunted me terribly when I used to believe in polygamy. And as you may have read those

who have read the book, the first major trauma that I had on this subject was in seminary class

at the late great BY high school in Provo when our seminary teacher Boris's testimony that this

is God's way of marriage and that we are not allowed to live it now. But if we are sufficiently

worthy, if we, as we become less selfish, you young women, if you become less selfish, you will

understand the beauty of all this. And you're in to live this principle. And I remember truly

where I was in that classroom watching that much loved teacher bear us his testimony and knowing

that he would not lie to us. But knowing and walking home knowing that there was a wedge between

me and God, between me and God's church because that was not right. And that led to so many years

of study and anguish and tears as a very good thoughtful BYU student. I would study the books of

the brethren and then I would come home and weep because I was forever second class. And the

final thing that proved that was polygamy. So that has always been something that has been very

hurtful, very hurtful to me. And gradually, as you will read in the book, I gave that up believing

that is never was and never will be of God. And I continued to see hurt around me. I continued

to hear from women. And I continued to hear from my loved cousin in Provo, whose husband had passed

10 years before her. I'm asking her, how do you feel about that you and I are going to move over

there one of these days. How do you feel? Oh, I feel fine about it. But I wonder if my husband has

taken a second wife already. And I was just floored and then furious. And I'm ever leaving

her house and saying, somebody needs to do something about that. And obviously, I am the person.

Obviously. Absolutely. No. No, I am perfectly positioned to write this book, which I didn't.

Absolutely. So this book, I mean, really at the core, it's about the role of women in our theology

and in our world. I mean, really. But you chose to sort of address that through the lens of

polygamy. And Lindsay and I have had a few talks about the extent to which everything sort of traces

back to polygamy, right? And so talk about that. Because really, I think if this book had a message,

it's that women and men need to be partners in life, government, in marriage, in church

government, et cetera. Why talk about the role of women and the importance of women through

the lens of polygamy versus just doing a book about women and the need for us to respect and love

them more. And we love women, don't we, John? We do. And I mean, who can just write a book about women?

I mean, and especially if you're on the trail of trying to find a fuller place for women in this

world, we have to look at all that and say, okay, what are the things that need to change? What are

the things that we've got to move forward with in order to create a place where partnership can

live? And moving out of part, out of polygamy, out of patriarchy into partnership is the larger

general theme of this book. And many of us understand and like the word partnership. And you can

even hear some of our general authorities use the word partnership as they talk about what

marriage should be. But marriage can never be a partnership. If polygamy is anywhere on the horizon.

And consequently, I mean, there are plenty of ways that people can choose different aspects of what's

holding us back from men and women being true partners, which does not mean doing the same

things, thinking in exactly the same way. We need the richness of the diversity of whatever

women and men bring to the table. But they have to bring it equally and with equal regard

for what it is that they bring. And to me, in my particular religious organization, the concept

of polygamy is one of the, and maybe the first obvious thing that holds us back from moving into

partnership, because a polygamous arrangement is antithetical to partnership. It simply is.

And it is my belief and my commitment to do whatever I can until I die, that the LDS Church,

which I happen to love, the Mormon community, which I regard very, very highly, deserves better

than this. And my theme is, we are better than this. And that's why I have spent it all the time

that I have in bringing forward all of these really heartbreaking stories to show the worst of what

is going on in our community so we can do better because we are better. I love it.

I love the story about the screenplay you were asked to write. Can you tell us that story because

this is a super cool story? Sure. This was when in the 80s, late 70s, that I was invited by

Jim Concling, who was a producer in Hollywood, who had been invited by the brethren to

be the person to had producing a major motion picture about the Prophet Joseph Smith.

So the brethren were thinking about sponsoring the money? They provided the money.

And it was determined to ask maybe it was eight, but I think it was either six or eight different

writers to produce a screenplay for a small amount of money that they would give. And then

whichever of those turned out to be the best, that one would be chosen to be actually filmed.

And the brethren wanted it to go through this Hollywood office because they didn't really

wanted to come directly from from Salt Lake. So Jim called me and asked if I would be one of these

several to try it. And I was honored and I thought, oh boy, Joseph Smith and I had not had a really,

really smooth sailing relationship. But I knew that he was an extraordinarily

tremendously dramatically interesting figure. And this whole thing interested me a lot. And I had

spent some years writing religious scripts and educational scripts for BYU Motion Picture

Studio. So anyway, I decided, yes, I would do that. And so I dove in, and for a couple of years,

I immersed myself in the materials that Jim sent to his books and papers and out of print things.

And it was fascinating to really read everything that I could about Joseph. And I wrote this screenplay

that I called, you called it brother Joseph. The American prophet. Yeah. And I really enjoyed writing.

I found tremendous appreciation and empathy for Joseph. And I found a lot of anger against him as

well. And I write off the bat. I said to Jim, we're going to bring polygamy into it. Well,

we have to, some of it, but that won't be the focus. So I did bring it in. And I think I had

a couple of scenes that were really very poignant and very correct in how it handled all that.

But to shorten all this, there were really only, I understand, about three or four of the writers

that made it through to finishing a screenplay. And at any rate, you're one of two that made it to

the end. Yeah, of those that were finished, mine was one of two that was selected as good possibilities.

And they actually thought about trying to combine these two screenplays. And I mean, that's a weird

thought. But anyway, finally, that project did not happen. And the criticism that came from

Salt Lake City about mine was that I, I was too sure. Too sympathetic to Joseph's wife, Emma.

And also too sympathetic to Joseph's friends who turned against him at the end. I'm assuming William

Law. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's true. I was. I was sympathetic. And I am sympathetic

to those men and certainly to Emma. So anyway, that's that's the story about that particular thing,

Joan. And the project was put on hold. It says the powers that church headquarters

could not agree on how to represent their founding prophet. And so no film was made.

No, that's true. Can you, would you ever be able to share that screenplay?

Oh, I own it. But I, I, I, I, I, I wouldn't want to put it out. It's, it really is not a great screenplay.

Who believes that? Raise your hand. No, it's, it's not, it's not a great screenplay.

I, I did a lot of good things with some of the characters and some of the,

some of the scenes. But it was a little bit too much like a, like a stage drama.

And it relied too much on dialogue. But I did some very good things with it.

Well, you wrote, you wrote a theme song? I did. Well, you read, do you mind reading some of the lyrics

of your theme song? Wow. Is that all right? Sure. I've got to start for you. I think that's it right

thing. I love to have her read. Doesn't you heard the Marmer Stories interview before? Okay, okay.

She's great at reading. I, I did write this as a theme song and I refer to this theme song at the end.

And I, I, I had this being, yes, I, I had this theme song being sung as Joseph comes out to

greet this wagon train of dozens and dozens of wagons that just could, it poured and this is,

it was all historically accurate. These wagons just poured into far west Missouri and,

and I had this, this theme song going as that, as he would shake hands with people coming through.

Brothers and sisters, hold out your hands. Let me touch you, help you understand that we are

brothers and sisters, all family. Your joys are my joys and your hurts hurt me.

Way down within us where spirit is flowing, there moves the dream, the vision, the knowing,

that from the beginning, God's breath was inside us. There is no ending. Not death can divide us.

Brothers and sisters, hold out your hands. Love one another till everyone stands as brothers and

sisters, sharing the sun, learning at last that we are one. And Joseph did try to, you know,

create Zion. Did try to teach that we are one and we'd care for each other and help each other

and, and, and much of that happened well in those early days and a lot of it didn't.

So, some of the feedback that this book has received from a few people probably reflects the

temperament of many who have studied Joseph's life in the 21st century. And that's just a

feeling of real frustration and anger at Joseph Smith. Talked a close friend of mine just a

couple days ago who just was furious at Joseph Smith. And, and, and while you don't pull punches on

Joseph, you have a chapter called Brother Joseph where, you know, you are not only critical of him,

but you also are very kind to him. Can you talk about that and how, how someone who knows so

much and feels so strongly about the issues that come from Joseph that you would write this very

hard-hitting book that made me want to punch brick? How you can still have love for Joseph?

Well, I have had people say to me, you were, you were much too kind to Joseph, much too kind to him.

And, I understand that there is a way in which that likely could be true.

