After being hounded from city to city, from Ohio to Missouri to Illinois, the Mormons founded Salt Lake City in 1847 as the new center of their faith. In 1919, I was born into this Church, then a marginal and provincial sect of less than one million. Mormonism, by the end of the 20th Century, however, would be transformed into the quintessential "American religion," as Harold Bloom has called it, with over ten million adherents, more outside the United States than within its borders. I came from a family of early converts and pioneers and was surrounded in youth by passionate believers and evangelists. One of my grandfathers had played ball with Joseph Smith, the founder of the faith. At first, I felt fortunate to be among the "Saints," as they called themselves. Later, I was embarrassed when I realized that many regarded my Church as a marginal cult that had usurped "Saint" and many other religious terms. I doubt that I ever believed that as a Mormon I would be uniquely "saved." But I was a credulous boy. I know that until about eight or nine, I totally believed in Santa Claus. I remember trying to ignore the busy sounds after I went to bed on Christmas Eve that might indicate that my father and mother, rather than Santa, were laying out the presents. I would never have dared to get out of bed to check. I similarly tried to believe in Joseph Smith and his visions of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost in the Sacred Grove. Illustrations of this climactic scene, and of Joseph translating the celebrated plates of gold, were everywhere in Mormondom. But if I believed that the Almighty and other divinities could appear before men, as the Mormons claimed, I realized that I, too, might have such visions. The prospect didn't hearten me. In fact, it scared me to death. It was all too easy to sin and almost impossible to remain pure. It was best not to think about it. Curiously, I felt that any visions that might appear before me would be malign rather than benign, and I wanted nothing to do with them. Good and evil in the Church of my day were sharply and mutually exclusive. My schoolmates and teachers were predominantly non-Mormons, and I wanted to be one of them. As a Mormon, I never felt superior to anyone; indeed, I often felt that I was an oddity. By junior high, especially in sports, I felt vastly inferior, an eccentric who could never fit into either Church or school environments.

Family in the 1930s: Joel (top left), brother Kermit (lower left), sister Julia (right), father (center)

But as a small boy, I took Church-going for granted. Because my family life was tormented, I needed to feel that I belonged to a larger community. For a few years, being part of a congregation with my father and mother was a healing and reassuring experience. My father would carry me on his shoulders to our first chapel, several blocks from our house, and I would try to sit perfectly still, imitate the hymn-singing, and draw on my sketchpads during the long sermons. But I was also troubled by frequent coughing fits, spells that were so prolonged and violent that my mother had to take me home. To this day, I remember the disturbingly scratchy feeling in my throat and my futile attempts to hold back a cough. If I coughed once, it was hard to stop. It's as though I were allergic to piety itself, or to all those dressed-up, deodorized, and perfumed Mormons, standing or sitting too close to one another, breathing, singing, and praying in unison. Later, I mocked this heavy atmosphere as the odor of sanctity. After I left the Church, I swore I would never again be a member of any group.

I was always cold in chapel, and because it felt like a testing or proving ground, I would tremble, whether I was sitting upstairs with the adults or downstairs with other children. Many Mormon services are interactive, and nearly everyone is expected to participate. But I always felt insecure and exposed, terrified of being called upon. I could never fit my imaginative inner life into the context of services. The worst problem was posed by my father's overly eager presence beside me. Because he was always volunteering, or otherwise calling attention to himself, I soon decided that my appearance and deportment had to be quietly, smoothly conformist, and I never spoke a word. I wished to be an agile, soundless cat, one that could appear and disappear at will without causing comment. Indeed, in most large groups, with the exception of the university classes I later taught, I have reacted against my father's behavior—wanting to make no noise, cause no fuss. And yet with friends and in lighter moods, I could be as gregarious as he was.

As a child, I wanted to believe in the Church and love my father, but by my early adolescence, I realized that I could do neither. By my mid-teens, I struggled to free myself from both father and faith. But the bonds were too powerful. Despite my winning a degree of intellectual freedom, I could not emotionally liberate myself until much later.

