I’d like to start off with a story of power wielded selfishly against innocent victims. The wielder was me. The innocent bystanders, bright, eager, and trusting new missionaries preparing in the Provo Missionary Training Center (MTC) to serve successful missions across the ocean in Italy.
I had been teaching at the MTC for at least a year. I was finishing my undergraduate degree in English from Brigham Young University, and getting a job teaching Italian, the restored gospel, and some missionary skills to passionate and powerful newly minted missionaries was the best job I had ever had. Their testimonies lifted and sustained mine while I struggled with new things I was learning about the Church’s past, alternative theories on church leadership and doctrine, and my own spiritual malaise that was complicated, no doubt, by a persistent personal struggle against a pornography addiction. In a word, I was a mess. But walking up that long, gradual slope to the MTC five or six days a week was a chance to ponder my spirituality, to beg my Heavenly Father for forgiveness (and just one more chance!), and to strategize how to protect my (whom I then thought of as) naive charges against the pernicious influences and ideas that buffeted my testimony and my soul. If all else failed, I knew a combination of verb drills and practice door approaches would get us all through the evening.
About a year in, though, that changed. I became increasingly desperate to find answers to my questions. In what I now consider an act of faith and trust in the Lord’s appointed servants (though at the time I vacillated between seeing it as a cruel trick and an inspired teaching strategy), I began introducing the missionary companionships whom I taught to “progressing investigators,” individuals modeled off of people I had known and loved and who, in most cases, had not decided to join the Church, some of whom had gone as far as having a baptismal interview and some who had never even attempted to read the Book of Mormon and pray to know of its origins. These individuals, in the course of their interactions with dozens of missionary companionships, expressed the doubts, quandaries, and hard ideas I was struggling with. And just like that, I set the missionaries to work, preparing sometimes on a daily basis, to really teach me.
One of these investigators, whom I named Salvatore, was particularly difficult. He represented one of the most difficult moments of my own mission to Italy, a failure to follow the Spirit that has continued to haunt me, to some degree, to this day. Salvatore, or rather the man he represented, was a charismatic and delightful human being. His story, or rather the ways our stories intertwined, bore all the hallmarks of something you would write in a letter to the Ensign. My companion and I met Salvatore just before it was time to go inside and prepare for the next day of proselytizing. One of the main pedestrian thoroughfares of Ravenna, a road called Via Cavour, was busy and crowded this Saturday night. Attempt after attempt to interest a passerby in the message we had to share proved unsuccessful. The feeling of being surrounded by people who could be helped by the gospel was frustrating, even infuriating. To make matters worse, I had been unsuccessful in Ravenna for about four months already, had, in my eyes, been passed over for promotion to senior companion, and constantly compared the baptisms and blessings I had experienced in my first city with the spiritual barrenness of this one. I felt responsible for the small, fragile branch that had held on tooth and claw for so many years.
Then I had an impression. The kind you read about and hear about, the kind that sent Wilford Woodruff to the United Brethren, the kind that made Parley P. Pratt ask to borrow that copy of the Book of Mormon. The impression pushed me to approach a middle-aged gentleman whom I never would have approached otherwise. He looked like all his energy for the past week had gone into preparing himself for this stroll along Via Cavour. His shirt and slacks were carefully ironed, his shoes expertly polished, even the tuft of chest hair poking out of his shirt was expertly prepared. He was the vision of middle-aged Italian masculinity. So I went up to him and complimented him on his shirt. Asked him where he purchased it.
He had stopped. We were talking. This was my chance.
Then, in my typical rough transition, I asked him if he had ever spoken to missionaries like us before. His response blew us away. “No, but I have been walking up and down this blasted street all evening hoping you two would stop and talk with me.”
What followed was an incredible story.
Salvatore had recently moved to Ravenna, prompted by a change of scene. He had been addicted to gambling and it was one late and drunken night, after losing almost everything he had, that he wrecked his car between casinos in the north of Italy. Hitting rock bottom, he left for slightly sunnier climes. He was trying to re-enter the oil industry, where he had had some success in past years but whose demands had ultimately ended his marriage and family. The first day after he had moved in, he spotted us and saw a spiritual opportunity. He bided his time and, lo and behold, an opportunity to speak with us on Via Cavour came shortly thereafter.
Salvatore quickly expressed admiration and happiness at learning the principles of the gospel: amazement at the story of Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon, comfort in the plan of salvation, humility towards the Atonement of Jesus Christ. He started to make and keep commitments, culminating in his letting us take all the alcohol from his house and throw it in a nearby dumpster (it was no small amount). The great ease of conversion, however, dulled us to warning signs. He rarely, if ever, read the Book of Mormon alone, rather expressing a desire to read it together. Baptism was his goal, so we did not blink too much when he began accepting commitments like paying tithing with verbal circumlocutions and dependencies. This all led up to a difficult failed baptismal interview in which he refused to commit to paying tithing after his baptism.
Members and missionaries alike tried to testify of the blessings and rewards of obeying this commandments, but the embarrassment of a failed interview and what amounted to a creeping suspicion that these mormoni were out to get what years of gambling had left behind embittered Salvatore.
I blamed myself for not being spiritual enough to have discerned this spiral. Our meetings with Salvatore grew less frequent and more confrontational, despite our best efforts. We stopped meeting in Salvatore’s home, instead briefly meeting up in public places. The last of this series of public meetings led to the caricature of Salvatore I later played for MTC companionships.
We had been begging Salvatore for weeks to read the Book of Mormon on his own so that he could gain a witness of its correctness and divine origins. In this meeting, he told us, he had acquiesced to our request, beginning the book from the beginning. And here, he smiled, was finally the proof he had been looking for. My companion and I also smiled, looked at each other, and waited to hear what Salvatore, in his usual dramatic manner, would say.
“I’ve found evidence that the Book of Mormon is not, cannot, be true,” he said.
We were dumbstruck. How could this be?
“Turn to the story of Nephi, chapter four. This is not the action of a prophet. This is an action of the devil. This is the wolf in sheep’s clothing I suspected. This is not the word of God. You, my dear boys, have been deceived and have dedicated your lives to deceiving others.”
To be continued next week
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