I already did have all those stories that I had called when I was commissioned, of course,

to show Joseph in the best light possible. So, I had found all of those stories. And, I wanted to show him

as much as was correct toward the beginning for a lot of his strengths. And, I really did not want to

just go after him to punch him for just doing all this dirty, awful stuff. And so, as I read that

screenplay, again, and I, and all of those instances are correct. I didn't make up one thing about

those. And, they did show a man who was generous to a fault, who came home barefoot, having given

away another pair of boots, who really did a lot of remarkably kind things. And, and so I,

I wanted to show that part of him so that I could feel more balanced when I actually said the words,

Joseph made an error. Joseph made a mistake when he brought us polygamy. And, also, you know,

I was maybe remembering something I've never forgotten from Speech 101, BYU, where I majored in

Speech and Drama. That a major thing to look to remember about creating a speech is,

bring your audience, meet your audience where they are, and take them where you want them to go.

And, I wrote this book not just for those who are dissidents. I wrote it not just for people who

kind of hate Brother Joseph. I wrote this for the people that I really wanted to get on board

and walk with me through all of this to get to some of the tough stuff. And, so I really felt

that if I gave them a glimpse, that I was not a hater of Joseph, which I was not, and I am not,

that I would invite them to get on board, and they would think, oh, maybe I can do that.

And, I've had a number of people write to me and thank me for letting them continue to have

their feelings about Joseph. Oh, I tell you that I know that I did that, and I don't apologize

for doing that because it wasn't on us thing that I did.

Every single one is zero sugar. Tap the banner to learn more.

And, you also don't pull punches. I'll just kind of read a little bit of...

Sure. Do you want to read it or you don't need to?

Oh, go ahead.

Okay. Joseph Spargerfurs, those who today are faithful to the church he founded, as well as those who

have no reason to be partial to Joseph, paint a picture with strokes that suggest. Here we go.

A tragic hero who acted sometimes recklessly. He placed quick and unjustified confidence

in people who turned out to be traitors. He was not economically realistic, attempting far

more than he or his people could manage, running up debts that plagued him all his life,

and fleeing from a financial disaster that he himself caused and that nearly destroyed his church.

He was overly optimistic, overlooking the practical obstacles in a plan, and going ahead anyway,

often to fail. He prophesied success for a rash venture, then blamed his followers for their

lack of worthiness when it failed. He could be obstinate when contradicted. He believed all his

revelations, never questioning, never doubting that they came from God and making proclamations

in the words of Mormon scholar Eugene England, in the full flush of classic hubris.

Mormon history at BH Roberts put it this way, the prophet lived his life in crescendo.

That sounds like the kind of character that furries will surely take down.

Yeah, I believe that. He was a very, very, very complicated man, and I think he was a tragic hero.

But the writing is just so powerful. It's so good. Yeah, it's so good. No question the Joseph

used his people, asking of them more and more. He used his people as building blocks, but the

end of us they were creating was for each of them, was just as much as it was for him.

Okay, so that was super useful to understand. You love Joseph, but you also are willing to be

critical of him. Oh, yeah. Chapter three is a really interesting chapter. It's called the why

of Mormon polygamy, and you talk about why it happened. So what is your best after studying

this really in depth? If it wasn't revelation from God, how and why did it happen?

If you had to sort of like give us a timeline, you wrote a little bit about maybe Fanny Alger

and what Joseph was feeling and thinking. By the way, what does Cumbly mean? You used that word

to describe Fanny Alger. I think you were quoting others. I was quoting that. We'd made a

attractive. A attractive. Okay, all right. Pretty. So what's your best summary of how and my

point of me happened? I do quote there saying that I went to Utah to interview a whole bunch of people.

And I interviewed, well, one of them was Professor Marvin Hill. And he said to me, do you want me to

tell you how I think polygamy got started? And he was a church historian, right? Church historian.

No, no, no, but he was a professor of history at B1. And he wrote an important book with

the Delanox on the fate of the. So he said, my best guess on how polygamy came to be

is that two things happened at the same time. Joseph was studying the Old Testament deeply.

Learning about prophets Joseph knew that he was now a prophet and he was trying to decide what

does that mean or what does the prophet do or what what is a prophet. And brother Hill said at the

same time, I believe Joseph fell for Fanny Alger. And he had all these feelings for her

that he felt had to be wrong. But somehow or other, these two things that he had was experiencing

came together. And they relieved him of this terrible, terrible dilemma. And he began to think, okay,

if I am a prophet and they were prophets in the Old Testament and many of them had more than one

wife. And if I am having these feelings for a woman other than Emma, these feelings must be

coming of God. And this must mean that I as a prophet should participate in the same thing that

many of the other prophets did. And so said Professor Hill, I believe that Joseph sort of created

his answer by bringing those two things together and making it work. Do you think he believed it?

Oh, I think he believed it. I do believe that Joseph

thought that he was doing the will of God. Now maybe there was a time when that got so far away

from him that he, I hope that he wondered, is this really what God wants me to do? But I think that

rather than just beginning and ending with the idea that he was a scoundrel, which I cannot do,

I believe that he did believe a very great deal of what this was all about.

One of the coolest things about this chapter is you sort of take down each of the historical

justifications that people have used to justify polygamy. And I'm going to just read some,

and if you want to give like a one second response. Yeah, that'll take you a long time.

Oh, let's do a couple. So necessary to multiply a reproach to the earth.

Didn't do it at all. No, no. Joseph doesn't have any progeny that can be proven from these other

wives. And in Utah, it's been shown statistically that monogamous women provided slightly more

children than each polygamous woman did. Okay, too many women, so many women in Utah,

we just had to find them, you know, we just had to remember multiple women. All the widows.

The church technologists of that, the demographic show that there was written never a time in all

those decades that there were more women than men. Polygamy produced more faithful members,

raising up a righteous seed, as they say. You can, the way you define faithful, you can. You could say

that those that plagued me brought people who also were very hard line authority oriented

pulling them as people. But, you know, when I, I, I said an email to Tom Kimball asking his

opinion on that, he said, ah, from what I see in my family, and he was a quite great grandson of

hebercy. He said, um, polygamy just brought more, what was the word he used?

Tom said, um, probably we brought more fundamentalist people. Yeah.

Even now the majority of my Kimmel cousins are not Mormon, Tom says. Yeah.

Yeah. How about there had to be a restoration of all things? Oh, he said fundamentalist and atheist,

is what he wrote. Yeah. Restoration of all things. Oh, golly. That's just so. That's so. Let's restore

everything in the Old Testament, right? Yeah, let's get animal sacrifice back. Let's get you can't,

you know, I'm, I'm wearing two different kinds of clothing put together that, you know, this is,

this is linen, and this is whatever. This is maybe silk. Let's, let's, let's bring back the,

you can stone your children if they disobey you. Let's bring back all these things. How ridiculous.

I mean, you know, if you build, if you build a new house, and you say, oh, let's choose something

to take from the old house that will really, you know, remind us of our good times there.

You choose something beautiful. You won't, you won't find the, the ugliest, dirtiest thing

that you could practice, could bring and say, well, we got to restore. I mean, I, I have no

patience with that term. No, no patience at all. That, that, that, that, that everything had to be

restored. I got to go in a little bit. All right. So maybe there were more women, there were more

righteous women. The men were scoundrels. So we needed, you know, the righteous women needed to

be married to someone. Wait, how to, that's not ready in there. There are more righteous women.

There are more righteous women than me. Yeah. Okay. Well,

see, I have no patience with that either. That's just, you know, this is pretty insulting to men.

That was terribly insulting to men. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you, Carol. I appreciate that.

That's just so rich. And there's also some crazy stuff. And the, the, the only documentation

anybody can find for that was some silly dream by somebody, some general authorities son

who had a dream saying, you know, when Lucifer, when Lucifer sent out, you know, the, the call,

that they, that you follow me, that there were, what, a lot more men that followed, no women

followed. So there were a lot of women who righteously stayed with Christ. And we have to find a

place for them. Come on. I'll give you a lot of my dreams that, that, that bring out all kinds

of weird things. I just give that no credence at all. And, and this chapter is wonderful because

it gives a takedown of every single major justification ever offered towards polygamy. It's really good.

Well, listen, get, go to the one that says, if polygamy hadn't been, I wouldn't even exist.

That's my favorite awful one. Let's talk about that, Carol.

I tell in the book of, of my great grandmother on my mother's side who said no to polygamy,

we will get to that story. That was the great grandmother on my father's side who said yes to

polygamy. I came through the second wife. You're telling me I wouldn't exist unless polygamy had

existed. The my eternal soul would not have found some clever way to get itself down to this earth

in some perfect spot in order to continue my, my eternal life. Listen, every war that has ever

existed brought forth beautiful children. Rape has brought forth beautiful children. Does that

mean that these things are good just because they brought forth a child? Come on. That there's no

logic to any of that stuff. Yeah, turn the page. Get a new chapter.