Since the Church had no paid clergy, all members could be singled out to serve, from eight-year-olds to octogenarians. Each "soul" would visibly struggle to organize his or her thoughts of the moment, if there were any, trying to get each word out, often stammering and apologizing. Adults would begin their speeches similarly: "Brothers and Sisters, I stand humbly before you, trusting that the Lord will inspire me…." If God was speaking through them, I felt that His voice had many inadequate vehicles. A few minutes with pencil and paper, at home before meetings, would have saved the congregation much boredom. But the brethren were resigned to these faltering improvisations. I never heard a surprising word or original idea from any of these ad hoc ramblers; but I never wished to join the competition to show what I could do. Later, as a teacher I would strive to become a very good speaker, always prepared. Many adults in the congregation seemed to welcome this opportunity to express themselves and to strengthen their faith by avowing it publicly. They seemed to be trying to talk themselves into firmer belief. Each speaker lamented the Church's long history of persecution, sacrifice, and martyrdom. Many referred to the Mormons' repeated ousters from communities and their being forced again and again to move on. The memories of their earliest years in Utah were still very much alive through living grandparents.

In monthly Sacrament Meetings—our group confessionals or "bearing of testimonies," one blessed soul after another stood up to declare the truth of the Gospel, all repeatedly reassuring themselves and their listeners that Joseph Smith was a true prophet of God. These were public confessions, and secret sins were rarely revealed, as they could be in the private Catholic confessional, and there was no official ritual of absolution. I only realized after the great crisis of my life how deeply I felt the lack of rites of forgiveness, anything that would enable me to absolve myself. Although as a youth I heard a great deal about faith and hope, I rarely heard the word "charity," especially when applied to gentiles. The Church was very inward-looking, obsessed with its peculiar history. In his own testimony, my father could pull out more stops than anyone, his voice quavering with ardent faith. His performances left me a wreck, and I swore as a boy that I would never bare my soul in public. I wondered later whether I would have turned against the Church at so young an age, if my father had been less flamboyant in his beliefs.

My private thoughts and preoccupations would certainly have horrified the pious burghers in Sunday school. The naughty boy whose most thrilling moments were spent staring at naked adolescents at the Deseret Gym feared that he might have been tarred and feathered by the original Latter Day Saints, if he had ever confessed to such perversity. I early began to live multiple lives, keeping each identity separate and apart from the others. The only occasions on which I was happy under Mormon auspices were my years between 16 and 19, when I left our chapel and sang instead on Sunday mornings in the Tabernacle Choir. In addition to our Mormon hymns, we often sang good music, with a fine conductor and organist. And most important, I was in love with two choir members, James and Richard. Gazing at the sides of their wonderful heads from my choir seat behind them, I was often in a state of ecstasy, although I rarely spoke to them directly.

In mid-adolescence, I left the Church of my fathers and became an apostate. To my distress, meanwhile, a new chapel was built across the street from my home, as though to monitor my behavior. Although my loss of faith was for a few years painful and disorienting, I slowly turned against all organized religion. Because of my father's inflexible religious zeal, I retained a tormented relationship with the faith, even after I ceased to attend services. In a delayed attempt to understand my father, I recently read parts of the diaries of his father, Carl, and his uncle, John, who were converted to Mormonism in their native Denmark. These accounts were written in the 1850s during the six years in which the two served as missionaries in Norway. In this Lutheran world, they were driven from town to town and repeatedly imprisoned for preaching an alien Gospel—very much like what the Saints experienced in the New World. In their early Twenties, the brothers sang together so beautifully in prison that they moved all who heard them. As a youth, I often envied them their whole-hearted faith, astonishing courage, and their seemingly fulfilled lives. But I've never felt that I've betrayed my pious forebears by living a secular life dedicated to the arts.

