Wherever it came from, I have always had a deep fascination, obsession, love (etc.) with hidden knowledge, ancient secrets, hermetic brotherhoods passing down obscure books to the next generation of guardians in hidden rituals. Inscrutable texts written in long-dead languages. I lived for that shit.

I lived in a majority-Jewish area at a time when my friends at school were reaching the age of bar/bat mitzvahs. They got to go to Hebrew school after normal school, where they learned to read the gnarly characters of a form of a holy language that had been dead for centuries. I was outrageously jealous, something my friends could never seem to wrap their heads around. I went so far as to email a local Rabbi about the possibility of a gentile attending Hebrew school, who gently answered that it was maybe possible, but why?

Still, I had plenty of fertile ground within the bounds of my own inherited religion. After all, we had not only the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek scriptures, but the Book of Mormon, another ancient work brought forth by the super-duper miraculous power of god and translated from “Reformed Egyptian” (a language which, I noted with no small satisfaction, most scholars had never even heard of).

And that wasn’t all! Joseph Smith had also revealed the lost text of the Book of Moses, the Book of Abraham, and a scroll hidden up by none other than John the Revelator himself! (And although I didn’t learn about them until later, he’d even translated a portion of the Kinderhook plates, which took some real skill…considering they were a hoax.)

Mormonism’s library of canonized scripture is extensive, and it contains a chaotic mishmash of history, pseudo-historical legends, and the wholesale fabrication of Joseph Smith’s ingenious, fertile nineteenth-century mind. The religion retcons and repurposes the books of the Bible and even its own unique scriptures to suit prevailing circumstances and needs, prooftexting liberally and cheerfully allowing anything the privilege of potentially meaning anything else.

I got to know the canonized scriptures of mormonism very well. Sure, reading them was a hell of a lot more interesting than listening to what people were saying in the dry hours of meetings I so often found myself in. But there was also a sort of hidden, secret majesty to delving deeply in these mysterious words. I knew things about the scriptures that most of my leaders didn’t know. It took one of the attributes that made me inherently different, and made that difference holy. It earned me respect and admiration, which I didn’t really have any other ways to get at church.

This continued as I went to a year of college, then a two-year mission, and as I completed my undergrad work at the mormon micro-dystopia that is BYU. I studied Arabic, Hebrew, and scholarly analysis of scripture from the Talmudic to the secular.

Of course, the best way to lose respect for scripture is to study it rigorously. But I took my time about it, in part because I knew that on the day I opened the Book of Mormon and saw only a wildly implausible nineteenth-century con, I would experience a profound sense of loss. Even though I had already been experiencing that sense of loss little by little as I retreated across the Russian winter landscape of faith and reason’s battleground, I was right; it hurt.

It still does, a little bit.

The abundant opportunities for humor at the expense of the books I once cherished do help, sometimes. But they’re never going to make me forget. I possessed, collected, and cherished a sacred sense of awe. It gave me a place in the mormon church, and a place in the cosmos. I don’t have the slightest regret about outgrowing that, but I know what a loss it is when it happens.