Just read us that last. I love it. Imagine, join with me in invoking visual imagery of this final

few sentences of this chapter. Sure, the outline of right. Well, I have to read the paragraph

in my head. But a brother Joseph said that friendship is a grand fundamental principle of

Mormonism. True friendship, I believe, is described in that lovely thought. I have read more than

once from writer Dina Craig, who lived in England during Joseph Smith's lifetime. Oh, the comfort,

the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor

measure words, but pouring them all right out just as they are, chaff and grain together.

Certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping and then with

the breath of kindness below the rest away. I count myself as a friend to brother Joseph

and I wish to honor him like this. I hold the fullness of his life in the palm of my hand,

chaff and grain together. I keep the many kernels worth keeping and with the breath of kindness

below the rest away. And that's why I have spent so many months, a couple of years,

more years, trying to get rid of the chaff of polygamy, so we can truly see the more honorable

aspects of brother Joseph's work. Our good friends that community of Christ have done that, you know,

they give us a good example in a lot of ways.

One of the first moments of this book that made me want to literally punch my fists through a brick wall

was when you talked about Emma. Specifically, and I should know this, but I had totally forgotten,

I'll just read. Her eternal salvation was at stake. She gave in, took women by the hand and gave

them to Joseph. She watched as the two partridge sisters were married to her husband,

not knowing it was a charade to appease her, not knowing that they had been married to him

months before. Yep. Can you talk about Emma and pretty dishonest? Well, just talk about Emma

and why you wanted to dedicate a chapter to Emma. Well, golly. As I dedicate there at the first

page of the book, this book is dedicated to Emma who was the first to weep. Emma was so brave,

and so truly committed to Joseph's work. That's what must have driven her crazy. She was not

pretending. She believed in Joseph's work. I think all the way through. So she had to find a way

to hold in one hand her belief in Joseph's divine calling and the tremendous personal hurt

that came to her through polygamy. She was this bright woman. She was a couple of years older

than Joseph. She was much more educated, but she revered him as her prophet and her husband.

But this thing, this dishonest

event that came into her life that drove a wedge between her and her husband seemingly

because of God, which things she didn't really know about for quite some time.

She evidently... She was wife number 20 something, right?

I don't remember what it was. She saw what was happening. What number was Emma sealed the Joseph?

Well, 23 something. Yeah, she wasn't sealed for a long time. She knew something about what was going on

with Fanny Alger. But she was kept in the dark for a lot of these women.

And so this woman that I think all of us who know anything about her revered a lot

was treated very, very badly. She was treated dishonorably and dishonestly

by her husband. And she had to find a way to deal with that because here she was. This prominent

woman in the community, her commitment to Joseph was profound. And I believe she was torn

almost to madness sometimes. And I wonder sometimes if she wasn't afraid for her life,

because there were people who wanted to get rid of her really. When she was being

a stumbling block to the church, I think she was sometimes afraid for her life.

Talk about the healing experience you had and almost a visionary experience you had.

Visiting Navu in the context of thinking about Emma and Joseph and the revelation and

plugging me. It's one of my favorite parts of the book. Right. Well,

I was asked to go to Navu with affirmation, you know who they are.

Our, the community of our LGBTQ brothers and sisters in the church and out of the church,

you have Mormon base. And I didn't want to go. And I was so busy writing this book. I was saying

no to all my friends going to a movie. I was doing nothing because nothing was as interesting to

me. Go to a movie. Why should I do that? When I could write this book that was so thrilling to me,

I would get up in the morning and I could not wait to. And anyway, it was thrilling to write this

book. So I said no to go. But finally, my dear friend, Randall Clacker convinced me,

oh, please, please come to Navu. It was a leadership conference. And so I went. And it was a wonderful

experience. And my assignment was to, to give a talk about Emma in what I understood to be called

the big room in Joseph Smith's red brick store upstairs. And, and as as part of that, I, I gave the

presentation of Emma Smith, who is one of the 16 women that I present in Mother World of the

Morning, who have a connection to God the Mother, either wanting her, having forgotten her, whatever it

was. And of course, we know that Joseph did have a concept that there must be a mother in heaven.

And so I utilized that as my way to write that that scene of Emma. So I, so I did that. And then I

went downstairs and Lachlan McKay, this very delightful charming man who is now one of the 12

apostles in a community of Christ, was there as the shopkeeper. And this is the store where Joseph

really built so Joseph could earn a living. But two or three months into it, it collapsed because

Joseph gave away all the goods. He couldn't, but the people who could not pay for for goods, he

couldn't not give them to him. So anyway, that's where we are. We're in Joseph Smith's brick store.

And I am the last one to finish as people are talking to me. And I am, Lachlan had shown us around

and he knew of my interest in polygamy. So he's there as the shopkeeper and I choose a few things

that I'm taking home. A mug, right? Joseph Smith mug? A Joseph Smith mug that my pens and things

are in on my desk. He says, Joseph Smith's red brick store. And so as Lachlan is wrapping these

things for me for travel, he says, you know, that the room up there, one of those two offices,

that's that's the place where Joseph Smith wrote out your section of 132 about polygamy.

And I said, wow, really? Just right up there, that's where that happened. And he said,

yes, it did. And I said, I said, please, I've got to go back up for a minute. Can I please?

He said, certainly, take your time. So I ran up the stairs. Well, I've got to read it then.

You got to read it. It's already. Tell us what you're reading though. Oh, you're going to read,

okay, yeah, yeah, you know, you know your book. These are the Joan of Art boots, right?

No, I want to see where your Joan of Art boots are. I do.

Do you ever wear them in public? No, no, no. I kept my Joan of Art boots. I played Joan of

Art at BYU, a director Harold Hanson. We were supposed to turn all the costumes in, but I kept the

boots. And they were just felt boots and long shoot laces. And I thought, if I asked here,

Dr. Hanson would give them to me, but I didn't ask. I just took them. So they're in my personal

archives. Tell them, tell them when you, when you, when you wear them. Well, once in a while,

I have taken them out and worn them when I needed to feel Joan's courage coursing through my veins.

I have Joan of Arc's boots to wear. Can you guys see cute little Carolyn Pearson putting on a Joan

of Arc boots and give a little courage for the day? I love that. I want to see a picture of your

boots. Okay. We can arrange that, John. Okay. Okay. No, these boots I bought in Caramel,

California. Okay. I'm sorry. I digress. I digress. And let's get back into the mood here because

this is very important. So I am, I am up there in the, in, in Joseph's, in Joseph's office.

And I, I, I call down, I'm going inside, but I won't touch anything.

And if this is an office right by the big room where I just presented the Emma.

And I, I stand there in the office. And I, I am seeing in my mind,

I, three men in that office, Joseph, his brother, Hiram, his secretary William Clayton discussing

plural marriage and Emma's refusal to accept it. I listened as Hiram urged Joseph to write the

revelation down and let him take it over to Emma and read it to her. Certain he could convince

her it was of God. Joseph replied, you do not know Emma as well as I do. Hiram persisted. And so

Joseph spoke the revelation which William wrote down sentence by sentence. I walked with Hiram as

he hurried to his sister-in-law, sat at her home and read aloud the revelation to spoke of the

eternal nature of the marriage covenant and the acceptability sometimes the commandment of plural

marriage. I watched Emma's face only skeptical at first become hard. Her eyes narrow, her mouth

burst as she heard the words directed to her. But if she will not abide this commandment, she shall

be destroyed. Sayeth the Lord. I watched Emma rise now with fire in her eyes as she angrily ordered

Hiram to leave saying that those words were not from heaven but to come straight from hell.

Hiram left. Emma collapsed in sobs and I watched seeing it all as I stood there in Joseph's office

in the red brick store. I remembered then the big room just feet from where I now stood. I watched

as Emma and her Mormon sisters in that room, in their homes, in their wagons, in sickness and trial,

in childbirth, welcomed and used the spiritual power Joseph had promised them. They administered

to one another through the anointing of oil and the laying on of hands. They rebuked illness

and darkness. They pronounced healing blessings and did so in the name of the Lord.