By the time I went to the University of Utah in 1936, I was still as troubled about Mormonism as I was about my father. They were my twin bêtes noires, each an authoritarian and distorted image of the other. I slowly became a dedicated agnostic. Exasperated by my unusually skeptical mind and equivocal comments, a Mormon colleague at the university told me that I was a walking question mark. I later had to look for other people who had made journeys toward disbelief similar to mine. I discovered at Harvard a kindred spirit in W.B. Yeats, and I was happy to come upon his line, from "Vacillation" which I have frequently quoted—"Homer is my example and his unchristened heart." I had already found it impossible to keep the Word of Wisdom—the severe Deuteronomic commandments of a Church that regards as major sins habits that I considered minor physical indulgences. Among us fallen Jack Mormons—the circle of friends I found in my freshman year—smoking and drinking were necessary acts of defiance, almost a badge of honor.

During the Depression, when my family began to receive benefits from Roosevelt's social welfare programs, I was distressed by the right wing and un-Christian hostility of the Church toward FDR's public works projects, Social Security, and other safety nets. The Saints were so obsessed by their own painful history, they never seemed concerned with the non-Mormon needy. To many Saints, FDR was the devil himself. The commitment of my Parrish relatives to Mormon values, to fierce independence and self-sufficiency, led them toward staunch Republicanism. A Church that had in early days experimented with aspects of socialism was by my time wholly devoted to capitalism. For my mother and me, however, the name "Roosevelt" rapidly became more important than that of either Joseph Smith or Brigham Young. We were far more confident that the New Deal was saving our bodies than that the Church was saving our souls.

Perhaps the boldest of the Mormons' appropriations from other faiths has been their identification of themselves as "chosen people," all other peoples being "gentiles." Most of the Jews I knew in Salt Lake City were amused to find themselves among the goyim. Today, the Mormons still believe that only the leaders of their Church (the presidency and 12 apostles) spiritually constitute a rebirth of the original disciples of Christ. In my youth, Church-goers felt that the Prophet Joseph (the Mormons' founder) was more important than Christ. And the Book of Mormon was referred to in chapel far more frequently than the Bible. The name "Christ" then smelled to many Mormons of incense and Catholicism, and so they usually spoke of "Jesus," a name that suggested comfort and closeness, as in the hymn I sang many times with the entire congregation, old and young alike: "Jesus wants me for a sunbeam, / To shine for him each day. / In every way try to please Him, / At home, at school, at play."

Unlike Madison and Jefferson, wise men of the Enlightenment, who emphasized reason, balance of powers, and the separation of church and state, the early Mormons sought to found a devout and tightly disciplined theocracy in secular America. Their belief in their own uniqueness and superiority caused great tension and ultimately open confrontation with other Americans among whom they lived. But other issues presented even more serious problems, including one astonishing aberration in the doctrine of a people who weren't even allowed to swear. In 1852, just 32 years before my parents' birth, the second leader of the Church, Brigham Young, following Joseph Smith's family pattern and prophecy, declared that polygamy was to be a sacred practice among Mormons. Brigham proclaimed that polygamy was God's law, and that it would spread throughout much of the globe through pairs of Mormon missionaries. Being called to polygamy was considered a great honor. Indeed, many were told that they could not enter the highest kingdom in the afterlife without obeying the call to what the Saints termed "celestial marriage." Only about a quarter of the Mormons, however, seemed to have practiced polygamy; most of the leaders did.

Inevitably, the gentiles were shocked by plural marriage. Reports of Brigham's many wives were subject to widespread caricature in the press. In their last home in the Midwest—Nauvoo, Illinois—the Mormons suffered the most violent of many attacks at the hands of their neighbors. Appalled by polygamy and alarmed by reports that Joseph and Brigham had formed their own private army, angry gentiles shot and killed Smith and his brother in 1844. Brigham, convinced that the Saints should be preparing themselves for the millennium, instead of perpetually fighting their neighbors, encouraged them in 1847 to walk with handcarts or ride by covered wagons to what is now the Great Salt Lake Valley. In what was then Mexican territory, the Saints could finally practice their belief undisturbed by angry neighbors and local or federal governments. But after the war between the U.S. and Mexico in 1850, the U.S. annexed Mormon land and declared it the Utah Territory. And once again, the Saints were subject to American law.

