Mormon’s middling mission offers intriguing insight

Chances are good that you’ve opened your front door to see a pair of clean-cut young men wearing white shirts, ties and dark dress pants standing on your doorstep. Their first words might be, “Are you familiar with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?”

In his memoir, The Missionary, Toronto writer Greg Hudson provides the inside scoop on these young missionaries through his personal experience of serving as one in western Ontario from October 2002 to September 2004.

Hudson grows up in a Mormon family living in Calgary; he sees his two-year mission as the pinnacle of his young life, and has high hopes for proving his devotion to the church by performing a record number of baptisms on people he’s brought into the fold.

His brother Sam served his mission in France, and his sister Gillian was sent to Russia; Hudson, meanwhile, has his own hopes for his posting. “My dream was a place like Haiti or South Africa, where I would be a distinct minority. I wanted culture shock. I wanted to be called to a place that would confirm my suspicions that, aside from some mistakes, I was mostly righteous,” he writes.

When Hudson opens his mission call letter from the church president, he’s dismayed to learn he’s been sent to the Canada Toronto West Mission.

The main reason for keeping Hudson in Canada was his recent diagnosis as a Type 2 diabetic — an inherited condition. While he notes that other countries have insulin available, he’s upset when others tell them his medical condition will likely keep him in Canada, which proves to be correct.

He’s further disappointed to discover his mission territory doesn’t include Toronto itself, but is headquartered at the Brampton temple and includes Waterloo, London, Sudbury, Barrie and Niagara Falls. At the Brampton mission home, Elder Hudson meets his first partner, Elder McDaniels, to begin their mission in Sarnia. He asks McDaniels to teach him humility.

LDS missionaries, as they are called, are only allowed to read scriptures and four missionary reference books. They are instructed not to listen to the radio, watch TV or attend any form of entertainment other than joining local Mormon families for dinner most nights. (Hudson said the dinners tended to be spaghetti, with the occasional lasagna thrown in.)

Staying in a small apartment with twin beds in the one bedroom, the missionaries would start each day with prayer and breakfast and then head to a pre-selected neighbourhood for door knocking. If anyone answered the door, the missionaries would try to open a dialogue allowing them to explain some of the church’s tenets.

The ultimate goal is to have the person decide to join the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and be baptized. Hudson set personal goals for his baptisms, but achieving them was often frustrating. In one case, a woman expressed her interest in joining but later backed out after her sister told her what she viewed as negative aspects of the church.

In addition to the difficulty of finding success in his mission, Hudson is also challenged by what he sees as his ongoing struggles with pornography. Beginning when he was a teen, Hudson became fascinated by images of female breasts as seen in magazines. He fights against his desire to view these images and experience sexual arousal, since he knows it goes against church teachings. Sex is only permitted within marriage, and masturbation viewed negatively.

After returning home from his mission, he starts a relationship with a church bishop’s daughter, who doesn’t follow the sexual guidelines. The guilt he feels over their actions, coupled with increasing doubts about his spiritual beliefs, leads him to a personal crisis.

While The Missionary is on the whole informative and interesting, the book contains somewhat confusing details as Hudson shares the LDS’s history and includes spiritual quotes. However, it does make those young door-knockers more relatable.

Andrea Geary is a freelance writer in Selkirk.