A strong intent moved through my body and settled in my chest. I raised my palms in front of me

and I spoke aloud softly. Dear God, our Father and Mother who are in heaven and in our hearts

and in this room, I am so grateful to be standing here. I am grateful for the beautiful and important

things that happened in this city and in this building. And now as a member of the Church that Joseph

founded, as a Mormon woman who has been blessed by many things that happened here but has been

deeply wounded in consequence of something that transpired in this room, I take it upon myself

to pronounce a healing blessing. I bless the hurt that has developed from some of the words

that were written in this room. Words in what is known as Section 132 of the Doctrine and Covenants,

words that through many generations have harmed the hearts and lives of countless Mormon women

and men that this hurt will have an end. That the damage done by the concept of eternal

polygamy will cease, that the wrong will be righted and that soon there will be a time of new light,

of healing and of peace. Through the power of my love and my faith, I pronounce that this blessing

will be fulfilled and I do it in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

What do you love the image of Carolyn Pearson running around,

pronouncing blessings to heal all the messed-up warm and stuff that we've been suffering

from for centuries? Is that a beautiful image? Well, she's doing it.

Should not we all be doing that, John? Everybody here has the power of healing. I like it when

you do it. Okay, John, I'll keep doing it. So another story that made me want to put my

fist through a brick wall was about Zyna and not just Zyna, but Henry. Oh my gosh. Can you just

tell us a little bit about Zyna and Henry? Yeah. Well, see, Zyna seems to have been a very

smart, personable, attractive young woman and Joseph recognized that and he recognized that

Zyna would be a good addition to the building of his godly kingdom. And so he approached Zyna as he

had approached and would further approach a number of women to tell them that God was commanding him

to take another wife and she was the woman. And Zyna told him that she was engaged to marry Henry

and that's what she wanted to do. And so she moved forward with that and actually Joseph was supposed

to present that to conduct the marriage ceremony, but he did not show up. And instead,

what's his name, who was mayor of Navu. I believe it was John Bennett, who

gross, conducted the ceiling. And no, I'm sorry, not not ceiling. They weren't not doing

ceilings then, but who conducted the marriage. But Joseph, when asked why he had not shown up

to perform the marriage, he said, I cannot give away that, but she's mine.

And he continued to court Zyna after she was married. And to tell her that she was to be one of

his wives. And she held to her marriage with Henry. And some of this is kind of confusing as to when

and how and who was there and whatever. But nevertheless, she did agree to be sealed to Joseph

for eternity while maintaining her marriage with Henry. And the story, the official story is that

Henry was there and gave his permission. There is some family history that contests that.

At any rate, my dear friend told me that his family had always considered that Henry was a

bounder because he left Zyna and so Joseph and then later Brigham had to take her over. And then

when they learned that at the time that Zyna was sealed to Joseph, that Henry was on a mission,

the Joseph had sent him on. And again, when Joseph died and the widows were apportioned out and

she was given, and some of them had their choice, I do believe, but she was given to Brigham.

At that time, that's those words given to Brigham. Right, yeah. Well,

at the time that she began to live with Brigham as his wife, Henry had been sent on another mission

by Brigham. So anyway, that's the story of Henry B and Zyna Jacobs.

And he wrote that Brigham even excommunicated him for a time. He did. Is that right?

He did, yeah. Because why? Well, because evidently, from what the family can figure out,

because Henry was trying to get Zyna back.

So that's one of our really bad stories. You're making me angry at Carole Pearson?

No, I'm sorry. That's what happened, John. We got to toughen up if we're Mormons.

And so this shopper's called, is there no help for the widow? What's your basic point

focusing on widows? Well, I'm showing us, first of all, so that we can understand

the dilemma of widows today. We have to understand how this thing happened.

So at the time, and seemingly before Joseph died, he made arrangements to tell the 12

that if he died, his wives were to be given to them for their earth life,

but they were still sealed to him. And any children that they had, and they were to have children,

with his sealed widows. Now they're wives for this earth. And they all understood

that when they met Joseph in heaven, they were to deliver to him that wife and all the children

that they had raised up for him. And that set the scene for what happens today.

With the FLDS Church with... Well, no, with our widows.

Oh, right, right, right. With LDS widows who were one of the groups. And sometimes we need to be

talking about the various groups of LDS people who are especially hurt by the teachings and the

policies that we still have today around the idea of eternal polygamy. We'll get to that.

The next part that made me want to put my fist through a brick wall was the part about Phoebe Woodruff.

I was almost exploded when I read this. Do you want me to read it or you? Go ahead.

Phoebe Woodruff is the first wife of Wilford Woodruff. Wilford Woodruff is known for what reason

related to polygamy. I didn't. He did the manifesto, right? So this is the guy ending the polygamy

manifesto. It's his first wife. He's president of the church. You're not going to believe this.

In 1882, Phoebe Woodruff, first wife among seven to Wilford Woodruff, fourth president of the

church, speaking in a mass meeting of Mormon women, held in defense of polygamy, said, quote,

If I am proud of anything in this world, it is that I accepted the principle of plural marriage

and remained among the people called Mormons and am numbered with them today.

However, a few days later, a longtime friend asked,

how is this sister Woodruff that you have changed your views so suddenly about polygamy?

I thought you hated it, load the institution. Phoebe responded, I have not changed.

I load the unclean thing with all the strength of my nature. But sister, I have suffered all that a

woman can endure. I am old and helpless and would rather stand up anywhere and say anything

commanded of me than to be turned out of my house in my old age, which I should be most assuredly

if I refuse to obey counsel.

Well, I have a fine quote from Leonard Erington, my good friend, and as he talks about

the difficulty, the pain, the confusion that these Mormon women had, and that they

pretended one thing, and then they felt another, and he said, most of the reason that we don't have

good biographies of the early brethren, because of the whole family mess that it was just so terrible,

that for most of these families, there was simply not good feeling between them.

Yeah, he writes, nearly every important Mormon entered into plural marriage, and in nearly every

instance, the first wife, though formerly giving her approval for the second marriage,

privately opposed the second marriage, and privately was jealous of the second wife. Now,

this is Leonard Erington, church historian, faithful believing person who knew more about

church history than most people on the planet. While she attempted to sublimate her feelings,

these were recognized by her children, and these were magnified by them so that it was impossible

for them to look upon the second wife and second family in an objective way.

Feelings developed between first, second, and subsequent families, privately and not publicly,

they made snide remarks about their, quote, ants. Wives would tear pages out of husbands'

diaries that referred to the other wives and family. They would destroy letters to or from

the other wives and families. Bitter complaints would be made, which were passed on to children

and great-grandchildren. And sometimes apologists, polygamy apologists will say, oh, but there's all

these women who spoke so glowingly of the institution. And there may have been some. Let's just

acknowledge that. Your response, though, to that sort of broad, broad stroke would be well.

Well, human beings, and especially Mormon human beings, try very hard to make the best even of a bad deal.

To put our best face forward. And I believe there were a lot of polygamous wives who, to some

extender or another, were successful in creating a life, perhaps, of cheerfulness and doing the best

that they could. But everything of goodness that came from this, I think, was in spite of polygamy

and none of it because of polygamy. I have looked for God's fingerprints everywhere on polygamy,

past, present, and I do not find one fingerprint of God anywhere.

Well, one of the dramatic climaxes for me in this book was the story of your great-grandparents,

Mary and Mary's husband, James. I don't want to spoil the dramatic climax. But what do you want

to tell us about Mary and James? Oh, golly. I'll check the whole story for people who haven't

read it. Do you want to save them to get to the side of the book? Okay, promise you'll buy the book,

even if she tells the story. Raise your arm to the diagonal. No, okay. I knew early on that somehow

my great-grandparents who came from Nottingham, England, and James was a lace maker, and he

was important in developing some of the machinery that led to new kinds of lace making.

And they had a nice home there. And when they were converted to the church, they were very,

very devoted. And so they made plans to come, and they did. The family came a year early,

and James stayed to make money. And so they settled in Utah, and were called fairly quickly

to go up and settle Southeastern Idaho, the little town of Paris. And they already had

they knew Charles C. Rich, who had stayed in their home. They held the mission home

when they were in Nottingham. And the thing that I learned mostly about them was that

during their marriage at a time when James brought home a second wife, that his wife of those

many decades, who had given him what seven children, that she left him, and she no longer would live

with him as husband and wife. And so I knew that strange intriguing story. And I remember asking,

no, right? She said no. She said no. No. And they must have had a conversation about it. Every

Mormon couple had a conversation about polygamy. And nevertheless, I never knew why, at this late

time in their lives, would James, knowing that it was against his wife's strong wishes,

why would he do that? And I would ask my Aunt Mamie, and she was quite bitter about the whole thing.