From the 1870s through the 1880s, the struggle between the federal government and the Church over polygamy was at its height—the conflict between man's law and that of God, as the Mormons saw it. Although he was aware of increasingly hostile national feeling, the third President of the Church, John Taylor, privately ordained several leaders who would continue to officiate at plural marriages. This pivotal event occurred in the small town of Centerville, in which my mother was born and almost at the same time (1884). In an attempt to force the Church to abandon polygamy, the federal government finally placed Church property in receivership; unless the Church relented, it risked losing some of its most famous and necessary buildings, including the Temple and the Tabernacle. Polygamists during this time were denied the right to vote in federal elections and they lost other civil liberties as well. When many Mormon husbands (including my paternal grandfather) and wives were arrested and imprisoned, family life became chaotic.

In 1890, the warfare surrounding polygamy was brought to a climax. Church President Wilford Woodruff, acknowledging the inevitable, issued his First Manifesto, surrendering to the federal government and disavowing polygamy. The Church's sudden theological reversal, however, was devastating for many Saints, and it led to widespread hypocrisy. Even though it had now been outlawed, many Mormons at the highest levels of Church government continued to practice plural marriage. This gulf between the preaching and practice of even the Church's leaders must have shaken the faith of many Saints. Well into the 20th century, some leaders outwardly condemned polygamous lives while privately living them. The Second Manifesto against polygamy (1904) was signed only 15 years before my birth. And yet, as a boy, I knew nothing about the Church's guilty history.

My parents grew up during the Church's gradual retreat from polygamy—an organized effort to change its image and to discourage apostasy. Indeed, the Mormons began to lean over backwards to prove to the world that they were a strict and disciplined people. Even in the 20th century, the Church exercised unusual powers of repression and excommunication. The General Authorities of the Church started to harass and persecute Saints who still clung to polygamy. But the Mormons could not erase their own history. Indeed, the Church is still troubled by the ongoing devotion to polygamy of well over 50,000 fundamentalist Mormons in Utah, Arizona, and elsewhere. In 2003, as the Church expands like yeast, the process of abandoning once essential observances to accommodate new converts from many countries still continues. The Church wants to be responsive to a changing world, but its leaders remain authoritarian and paternalistic. Mormonism now considers itself to be a "mainstream" religion, and in terms of numbers and power it surely is. Indeed, today's Mormon Church and Southern Baptism constitute the right bank of that stream.

Although their own families had been polygamous, my parents told me almost nothing about this earlier church-and-state warfare. My father and mother were married in 1916 in their mid-30s. Trying to imagine what my parents went through as children, I am surprised that my father was not crazier than he was, nor my mother even more laden with guilt. Father had so idealized his parents that he claimed that his father's five wives and many children had lived together amicably. But in her youth, mother had been traumatized by the Church's shifts in doctrine, and by the consequent anguish they caused her own family. Because the Mormons' obsession had always been with rapid growth, with replenishing the earth and acquiring new converts, only gradually could the faithful accept the fact that their once holy practices were now outlawed by both church and state.

By the time of my youth, the Church had become a paragon of rectitude, overly severe about all sexual matters. Words like "chastity" and "abstinence" were now frequently used in Church meetings. Young people were not to engage in sex before marriage. To avoid sin, young Mormons married early. Today, they still marry earlier and have more children than non-Mormon men and women. With their severe injunctions against abortion, they have always produced large families. In their belief, millions of souls on the other side are always waiting to be given bodies so that they can live the life on earth, a necessary stage in their eternal progression. The only sexual activity that is sanctioned by the Church is that which gives these souls earthly form. The billions of sperm which men produce should only be released with their wives.

