The Candle I Was Forbidden to Light

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Every faith on earth travels the same road: from a parent’s hands into a child’s. Councils ratify the creeds, scholars argue the doctrines, but faith itself is transmitted at bedsides and kitchen tables, in a voice the child already trusts — and, far more often than the official histories admit, against the rules.

In my childhood the rule was posted on the back of a door. Hard times had put us in a motel — near poverty, a family too large for the room, a stay that was supposed to be brief and was not — and the rule said no candles. The front desk had clarified it further: no open flames of any kind. My mother lit one anyway. On Sunday evenings she sat five children in a row, opened the old book with its gold lettering worn nearly invisible, and read scripture aloud by a flame the management had twice forbidden. She was not careless about the risk. She had weighed it against a danger she judged greater — children who might pass through that low season with no ambience of the sacred at all — and she made her choice. The reading taught us the words. The forbidden candle memorialized her faith. Forty years on, I can barely recite the verses; I have never stopped seeing the flame.

And the flame did what flames do. It threw our shadows on the wall, where we turned our heads trying to catch our own profiles before they vanished — my first experiment on the speed of light, decades before I had the words for it. It warmed the cold corners of a room that was not a home and made it one for an hour. Giggles broke every decree of reverence, and my mother read on above them, steady, defiant twice over.

She was in old company. Scripture, read honestly, is a long record of parents and keepers of faith breaking rules to hand it down. Jochebed defied Pharaoh’s edict and hid her son three months, then laid him in a basket of pitch and reeds rather than surrender him. The midwives Shiphrah and Puah were ordered to kill the sons of Hebrew mothers and simply did not, and lied to the king’s face about it. Daniel, under a decree that made his prayer a capital crime, opened his window toward Jerusalem and prayed as he had learned from his fathers, three times a day, in plain view. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego stood before the furnace rather than bow on schedule. Esther walked into the throne room against the law of the realm — if I perish, I perish — to keep her people alive. In every case the rule was legitimate, the authority real, the penalty serious. And in every case the faith survived because somebody decided the rule mattered less than the flame.

In the scriptures of my own upbringing the pattern reaches its severest form. Nephi stands in a dark street over the drunken Laban, and the Spirit tells him to kill: it is better that one man should perish than that a nation should dwindle and perish in unbelief. A beheading, justified by the transmission of faith to the children not yet born. As a boy I accepted that story the way children accept everything read to them by candlelight. As a man I have learned to tremble at it — because the candle and the sword rest on the very same argument. Break the rule, so the faith survives. The only question is what, or whom, you are willing to cut.

I have been on both sides of that blade.

When the church of my fathers could not live up to its factual claims, I did not drift gently into doubt. I swung hard to the other shore and fortified it: secularism wedded entirely to objectivism, science installed as the sole giver of all information. I was defensive of that position in exactly the way I had once been defensive of the faith — and I could not yet see that I had only changed uniforms in the same war.

And in that season, I became the Laban of someone else’s deliverance story. To the mother of my children, it was better that one man should perish — his character, his identity, his place — than that the family’s faith decline and the expectations of her society go unmet. So the beheading proceeded, justified at every step by the good it protected. I was cut out of the family pictures first. Then, by every detestable and deceitful means available, cut out of the family itself. A beheading of that kind is not quick; it took more than a decade to sever the last ligaments. I record this without asking the reader to adjudicate it. I record it because I understand the logic from the inside — I was raised on it, warmed by it, and finally laid under it.

So this essay is not finally about a motel, or about Mormons, or about me. Across every culture I have studied or lived in, the same fight is running: the handed-down flame against the posted rule, and lately a swifter current that would usurp wholesale the morals and ideals that built societies — not test them, as I insist we must, but simply sweep them out. In one lifetime I have stood at nearly every station of that fight: the child of a pioneer legacy, the defender of the faith, the questioner, the apostate, the beheaded, and now a man building a church so that faith and reason need never again demand each other’s heads. I went from leader to liberator, from wisdom giver to whistleblower — and every one of those turns was the same turn, made by the same man, who only ever wanted the light left burning. Paul walked that road in the other direction: the zealot who held the coats at a stoning became the man his own people tried to kill for apostasy, and he never once thought he had changed sides. As Paul showed, the road from pioneer to apostate is short, and it runs both ways.

What I kept from the motel room is this: the flame is worth the rule broken for it. But the sword is not the candle, and no verse makes them the same. Hand your children the light. Refuse them the blade.

Light the candle. Watch the wall. The shadows you cast are being kept.

— Clayton Hess

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