But anyway, nobody knew anything more than why I've just told you that that happened.

And then comes Lindsay Hansen Park, that troublesome, beautiful red-headed woman who still drinks

diet coke. But because of me, she's drinking less and less. So here comes Lindsay. And I listened to

all of her podcasts because as you know, she has done this wonderful series that she originally

called 100, 100 podcasts of polygamy. And it's gone into much more than that now. But I remember,

I was standing in my kitchen, listening to the podcast. And at the time I was writing this book.

And she was interviewing, oh, I know his name, and I've forgotten this very smart historian,

about some of the ways that polygamy was happening in Utah as Brigham took what Joseph had done

and doubled it and doubled it and really made it this gigantic part, this foundation of Mormonism.

And I heard Lindsay say, and in 1873,

Brigham Young started.

In 1873, Brigham Young gave a sermon in Paris, Idaho, in which he said that if a man refused to take

a second wife in the eternities, he would lose the wife he had. And I remember, what did she just

say? And I played it again in Paris, Idaho, 1873. So I remanded and I listened again. Paris, Idaho,

1873, he would lose the wife he had. I was just thunder struck. And I thought, wow,

if that is true, that answers a lot of family questions. So I immediately ran the phone and I

called my siblings and I said, did you know this? And of course they didn't. And my St. George

brother who loves to get on the internet and ferret out thing is that Warren, he quickly found,

and all of these sermons are available on the internet. So he just put in Brigham Young in the

date in Paris, Idaho, and the whole sermon was right there. And it's true. This is what he said,

that if a man refuses to take a second wife, he will lose even the one wife that he has when he

gets to heaven. And I thought, damn. I betcha, that is what happened, that all these years he said

no to the thing. And then when he heard from the person that he considered to be his prophet,

that if he didn't go along with this, he was going to lose this wife that he loved dearly.

And so, I'll betcha, he just said, I've got to do this. I have to do it for the sake of our family.

I had been really angry with him before, but now I felt so bad for him. And so that's the story.

Yeah, and Brigham Young goes on to say things like, Joseph received a revelation on celestial

marriage, a great and noble doctrine. Now, where a man in this church says, I don't want

a one wife, I will live my religion with one, he will perhaps be saved in the celestial kingdom.

But when he gets there, he will not find himself in possession of any wife at all.

Brigham Young doesn't come out too well in your book,

Carolyn Pearson. I am so sorry. What do you want to say about Brigham Young?

Do you know at the beginning of that sermon, he says, I have brought to you many a fine doctrine,

and I have never taught you anything that is not correct. Do I have never made a mistake,

or however you put that there? And I tried and I found some good things to say about Brigham,

because Brigham does have a lot of important things that he accomplished.

Really, he brought his people here and he made without his energy, his commandeer personality.

Perhaps this experiment here might never have been successful.

And I went out of my way to say that I admire how he had the Salt Lake Theatre built

before the Salt Lake Temple was even was finished. And he brought in

of the best actors from across on both coasts. And he made this thing, the gem, the theatrical gem,

of the country, really. So I tried to tell some of the really fine things about Brigham Young,

but there are a lot of things about Brigham that I cannot condone or admire.

Let's bring this to the modern day. I know what I heard about this book. I'm like,

like people just kind of now have forgotten about it. They don't really take it seriously.

Even Gordon Mehingly on their King Live said, you know, that it's in the past. It's not,

it's no longer doctrinal. And I think there's sort of this big catch-all in Mormonism

about the afterlife, which you write about very directly, which is, Heavenly Father is a loving God,

and he'll figure it all out in the afterlife. And so even my own mother, honestly,

who's sealed to a man, who's sealed to his late wife, when I asked my mom about being a plural

wife in heaven, she's literally just like, you know what, it's all going to be fine in the afterlife.

I'm not even worried. Heavenly Father is going to figure it out. Having said that, you have 8,000

narratives that you've received from women and men talking about how the teachings around

polygamy are still affecting women in the church today. Can you give us a sample of how these

teachings are literally affecting people's happiness, health, and well-being in 2017? Sure.

Some of the individuals who are particularly affected by this, and I grant you, John, that there

are women who will say, that doesn't bother me, that doesn't. But for every one of those,

I think I could find a lot of women who either will acknowledge that it's very difficult for them,

or have put it so far down in their psyche that it's their causing trouble in their

personality and in the way they see the world, the way they see themselves and the way they see

their husband, so that it does cause a significant problem. Some of the women who are most,

well, let's talk about my survey for just a moment then, as long as you brought that up.

I knew that I wanted to do something about this subject because it just, I have received so

many from stories from women. I started getting stories from women when I first put 50 years ago

when I put out that little book called Beginnings. Women began to trust me and write me their stories

that sometimes were just painful, and some of them had to do with their feelings about polygamy.

So I quickly began to learn that a lot of young women who they understand that if they die soon,

certainly their husband is going to be sealed to another woman, and that will make them

automatically eternal polygamists, and I had been getting all of these various stories,

and I thought, I want to do something with these, but I don't know what to do. So I'm going to

really shorten all this, but I had a really good conversation with Greg Prince who convinced me

to do a major survey just with my own name. So I put out a survey just on social media asking

for Mormon and ex-Mormon women and men to just take this survey, and we had established a

quite a few questions about how they felt about the inequality in the sealing practice,

and you know what is meant when I say the inequality in the sealing practice that a man can go

back to the temple and have another woman sealed to him, which is not the case with a woman.

And we have at least two members of the first presidency who have done just that, is that right?

Indeed, indeed, we have, that the top two leaders in our church today.

Russell Nelson and Donald H. Jones have been sealed to a second.

They are, they are eternal polygamists. Right, right.

So I sent out this survey wanting to get information, and at the end saying,

if you could tell me your story, or the story of somebody near to you who has had

some kind of an experience with this, I would appreciate it. And so on day number one,

I wrote an email to Greg who was more involved with the actual mechanics of the survey,

and I said, could you look and see if how many we had people, how many people had taken the

survey today? And I was hoping, oh, maybe there would have been three or four or five hundred,

that would be great. So he got back to me and said, it's 10 o'clock now in the east. And today,

so far, we've had over 2400 people take this survey. And then he added, this blows the faith crisis

survey out of the water. So we just waited and every day the number was larger. And when we close

the survey down, after having had it open for four weeks, we had had over 8,000 people

taking the survey. And so I spent months reading through all of the answers to all of these

questions. But the part that really interested me was at the end when I had asked for stories,

because that's what I really, really wanted. And so I, in my very

non-technological fashion, put out my yellow post-it notes here and there and here and there,

and began to write down certain themes that began to emerge. Widow

has been bringing up other man's children. And all of these different themes, and I correlated

the number with that, and I began to create these different documents. And so I found that I had

so many stories. And of course, I could never find out who wrote these stories. It was totally

anonymous. But I estimated that there were about 15% of these stories that were saying something

like, polygamy is just wonderful. You just have to have more faith. But about 85% of them were

stories of enormous heartbreak. And so I thought, well, it appears that I'm going to have to write a

book about these, because I have the material. And so I began to gather all of these stories

into their thematic place and decide what chapter. And I initially thought, I'll just give

these stories out, and that's what will be the book. And then I thought, no, I kind of want to

be in the book. And so I decided that I would bring my own persona into the book as well, as

well as bringing certainly not any new historical material. I'm not a scholar who could find some

brand new thing from way back there. But I wanted to give a thread of history so we could see

why some of these things had developed as they did. And then to that, add these stories,

mostly from these women, as well as from these men. And, you know, one of the very first stories

that I got was from a woman. And then, well, she had told her story on the story, but she also emailed

me. And I just could hardly bear that she was telling me that she said, I'm a young mother and I'm

happily married. But the anxiety is always there, this terror. And it has turned me into a hypochondriac.

I don't fear death, but I know that if I die, young, my husband will have another woman sealed

him. And I will live an eternal polygamy. I fast and I pray, but no peace comes. I've spent many nights

in tears. I go to a therapist, but she can't help me at all because the church has not changed.