Once nationally condemned for polygamy, the Church has ever since frowned upon the slightest sexual deviation. I remember, as a boy, my Sunday school teacher once told my class, "If I ever hear that any of you were abusing yourselves, I would cut off your penises." I was astonished by this cruelly threatening pronouncement, and grateful that there were no ways in which he could implement his warning. In the eyes of Mormons, Onan's spilling his seed had almost cosmic implications. I think the struggle against masturbation was the most difficult of my "moral" tasks; and giving in was laden with guilt until my mid-20s. After prolonged delay, release was almost too intense to be enjoyable. Strangely, despite the Church's eccentric sexual history, lust and lechery were elevated from the least to the most severe group of sins. If my family was representative, industry and cleanliness ranked highest among the virtues.

Like other white protestant faiths, the Church was racist throughout much of its history. Blacks were not admitted to the priesthood until 1978. Today, Mormon racial policies have necessarily been modified. The Church is now a worldwide, multi-ethnic institution, and all racial (although certainly not sexual) prejudices have been officially dropped.

In their dark suits, the dedicated pairs of male (and now female) missionaries still travel "without purse or scrip," and are recognized around the world. Converts can be forgiven for falling for the messengers (usually good-looking youths), rather than their message. Hesitating converts may think, "Well, if Mormons can look like these ardent angels, I'll sign on the dotted line!" While in the service of the Lord, missionaries are supervised as closely as monks or nuns—accountable through daily diaries, even for their most aberrant thoughts and acts. There has recently been a phenomenal increase in the number of these globetrotting evangelists, now well over 50,000. New Saints are promised eternal life, both in body and spirit. In my time, they were told they might ultimately rule over planets or "astral kingdoms." By showing us pictures of gloriously happy families together at the fireside, the Church advertises its faith through all media. The long-running weekly broadcasts of the Tabernacle Choir are only the most familiar of the Church's voices.

In the Church's other aggrandizing practice—baptism for the dead—the faithful undergo countless ritual baptisms by immersion for the legions who died before the Church was established in 1830. All unfortunate men and women who lived before that date are given a chance to accept the Gospel. For this purpose, the Church maintains the largest collection of genealogical records in the world, stored in enormous bomb-proof caverns in the mountains east of Salt Lake City. Joseph's vision was grandiose: he wanted his Church to include the living and the dead. Like all children, when I went through this baptismal rite, I was a proxy for persons long since dead, souls whose names were rapidly and unintelligibly chanted over me. The other members of my Boy Scout troop, wrapped in white gowns, wet and shivering, had left the baptismal font just before me. I may have been saving souls, but I was scared to death, barely able to catch my breath between dunkings.

My early environment had so emphasized sin and punishment that I did not believe in the possibility of mercy or forgiveness. This had long-term reverberations. As a measure of the Mormons' hold over me—when I was labeled a criminal in 1960—it never occurred to me that forgiveness, unlike acquittal, was possible. In college, I had read the moving pleas for mercy in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure, but I did not fully realize that there might be hope for all fallen sinners. I have often felt that Mormonism, like some other Protestant faiths, places too great a burden upon the average unaided soul, particularly my erring soul.

Within a few weeks of my baptism at eight—the one occasion on which my sins were washed away and I was forgiven—I was sure that my record was already blackened with sins, on the basis of my evil thoughts alone. The Church leaders seemed far more preoccupied with commonplace bad habits like smoking and drinking than with more important ethical acts and moral beliefs. For believers, even a cup of coffee, or a blasphemous word, could tilt the scales of moral law. At home, I remember the occasional 20-minute prayers before meals, in which my father begged for forgiveness as though he had committed serious crimes: "Oh Lord, I beg that Thou wilt overlook my weaknesses and follies…" Even as a child, I wondered to what acts my father was referring. Had the Church's preoccupation with sin and guilt not been so deeply imprinted upon my father, I might have been able to free myself decades before I did.

