Note: I originally wrote this in 2012. But this past week I just streamed both seasons of Twin Peaks and felt the need to revisit the essay. Because, well, Agent Cooper is everything I want to be.

A few years ago, an obscure pastor in Florida held a Quran in one hand and the promise of a lighter in another, effectively threatening to throw an ideological grenade into a crowded room. The PR stunt worked as it took the viewing world hostage in an unprecedented display of evangelistic theatrics and foreign policy nightmare.

I raised my politically progressive divinity school graduate voice with millions all over the world in protest. How could he? What an ignorant, hateful human being. Does he understand the harm he will cause? Why I’d never. Such an outrage—oh, wait.

Like a memory lost after a long night of drinking but involuntarily dredged up out of a swamp of forgetting, I remembered. And I cringed. I did what?

The memory returned as this: I held the Book of Mormon in my hand looking for a way to destroy it. I was twenty and at the sad end of my student missionary year in the city of Prague, a failed experiment in adult freedom, religious conviction, and wanderlust. The ordinary sadness of a young woman living far from home collided with a wall of doomsday theology and the fanatical tendencies of a boss who claimed at the low point of the year that I was an agent of the devil. For months, I felt homesick and my journal read like the calendar of a prisoner with a release date. Now, I could go home. My roommate Charity and I were closing up the little one bedroom apartment we had shared for the past nine months. My suitcase was packed for a month.

The holy book in my hand was a reminder that we were not the only missionaries in the neighborhood. And things had not ended well between us and the Elders. We never knew their first names, only their last names which I have forgotten. Even between themselves we only heard them call each other by Elder so-and-so.

Four missionaries collided into each other not as goofy, earnest college students clumsily doing God’s work but rather as dangerously self-assured ambassadors from competing cosmic visions—we of the Seventh-day Adventists, they of the Latter-day Saints. (If you are neither, then you might be saying to yourself: aren’t both religions equally weird?)

We warily circled each other for months at bus stops and the grocery store. On Halloween, a holiday no one in the country paid attention to by American standards, we encountered the Elders on the subway dressed for the occasion, inexplicably, unadvisedly, in full nun habits complete with big, kitschy rosary beads around their necks. Judging from the many sideways looks the Elders received, it was clear that even if the Czech locals understood why these two men were dressed like nuns that they thought doing so was in bad taste. Yet, the Elders rode on straight-faced like real nuns might and moved through the crowded subway station with the same amiably fixed composure they carried door to door in their crisp white shirts and dark slacks as they doggedly trekked the Soviet-imprinted cement landscape sharing the Good News. I didn’t like them.

Once, though, in our desire for English-speaking friends, Charity and I attempted to bridge the distance. They invited us to their apartment for dinner. When we arrived, we met another LDS female missionary whom the Elders invited as part of protocol requiring mixed gatherings to always have an uneven number of men and women, ostensibly to prevent sexual pairing up. Obviously, whoever came up with this rule did not have much of a sexual imagination.

For many reasons, sex with the Elders was never going to be a possibility. But hopes for basic friendship while sharing a meal quickly degenerated into a bloodless religious war that ended with an ugly Scriptural face-off, prayer dare, and one of the Elders repeating again and again, “We believe the Book of Mormon is the second testimony of Jesus Christ. We believe the Book of Mormon is the second testimony of Jesus Christ.”

All my roommate and I had as proof of that unfortunate evening was the Elders’ parting gift of that very book. And I needed to get rid of it. Honest to God, this was my logic: If I didn’t dispose of the book, then Satan might use it to convert more people to Mormonism.

I’m not sure when I first arrived at the idea that Mormonism was a tool of the devil. In the church library of my childhood there was a video with scary background music and ominous narration that detailed the “false teachings” of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. And somehow I had gotten it into my head that Satan helped raise the Church of Latter-day Saints in the mid-19th century as an “evil twin” to the true and special remnant people of God (the Seventh-day Adventists, of course), who were themselves born out of the same religious fervor, geography, and yearnings of that time. There could only be one true messenger of God. And the Mormons weren’t it.

I can’t remember any sermons or family conversations on the topic although perhaps not inconsequential to the formation of my negative bias my father’s first wife converted to Mormonism after their divorce. And her name rarely carried positive associations with anything. Perhaps this part of our family history had seeped into my religious imagination, too, because when I was seven or eight years old, I once dreamed I was chasing a Mormon. And the Mormon was my older half-sister. In my dream she eluded me as I pursued her through the forest. Most notably, I woke up shouting “My God is better than your God!”

Whatever my own path to bigotry may have been, however, a simple Google search verifies this: I was an ideological granddaughter in a long lineage of fears and prejudices about the Latter-day Saints that extends far beyond my own Seventh-day Adventist roots into a much broader story of American history that, at its worst, bore acts of violence not only against books but against human beings.

All I knew in that moment in the apartment though was that this book was a tool of the devil. And Satan was the reason for almost everything scary I couldn’t explain, including a frightening bus ride home in my first few weeks in Prague.