It's policy on this. So I spend my whole life going to doctors saying, if surely if we cast the

cancer early, I won't die. And then he won't marry again and be sealed again. And then I won't be

an eternal polygamist. And she weeps during the night. So these are just normal women

who are fearing death because it will very likely mean that they without their permission at all

are going to become eternal polygamists. So that is a large group of women, probably all women,

because we're all in danger of that. And we're all in danger of living wonderful lives and

get to the celestial kingdom. And there we'll meet it because our husband will be a righteous man.

And he will be offered the opportunity to take another one or two or how many, however many wives.

You know, back in the 1800s, they talked about, well, there must be hundreds of mothers in heaven

in order to get all of these planets populated and all of that. So this is still deep

in our Mormon psyche. Not just that. For a long time in the 19th century, leaders taught

that you could not achieve exaltation. Right. Absolutely. Without being a polygamist. Is that right?

That's absolutely right. So we've got all that doctrine, not quote doctrine on the books

of prophetic statements uttered by the first president. Right. And those are not quoted now, but they

have never been thrown out. And so they're still there. So this is one way in which

nearly all women and some women are deeply, deeply hurt this anticipation. And you know,

there are a lot of women who love their husbands dearly. But the stories I get from them,

they're almost all say the same words. I find myself holding back part of my heart

from my husband, even in our most intimate moments, because I have this image that one day,

even if even in eternity, this beautiful intimacy that he and I now share will be shared by him

with many other women or at least one or two others. And so one of them said, I hold back a part of

my heart so that when the blow comes, I will have still a little part of myself left. Now that's

just terrible. We talk about wanting to have strong Mormon marriages. You want strong Mormon

marriages? Get rid of this ridiculous concept of eternal polygamist.

And this dear man who perhaps knows that his wife who loves him just kind of withdraws,

he has nothing to give her. He can't rewrite all that. So this is another great category of hurt.

And another great category of hurt was developed from what you just heard about the widows.

The young Mormon widows sometimes call themselves the Mormon lepers, because good Mormon men

are not really enthusiastic about dating them. I mean, they've already been claimed by somebody else.

And so on then, if one of these, and I tell very interesting stories in the book, I hope you read those.

Just to drive this home. You're a single Mormon man, and you meet a woman who you may or may not

love, but you find out she's already been sealed to her late husband. In your mind, you can't

marry her because you don't want to build a life of someone who won't be your eternal partner

in the year after. So it's in church dances or activities. Oh, why are you here? You shouldn't be.

Right. Absolutely. And rude statements that have been made. You're no good to any of us. Why are you on

this cruise? Or how was it one a woman put it? So this boy, this man that I was wanting to date

said to me, you know, if I fell in love with you and married you, I would spend my whole life

making you into a celestial being that I knew I would have to turn over to your husband once we

got to the next life. Why would I do that? Because husbands make women slush to be.

Well, so anyway, there is this terrible dilemma that is not solvable.

So the so the widow thing is one more terrible thing and while we're at it, so let's look at

it's not that polygamy is terrible for women and great for men. Polygamy is terrible for men.

You know, there are some men, right? When I was a teenager, I thought, oh, that's the greatest

thing I can look forward to. All these great wives in the in the celestial kingdom. And then I

grew up and I thought, what is this? This would be terrible. So, but let's let's say here's a man

who starts to date a widow and he falls in love with her. I have one long beautiful story in here.

I want you to read. But so here's a here's a theoretical man who somehow I'm going to I love this

woman. I'm going to marry her and they do marry and they have children. And he knows and he is

taught by the doctrines of the church. He knows that these children that have come from his own

loins from his DNA, they don't really belong to him. Because. Nor does his wife really belong to him.

Because just like Joseph told the 12, you can raise up earthly children that I you will then

give to me once I meet you in the eternities. So this man who has married this widow had children

with her knows he is raising these children that are not his and that he will lose them in the

eternities to be in the select and the divine kingdom of this man who got their first

who has the patriarchal privilege of having now is the that the woman is still sealed to him.

And of course this woman has the possibility of breaking that ceiling. But that's a hard thing.

And there are a lot of reasons why these ceilings await months and years and years and are not

even done. And when some of the ceilings are done the woman has to in fact I have read in these

stories that came to me. She has to drag that dead husband through the mud to prove that somehow

it is okay for her to leave him and and be sealed now to this new husband. And then so what do we

do? We're leaving him out there floating, unexalted. Why do that to somebody? And and there's the

most heartbreaking story here of an older woman who who she had her children with her first husband

and he died. And she has lived now 30 years with another husband that she just adores now.

And there's always this question and this fear. I'm going to lose him when we die. And on one

occasion her children approached her and said, Mom, we know how much you love your current husband.

We want to give you permission to break the ceiling with our father so that you can

be sealed to the husband that you now love so much. And it was hard for them to do.

And she wept as she heard her children say that. But she did go ahead and have that ceiling cancelled.

And then as she wrote in this story to me, that ruined the relationship she had had for 30 years

with the family of her first husband. They chopped her off every list. They refused to look at her

if she came to a family gathering at church. She was in effect dead to the family that she had had

a beautiful relationship with of her first husband.

Where is Christ in that kind of circumstance? He would never want that to happen.

It's our ridiculous idea that we have this chart and this authority in front of us

that we can draw these stick figures and say, Oh, this one, this male figure goes with this

female figure. Now we got it. Let's surround him with another couple of skirts here.

And now let's erase that one. Let's do this. Let's do this over here.

It becomes the most ridiculous chart you could ever think of creating and that's what we do.

And it breaks the hearts of women and it breaks the hearts of men. And I have stories from men

who really believe with all their hearts that they are raising children that should be their own

that are in reality being that they will live eternally with a man that they have never known.

And what is the confusion of these children?

Somehow when they study all this, they're told, well, you won't live eternally with this man

you think as your father. You will live eternally with a new father that you've never met.

It gets more and more ridiculous and heartbreaking as it goes along.

So let's see. What are some of the other particular awfulnesses that I should just note that

every chapter in the book is followed by a few pages of vignettes or stories from the survey.

So in a spurs with Carolyn's wonderful writings, you'll find eight or ten narratives of paragraphs

of people sharing their stories. And it's a really important part of that.

There are feelings about this you would never even guess. My mother was petrified of dying because

she was the second wife of my father and knew she would have to live polygamy forever.

It broke my heart to watch her trying so hard not to die. Strange things come up around this.

All the time we could just go on and on reading these awful things.

My uncle's jokes about polygamy waiting for us in heaven pierced his wife's heart and mine too,

even though I was still a child. It just pops up everywhere, everywhere. And it's indefensible.

Another point that you make in the book, you have a chapter called Five Pillies Making Nickel.

You talk about what sort of message polygamy sends to women about their relative worth

in our culture. Can you talk about that? Just really briefly.

Because the implications, as we say, polygamy sort of touches everything.

To what extent does the teaching of polygamy send a message to women about their relative worth?

Well, it does. Two women make a man. Or five women, five women, five pennies make a nickel.

It is impossible to come up with any observation about that than that the worth of women

is of lesser value than the worth of men. And I think I go through many things in the chapter

there that just to give us a glimpse of patriarchy in general, it's just not a good place to live.

Nobody should live in patriarchy. We need to work toward partnership.

So you have three recommendations because you are a constructive, optimistic, positive person.

You have three sort of visions for a partnership towards tomorrow. I'm going to read each one,

and then I'm going to have any comments. Is that okay? Sure.

You say, here are my beliefs regarding what must and will happen to achieve a Mormon future

that is truly post-polligamy. Belief number one. A couple of chooses to marry in the temple

can go into that holy place and stand on equal ground. What do you mean?

The language is different in the ceiling situation. Women give themselves, men receive them.

The total understanding is from the get-go that a man will be able to have another woman sealed

to him. And somehow or other, it is my belief that that must and will stop. We have precedent for

that. Hueby Brown was given permission by David O. McKay. And brother Brown was very

distressed at the confusion that would happen, time after time after time with women not being able

to be sealed to another. So brother Brown received permission from President McKay to do this very

thing, to seal a woman to her second husband and just do it and let the Lord work it out in the

next life. If the Lord is going to work all these things out in the next life, let's make it as

easy as we can on the people here and now, alive. So I think that's the easiest one to do.

Just make it very easy and say something like this couple is joined to be sealed eternally,

dependent only on their love and the will of the Lord. Let it be at that. Something like that.

All right, belief number two. This is my favorite. Section 132 of the Dr. and Covenants will receive

an inspired revision with plural marriage removed from the canon so the women and girls will be spared

the wounding to our femaleness that we received today. So just take it out. Take it out.