In my youth, I was most aware of the Calvinist aspects of Mormonism. In New England and upstate New York, the birthplace of scores of sects in the early 19th century, a Calvinist strain ran through many new faiths. Until my mid-20s at Harvard, I never thought that my homosexuality could be forgiven. But by then I had already for many years considered myself a sinner, and it was very difficult for me to shuck off my burden. Not until Harvard did I come upon John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. Grace for sinners! The idea astonished me. Although I had left the Church intellectually years before, I still could not release myself emotionally. Later, I was deeply moved by the hymn, "Amazing Grace." It took years for me to feel released from guilt. Because the Mormons believe that man possesses the means to gain his own salvation through prayer and participation in the Church's rites, he presumably does not need divine grace. But in youth I did not believe that prayer was sufficient, because I never knew whether it was heeded.

Despite the Church's Calvinistic strain, Mormons do not consider themselves, as many Christians have for centuries, fallen sinners, inheritors of Adam's sin—the weaknesses I now think of as universally human. Several articles of Mormon faith seemed to me overreaching: "As man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may become." I understand that the first part of this presumptuous statement is no longer emphasized. In my opinion, traditional Christian belief—that we are all imperfect and prone to err, but that we may all (by various means) be redeemed—far more subtly and honestly reflects the human condition. The strictness of Mormonism, therefore, was overlaid by an optimism that was always unconvincing to me. It still must be difficult for Mormons to reconcile this optimism with the Church's condemning even minor acts as sins. I think that the Church's insistence upon faultless behavior did immeasurable harm to children of my anxious temperament. I wish that as a boy I had known Jane Austen's shrewd comment: "Pictures of perfection make me sick and wicked."

Of course, the more severely we skeptical Mormons were criticized, the more emphatically some of us rebelled—as my friends and I did. Partly because I thought my sins were ineradicable, I didn't feel that salvation for me was possible. In adolescence, I felt that my powerful attraction to boys separated me from family, church, and everyday society. I was always sure that I could never change—nor did I wish to change—my deepest desires, desires that also felt natural and life-affirming. At the same time, I was trained to see these joyous attractions to my own sex as perverse and sinful. The pressures of church, family, and society were too great. There was obviously no resolution for this conflict. As proof of the depth of my own conditioning, I retained this guilt long after I became a dedicated skeptic in all religious matters. Today, I understand that there are therapy groups within Mormonism that try to "cure" gays of their homosexuality. Have these gay Mormons had "aversion therapy," or have they all become chaste or hypocritical? Doctrine and desire must still be deeply at odds.

Since the Church has long been dominated by a hierarchical paternalism, Mormon women were traditionally "saved" only through their husbands, who alone were admitted to the priesthood. Women today, however, are rarely happy with the idea of their gaining status and salvation only through marriage. The feminist movement within Mormonism has understandably found the Church's gender-based exclusions prejudicial to half of the human race. My mother was among those who fought strongly for independence. But the roles of women in Zion have always been complex. With their polygamous or monogamous husbands often consumed by Church and business duties, the wives usually brought up the children and were responsible for shaping their lives. Of course, this was and is a pattern in many families, American and worldwide. But from their pioneer beginnings, Mormon women had to be especially strong. In a startling and unprecedented declaration of their independence, women banded together so effectively in the early part of the last century that Utah was the first state to grant women the right to vote. In a religion that boasted of its male leaders, I believe that the great unsung heroes in Zion were and are women.

Most of my discoveries about the complicated past of the Church have been made later in life. In recent years, a book about the state of contemporary religion by my former colleague at Yale, Harold Bloom, has informed me of much that I never knew. In The American Religion, Bloom seems amazed by the range of Joseph Smith's invention of Mormon texts and beliefs. Bloom feels that Joseph had one of the boldest and most original religious imaginations of the 19th century. The Church, of course, would never agree that The Book of Mormon was the product of merely human imagination.

