Way Below the Angels

Starred review from June 9, 2014
You see them on bikes and on foot, their white shirts, badges, and backpacks identifying them as Mormon missionaries. A young man’s mission can be a time of discovery and faith-building or a jarring, frightening experience. But no missionary returns home unchanged. Harline (Conversions), professor of European history at Brigham Young University, recounts his experience as a young missionary in Belgium in this delightful memoir. After intensive training at the Mormons’ Missionary Training Center, he and thousands of his fellows are cast out into the world with minimal language skills and, he notes, little in the way of training for what the real world holds in store. As he dodges Belgians and fellow missionaries, weather and traffic, readers will laugh out loud at Harline’s misadventures. But this tale is, at heart, a reflection, 40 years later, on how life doesn’t always follow the rules set out by statisticians and spiritual advisers, and how growing up away from home can be profoundly unsettling. A thoughtful, wonderful read.

July 15, 2014
Two years as a Mormon missionary in Belgium.Harline (European History/BYU; Conversions: Two Family Stories from the Reformation and Modern America, 2011, etc.) spends a good deal of this reminiscence clowning around in a charming fashion, like the harmless and naive teenager he was when he accepted a two-year mission to proselytize the Mormon faith in Belgium. Unfortunately, Belgium was a land of Catholics, and Harline had been taught "that the Catholic Church was wicked. And weird. The Church of the Devil. The Whore of All the Earth....Wouldn't all those Belgian people in Catholic darkness be glad to see me?" However, the Belgians were not in the market for Harline's goods, and the author knew he was not cut from the proselytizer's cloth. He did not like the doors shut in his face, the poor Belgian weather, the dogs sent out to investigate his presence, the occasional display of firearms and, probably most of all, the near misses. Furthermore, he had to conduct himself in Dutch, a language he found "close to alarming." But he was not without faith and humor; he was not just a devout young man, but a searcher. He was open to the sublime, and he found it in Belgium's timeless places, such as a forest near the village of Godsheide in the late-afternoon winter light, where "we knew we were in some other world, like we and every person, thing, and place we'd ever known, done, or been were all there too, at once...toujours vu, always seen." Along the way, Harline learned a lot about being himself and had many profound experiences. In his memoir, he displays a fine mix of pathos and hilarity as he describes imagining what people made of his Dutch, laughing at his "stainless-steel suit," and giving thanks for the virtues learned and the connections made.An unvarnished, mostly bewildered and touchingly human memoir.

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July 1, 2014
As a boy, Harline dreams of joining the army of missionaries wearing white shirts and name tags as they spread the Mormon gospel. In this disarmingly candid memoir, Harline recounts how his childhood dream becomes an adult nightmare during his two years as an evangelist in Belgium, two years of knocking on doors slammed in his face, of quarreling with fellow missionaries, of bicycling through rain, andworst of allof wrestling with lacerating self-doubts. Readers share the pivotal epiphany in a Hasselt apartment, where the young missionary finally accepts his lot as an idiosyncratic introvert whose flawed but real faith will never mean the world-converting success he once dreamed of. Then a second revelation in a snowy Zichen field transforms a strange and repellant country into a familiar and delightful land. Unexpected experiences in cathedrals and chapels even teach the young Latter-day Saint missionary to recognize his spiritual kinship with believers embracing other credos. By turns amusing and tender, an unvarnished and introspective reflection, humanizing a little-understood religion.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)