You need to read this chapter too. I go through many ways in which the Dr. and Covenants was

revision, was given revision. The Book of Mormon was given revision. The hymns that we sing

were given revision. We didn't want to offend Missouri. So we re-wrote the hymn, long be the blood

that was shed by assassins saying or saying Illinois. We took that out because we didn't want to

offend the good people of Illinois. We very seldom think what shall we do not to offend the hearts of

women. That never comes up. And it's super interesting to learn that.

Joan, I just want to remember that reading Section 132 as we all do and I have several stories

of young girls saying in institute, in seminary, when we read Section 132,

one girl said, I left the room sobbing and I never went back to seminary. Another young girl

wrote, we studied 132. I went to the bathroom and I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. Now that should be

a cry to arms, to everybody in authority in this church, that vision of a young girl studying

Section 132 and going to the bathroom and sobbing and sobbing and sobbing, we, they should be ashamed.

Go ahead, Joan. We can clap, you can clap for that.

You know how to remind everyone how many revisions the temple ceremony has been through, right?

And that's supposed to have come straight from God. And of course, we know the doctrine and

covenants. Even the Book of Mormon has experienced significant revisions. So why not the doctrine

and covenants, right? Of course. But there's also just some really interesting history. The Hebrew

J. Grant, James E. Talmud and others put together an abbreviated version of the doctrine and

covenants in the 1830s. And they actually removed all the stuff that sort of they felt was going to superb,

1930s, sorry, 1930s. And they removed all the stuff they felt was superfluous because there's a lot

of stuff in there that was sort of, you know, specific to the time and the place. So guess what,

Hebrew J. Grant produced a version of the doctrine and covenants and he left out Section 132.

But when it went to Prince, was that Talmud? Talmud was a part of it, but Hebrew J.

He was the president who authorized that. But as it's going to Prince,

people start getting really nervous. The fundamentalists. And keep in mind that there were plenty

of fundamentalists back then that that pilgrimage did not die. You're still one of the church, right?

Right. Yeah. And they raised the stink. And so Hebrew J. Grant had the printing halted.

But we have precedent. He destroyed the sheets right at the books that were already printed and

said no more were to be published. But we are precedent of a Mormon prophet publishing a version

of the doctrine and covenants without Section 132. Do you guys know that? It's kind of cool, right?

And other sections were dropped as well. But 132 was a significant one that was dropped.

All right. I believe number three, the doctrine of plural marriage will be disavowed entirely

and no longer considered the word of God as pertains to history, the presence, or the eternal future.

Do you want an apology with that? I wouldn't necessarily ask for one. It would be nice. It would be good.

But you basically want to disavow it. Well, I think we're, yes, indeed, yes.

And I think we're getting very close to disavowing the very troublesome doctrine or teaching or whatever

you want to call it about our black brothers and sisters being withheld from the priesthood and

temple entry. The wording is very close to decrying to what's the word?

To say that it never should have happened in the first place. And it is my belief that eventually

that will have to happen for polygamy. You know, the church gave in 78, gave the priesthood,

but that didn't solve the problem. There continued to be a lot of very difficult things around race

and the continues today to be very difficult things around race. So that the brethren realized

that they had to do something more, which, you know, and writing that essay was closer to the truth

kind of thing. And it suggests, and it gives the words, that Brigham was affected by the social

feelings of the day. Those may not be the correct words, but that's the intent of the words there.

The Brigham was influenced by what was going on in the country today. And I believe with all my heart

that eventually, and certainly this will be after I'm long gone, however, how great would it be

if this could happen soon? But eventually, I believe the church will disavow plural marriage.

I think there is really no leg for it to stand on. And if we're going to try to cleanse the church

of the damage that polygamy has done, and does today, it's very hard to say, well,

God wanted it, but now we see that we don't need it anymore.

I think the cleanest, clearest way to do it would be to say, this was done in error,

we are finally fixing it, we are throwing away the teachings, the doctrine, so that it will no longer

hurt our people. Now, John, sometime, I don't know, I'm willing to continue to do whatever you

want to do there, but I want to read the part in the book that I describe how the church will feel

once polygamy is done away with. Well, let's find it, let's end with that, and then we'll have

a question or two. Do you got it? Do you have a mark? I do. All right, for those who might ask a

question, Tim Carolyn Houston, if you'll just kind of cue me. I have a couple of things that I want to

read, but this is, this I think is very important. The brother Joseph, whom I came to love and

whom I love still, would weep to see today's tears on this subject. He himself said,

I have always had the satisfaction of seeing truth triumph over error and darkness give way before

light. I believe satisfaction is what the eternal spirit of brother Joseph felt as he saw the

ending of the priesthood and temple ban, and I believe that satisfaction is what brother Joseph

will feel as he sees the departure of the ghost of eternal polygamy. This departure is inevitable,

I believe, because we will listen to the better angels of our nature, because we want to be not only

on the right side of history, but to be on the side of right, because polygamy bears bad fruit,

and has failed the test of Joseph's own words of being virtuous, lovely, of good report,

and praiseworthy. It has proved itself to be a destroyer. We, leadership, membership, women,

men, all are 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 taught by Jesus of Nazareth, by brother Joseph, and by every other man and

woman across the globe and across the centuries who grasped a spark of God and shared a godly message.

When the ghost is finally banished, each young and tender girl will learn at church and at home

that if she marries, she will become the singular and full partner of a husband of her choice,

and that her divine nature and individual worth are such that she will never be one of

here or in heaven. The writings of the folklore around polygamy, the old stories, and the statements

even of prophets will have been put away in the drawer marked expired and will generate no more fear

than ghost stories told around the campfire. Every individual, every individual member of the

church and every congregation will feel more open to the presence of our long lost heavenly mother.

For the disturbing ghost has been evicted from both earth and heaven, and the glorious goddess

full and soul partner that she is in the creation and sustaining of life is welcomed back into the

family. Marriages will be sweeter with no holding back a piece of the heart just in case.

A wife will sleep a better, never startled in the night by the terrible thought if I die before

he does. An elderly widow will spend her last days with peace of mind and no disquieting thought of,

I wonder if he has taken another wife already. A husband will invest fully in his one and precious

partner with never a thought that she is not enough here or will be added to in heaven.

A widow will be able to mourn her loss, and then if she wishes, look forward to a new relationship

in which she can be seen as the desirable woman that she is, unobstructed by prior attachment.

Her love for a past husband and a present husband do not conflict.

For she knows that God is not asking her to make impossible choices, and that in heaven there will

be many happy surprises. A man who chooses to marry a widow will do so with full confidence

that this is a blessed union and can only lead to good in this world and the next for him,

for her, for her children, his children, their children, and for her deceased husband.

The entire family invests only in love and not in anxiety. Confident that each relationship,

wife to husband, sister to brother, mother and father to children is secure. The claim of our

church that we create and support strong families will be even more true, as the ruptures and the

tensions produced by the ghost will have ceased. No one will experience apprehension over paperwork,

the 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 and good measure. Press down, shaken together and running over,

a connection that our earthly mind cannot now begin to grasp. And intertwined with every

benefit will be the supreme one, a God who has prepared an eternity that will break the hearts of

women and render them forever subordinate will be dismissed as preposterous. We will see with more

clarity and with deeper appreciation, the one in the mirror, the one on the other side of the bed,

and the one who thought this all up in the first place. A new buoyancy will render us a stronger

people, a people more prepared to gift the Lord with our portion of Zion.

I'm voting, I'm voting, I'm voting you, Professor and Revolator. Is that okay? Can we

sustain all the favor? Are you lost? Is that lost with us? That's wonderful.

That's right. We are all, we are all, all in our own wonderful private, sometimes public way,

profits and seers and revelators. All right. Well, I think we've kept you here a long time.

Is anyone dying to ask a question? All right, Martine.

But I have to go. I heard you say that we're going to mail a coffee to each of

the 12 in the first presidency, so I wondered how that went. And the second part of the question

that it relates to the first is that obviously the top two men, as John mentioned earlier,

and you get to talk to leaders of the church, are internal polygamists. So my hopes are not great

that anything is going to change anytime soon. What do you think? Okay. So for those in the

listening audience, the question is, did she mail a copy of this book to all the members of the

court of the 12 in the first presidency? Yes, I did. Along with a copy addressed by name to

each wife. And I didn't expect to hear back from any of them. But I have reason to believe

that some of them were looked at. I have hope that there have been conversations. I know nothing,

but I have hope that some of those were looked at. As to how I feel about our two top leaders

being eternal polygamists, that is not of my business. What, brother Nelson and brother,

oh, excuse me, what President Nelson and President Oaks do is not my business.