But Bloom does not admire Mormonism as he now finds it; his admiration is far more for the originality of Joseph Smith's imagination than for the Church itself. With Mormonism's growth from a sect to a worldwide religion, he maintains that both belief and practice have markedly declined. Today, in most respects, the everyday lives of Mormons reflect current American bourgeois culture. Pro-family and anti-abortion beliefs were pervasive in Mormonism long before the Right celebrated "family values," and the misleadingly named "right to life." But the Church's present emphasis upon these values has paradoxical implications. If marriage is essential to salvation, will all of the divorced and unmarried Mormons of the world, including all homosexuals, be relegated to lesser realms in the hereafter, or be damned? Partly because young Mormons marry early, there is a great deal of separation and divorce in Zion, even though couples are sealed to one another for eternity in Church temples.

Mormonism is now established in the center of American life, with at least 15 members in Congress and 5 in the Senate. The Mormons have increasingly conformed to American ways. But an America in the image of Mormonism is—for a still angry Jack-Mormon like me—a deeply disturbing prospect. The Saints, frugal and hard-working, have always shown great skill in acquiring money and power, laying up massive treasures on earth as well as presumably in heaven. I never heard Mormons preach some of the commonplaces of traditional religious ethics—that money is the root of all evil, or that power corrupts. Because the institution has vast investments, and its members in good standing pay a ten percent tithe, the Church's nearly six billion dollars in gross annual income place it halfway through the list of Fortune's 500. Time recently referred to the Church as "America's most prosperous religion," with a "thirty billion dollar church empire." I find its wealth and its faith starkly incompatible. Is it a religion or a corporation? How can these facts possibly be reconciled with the spiritual organization founded by Joseph Smith? This amassing of wealth is referred to by Church leaders as "husbanding the Lord's resources." Although many of its supporters call its financial empire "democratic capitalism," I might characterize its far right agenda as "religious imperialism."

Comparisons between the writings of a once-obscure American visionary at the beginning of the 19th century, and the work of some of the greatest English poets, strike me as inappropriate and absurd. But because poets have long helped me to articulate my spiritual life, I would like to place my view of Mormonism in a larger context. At Harvard, I found that the moving and anguished colloquies with God of Donne, Herbert, and Marvell—my favorite 17th century poets—gave voice to my reaching for something beyond (always undefined), and to my exploring my own deeply divided nature. While reading these poets, I can temporarily be a believer. The originality and wisdom of William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, among his other writings, have also greatly assisted me in reconciling the opposites that are parts of my very being. Although I know that these proverbs are partly satiric, I have used many of them as mantras: "Without Contraries is no progression"; and "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." I soon realized that in Blake's terms I had always been "of the Devil's party," and that I had long been fleeing from Nobodaddy, the image of a false and pompous sky-god. If Heaven and Hell can metaphorically and ironically be "married," there is even hope for my search for integration.

There has always been for me only one chance, this life, and there are no reprieves. When I taught Shakespeare's Last Romances, however, I found them irresistibly moving because he renders what seems to be a second chance for his protagonists so beautifully convincing that I have wanted to believe. This is a possibility that the tragic heroes can never have. I catch my breath because I partly can't believe, and yet I partly can. Even in the Tragedies, Antony lives a second, and far more glorious, life in the final dream vision of Cleopatra. In the acts of faith invoked by the Last Romances, the tension between skepticism and belief reduces me to tears.

And yet I feel that Shakespeare's references to the supernatural are rarely incompatible with a secular worldview. After an apparent miracle has occurred in The Winter's Tale, Leontes comments, "If this be magic, let it be an art/Lawful as eating." "Poetic faith" is well defined by Coleridge's famous phrase—the "willing suspension of disbelief for the moment." My most exciting experiences in all of the arts have been suspensions of disbelief, and finally the whole-hearted acceptance of the artistic vision. I can have no belief except poetic and artistic faith, but armed with that power, I can accept and expect miracles.