22 Days.

I’ve never been to a foreign country, but the idea of being a foreigner myself is probably the most alluring prospect. It will be nice to live for a while in a world that does not really expect me to understand it.

I joined the Church largely through books. I didn’t like most of the Mormons I knew, and they didn’t seem to like me. It was always puzzling to me that we could agree perfectly on these odd, specific, unpopular doctrines that absolutely nobody else seemed to find persuasive, while connecting on seemingly no other grounds whatsoever, and in fact finding each other vaguely offensive.

The temptation was (and is) to believe that those Mormons were not really sincere; they were the blinkered, flabby heirs of a tradition that they did not appreciate or even really understand. Like the Eloi in The Time Machine, their forbears built this magnificent edifice of ideas, which they use as casually and incuriously as one uses a microwave oven.

So I came here looking for my “tribe”. If I could find it anywhere, it would be here (and conversely, if I couldn’t find it here…)

Of course, I discovered that feeling alienated at BYU is actually one of the more authentic, nigh-universal rites of passage for LDS young people. Paradoxically, it’s the expectation of belonging that makes it so lonely–if even the Mormons don’t get you, you must be a real weirdo.

That’s why it will be so enjoyable to live in a foreign country. They won’t make sense to me, and I won’t make sense to them, and there will be no existential loneliness about it. In all these cultural training meetings they keep talking about the horrors of culture shock, but to me it just sounds like Provo.