I try very hard to follow a spiritual lead of a teacher that I love. Many of you know,

Viren Katie, who says, you have to look at everything in this world as either your business,

or God's business, or their business. And if you get out of your business and try to

mess around in their business or God's business, it's useless. And so I am content to stay in my

business. And I know that my business is to look around and see the suffering of my sisters,

and see the suffering of my brothers. And when I see suffering, it is my business to call attention

to it. And that's what I have done in my writing. And that's what I will continue to do in my

speaking from now until the day I die. And that is my business. And I will do it as strongly as I can.

Any other questions for guests, Lindsay? Yeah, come talk to the mic. That's okay.

That way it'll make it into the recording. Come back this way because of the fever.

Thank you. You've talked so beautifully about it. So I don't want to destroy the spirit of that.

I was hoping you could talk about how this doctrine has really set up a lot of grooming

behavior in our community. You know, you know, similar to tourism, stuff, dance, and things like that.

Thank you. In our LDS community, or

Yeah.

Well, it certainly has. And where Lindsay has helped to make us very, very much aware of

of all of the damage that's done in the FLDS community and some of the other groups. But

this concept certainly does affect and in a grooming kind of unnatural way to groom young

women for male authority, whatever it looks like. And I didn't tell what one of the stories in

the book is from a young woman who said, I was being taken home by the babysitter. And all of a

sudden he began to, excuse me, the babysitter is saying I was taken home by the man whose children

I had been babysitting. And all of a sudden he started to talk to me about DNC-142. And I know

what it meant. And soon he was telling me that I was going to be one of his wives. And by the

we got to my home and he kissed me. And I ran in and my father could see how, anyway, the father told

the man, call the man said he ever contacted his girl and he'd break his face. But you see

from the beginning girls are taught to respect authority. Girls are taught that the boys receive

the priesthood and they don't. And that they are to have reverence for the priesthood.

So of course that's a grooming. Nor did I tell that, I mean we all know the terrible story of

I mean it is a smart and not that she was willing to take the terrible authority of that man

but that crazy man took the door of normal planning to make that happen. And nor did I tell the story

of the mission president and the A's in Australia who went wrong. And this has been told in

about other places as well. And had personal interviews with his 12 of the

sister missionaries and began to groom them about polygamy. And they looked up to him as they

would look up to God. He was there before anything. And before the story got out by one of the

smart girls calling home, he had had sexual relations with six of the missionaries.

But that's an extreme thing. It's a very extreme thing. But it shows what can happen

when the idea polygamy is still present in the atmosphere. And when young women are taught

to give tremendous respect to the male portion of the community because they are the ones who

carry the power of God. And that's all I want to say right now. But I'm sure Lindsey could say a lot more.

Rince knows that greatness takes time. But so does laundry. So Rince will take your laundry and

hand-deliver it to your door expertly cleaned. And you can take the time pursuing your passions.

Time one spent sorting and waiting, folding and queuing, now spent challenging and innovating

and pushing your way to greatness. So pick up the Irish flute or those calligraphy pens or that

daunting beef Wellington recipe card and leave the laundry to us. Rince, it's time to be great.

Other final questions? Yes, Kelly, come speak here.

I was just curious. We talked mostly to write about polygamy more specifically in the

other church. I was just wondering if you have an opinion on the fact of consensual polyamory though.

I don't, I have no use for it. That's just a personal thought. I have no use for polyamory.

I believe in commitment of one to one. I know they're plenty who feel differently, but I'm the one you

asked. I love it. Okay, is there anything else you wanted to make sure? Well, yes, John. I have one more

thing to read. I don't like to read a lot, but this I wrote out because I didn't want to misspeak.

Tonight, I am formally offering what you might call a personal manifesto.

I am declaring that there is a whole set of new stories.

Call this the Mormon women's section. Stories to be put on the same table and examined under

the same light as the many thousands of stories from women that were recently the result of what

we may call the Harvey Weinstein phenomenon. The dynamics are different, but the results are

the same. The teachings and policies in the LDS church regarding the likelihood and often the

assurance of eternal polygamy is nothing less than gender-based abuse. It is an assault on the

spiritual, emotional, and sexual lives of LDS women. This is not a good day to defend the abuse

of women because I have heard from or spoken with thousands of believing or formerly believing

LDS women. I can report how these teachings and policies cause large numbers of women to feel.

The words they use sound like an echo of words you have been reading or hearing on the national

scene. I feel violated, intimidated, held hostage, used, threatened, crazy, confused, angry,

terrified, powerless, voiceless, inadequate, insecure in my marriage. I'm seen as property

as eternal chattel, in danger of being destroyed just like Emma, without dignity, hopeless,

of lesser value than a man in God's eyes, so sick. In the words of one woman,

bludgeon is the right term. I have felt bludgeoned by polygamy. Solsick,

bludgeoned, assaulted, abused, and the abuser, a personage given a place of high honor in our church,

a personage that I call the ghost of eternal polygamy. His mission purportedly is to connect

the human family in God's kingdom. To my observation, he divides and destroys. His main

achievement is to break the hearts of women. In the book of Mormon we read regarding the Nephite

men taking more than one wife, ye have broken the hearts of your tender wives and the

sobbing of their hearts as send up to God against you. This is not a good day to defend breaking

the hearts of women. Catchy phrases have cropped up in today's culture across the country,

me too, in Hollywood, times up. I do not have a short and snappy phrase for us, but I do have a

very powerful one. And one that I will hold to until the day I die, we are better than this and we

must do better than this.

Thank you, Carolyn. We love you so much. Before you leave, I just want to thank a few people.

Amy Groms, is Sharon still here? Amy and Sharon, can you guys come forward? These events are made

possible by so many people. This is Sharon Price who helped us organize this event tonight. Thank

you, Erin. This is Amy. Amy is a touch of operations. This is Cody Laney. Cody helps us in all sorts

of ways, including editing the podcast. I want to thank Trevor Hogan for being really

and I want to thank my lovely wife, Margie and players here with her. They make all of this possible.

Love you guys. Thank you so much. I want to thank the Commitive Christ for allowing us to have

our meeting here. They're so lovely. Please give them your support if you feel so inclined. I want

to thank all those who support the Open Stories Foundation. Many of you here are supporters. Your

donations are what makes all this possible as well. And just most of all, many of you have things

you could have been doing tonight. I am so heartfelt grateful that we filled the room and we're

able to show Carolyn Pearson how much she means to us and how grateful we are for her work.

So I love you all and I'm just very grateful that you would come and to share your support for

Carolyn and she wants to say something else. John, I find that in our discussion it has not yet come

up and I think it is a question for many who will be listening here if I still participate in

the church. And consequently, I would like to just tell you that yes, I do. I'm very active in my

Walnut Creek Second Ward in California. And believe it or not, I feel much loved in my ward

and much loved in my stake. And there are many people in my ward who have read this book.

Many of whom have told me it has changed their lives and changed their marriage and a very dear

woman who said to me, I can now snuggle up to my husband in bed and whisper to him, you are mine.

All mine. So this is the church experience that I have in my ward. And I just want to make sure

that that is understood that I am. And I believe in the goodness of Mormondom. And I believe with

Karen Armstrong who was a Catholic nun who left the church and hated religion and came back and

said, let us get into the heart of every religion and get rid of the stuff that is poisonous or

that is foul and get back to compassion and get back to the golden rule. And this is what I hope

for my Mormon community. That we can get rid of some of the things that still are foul and that we

can get into true compassion and the golden rule and become a true part. Our own corner of the

Lord's vast Zion. Thanks. I want to issue a quick challenge to everyone. I would so love to see

that table emptied. Carolyn brought a bunch of books for you to purchase. There isn't a book that

she's created that isn't a perfect gift for someone you love. So if any of you feel generous or

supportive or grateful or just interested in having a wonderful gift to give to yourself or to

someone else, I would love to see that table empty by the time we leave here tonight. And the

ghost of polygamy is 20 bucks on Amazon. It's 15 out there. So discount. And those of you in the

internet, please buy Carolyn Pearson's books. Carolynpearson.com. And the ghost of your journal polygamy

should be the first book you get. It's so powerful.