OCR Text |
Show XVI of Mormondom -- where parents choose their children's friends and businessmen their associates according to Mormon Church affiliations -- religious devotion readily transforms into fanaticism. In Utah, polygamists lose jobs and their families are socially ostracized. In "the Promised Valley," one's religious belief is reason enough for lifelong suffering, persecution and even murder. And so I have invoked translation -- in the literal and the doctrinal senses -- to save me from my own paradoxes, to remove me from the shadowy, outlaw world of secrecy, suspicion, and murder into a brighter sphere of truth and openness and life. For, I too, have come to that milestone where the viola tions of silence give way to the vibrations of speech, and I aim to translate the life into which I was born, to join it with the communities of the earth. |