It was late and the bus was almost empty. Charity and I were on our way home to our apartment in the outskirts of the city. From the back of the bus a man started talking loudly in Czech. I turned my head just far enough to see him out of the corner of my eye sitting in the very back, gesticulating wildly with his hands. Not being able to understand a word he was saying, my mind began to run away with possible explanations for his frightening behavior. Mental illness crossed my mind, of course. Why else would someone talk to themselves at such a loud volume? But it also seemed entirely reasonable to me to guess that he was, in fact, possessed by the Devil. That would make sense, right? Here Charity and I were, newly arrived in Prague to begin our missionary year and here was Satan attempting to scare us away from our purpose. Of course! I’d heard stories like this all the time in church. We were being tested. And I was failing the test hard because, to be honest, I was scared shitless. I wanted Charity’s assessment of the situation but I was afraid to even turn my head towards her in case I drew the attention of the crazy, demon-possessed man. So I just stared straight ahead and prayed hard.

When the bus finally dropped us off in front of our apartment complex, I found my voice and asked Charity about the terrifying bus ride. She looked at me quizzically and said, “You mean the man on the cell phone?”

Eight months later, I was accused of being an agent of the devil. There’s poetry in that, don’t you think?

But as absurd as it may sound, when I was twenty years old, a cell phone call in a foreign language sounded exactly like demon possession to me. Demons were omnipresent, I believed. In practice, this meant I saw demons even where they weren’t. Satan was real and powerful and deep into our personal business. And in turn, my fear of Satan real, powerful, and deeply personal. One of my defenses against Satan was to talk to him in my head like I was alerting a would-be attacker hiding in the dark. “I see you! I’m calling the police! And Jesus!”

This business with the Book of Mormon was serious business then. I considered my options. Of course, the most obvious solution was to throw the book away in the dumpster. But Satan might send a dispatch of demon helpers to rescue this copy of the Book of Mormon from certain destruction (as if he didn’t have access to a million more). From there, the book would be lifted on invisible hands out of the dumpster, into the air, across the street, through a window, and onto the kitchen table of an unsuspecting man or woman with life circumstances poising them to be the next perfect victim of the complex lie of Mormonism. So I did what the logic of my mind in that moment required: I tore it apart with my hands.

Of course it wasn’t logical at all. It was a manic, cathartic act of destruction in which I turned a sacred text into fistfuls of confetti while my roommate watched on like a passerby of a car wreck. She also took a picture. And I wince with pain to think that somewhere there still exists that photo of me dancing with arms raised in that rain of paper, trying to shake off my own demons I was calling by another name.

Nearly fifteen years later, I had done everything I could to distance myself from that strange and chaotic time in my youth. The world of meaning I once inhabited at the age of twenty was, by thirty, a shattered snow globe and I persisted through strata of grief and anger to re-create my place in a universe that did not have demons everywhere I turned.

But then, Pastor Terry Jones with his Wild Bill mustache and Wild West theology was no longer just some ugly caricature of everything wrong in American Christianity. He was a mirror. And as painful as it was to see my face in his, I could not deny that he and I held more in common than most, if only that we would forever be linked by membership in the small but notorious club of holy book destroyers. I mean, there really aren’t that many of us. But it only takes one to start a fire.

At first, it seemed like Terry Jones might back away from his own threats. He milked media time like a movie starlet, appearing on every news outlet that would give him a microphone. Like a surreal game show, a car dealer in New Jersey offered him a new vehicle if he promised not to burn the Quran. Pastor Jones accepted the prize then gave the car to a charity. Important political, religious, and military leaders all knew his name. President Obama addressed the controversy himself in an interview with George Stephanopoulos, imploring the pastor to listen to his “better angels” and rescind the proposed Quran burning.

Blessedly, Pastor Jones flinched. The September 11 deadline came and went and no holy books were burned. And in a phone call from Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Pastor Jones promised he would not burn the Quran. Why he made the promise, I don’t know. Perhaps he took to heart the warnings, perhaps he just got scared. Not exactly the makings of a “true believer,” I thought. Just a religious quack looking for his fifteen minutes of fame.

Perhaps Terry Jones became worried that his legacy might suffer the same evaluation. Because when he re-emerged the following Spring, he did so with a lighter and an accomplice, Pastor Wayne Sapp. Quietly, the two men oversaw the burning of the Quran in their church, the grossly misnamed Dove Outreach World Center on March 21, 2011.

Most Americans did not learn about the burning until two weeks later when nearly twenty people were brutally killed in Afghanistan, including seven U.N. workers, in a series of violent protests incited by President Karzai’s suspicious utilization of the news that Pastor Terry Jones, in front of a paltry audience of thirty, had proven himself a true believer, after all.

Predictably, Pastor Jones said he holds no responsibility for these deaths. Rather, he is on a personal crusade against what he sees as the demonic danger inherent in Islam and, by burning the Quran—a tool of the devil, he believes—he met fire with fire. One might argue that these are the risks a society takes when it values the right to freedom of speech. But it is already settled law that one’s freedom of speech does not extend to falsely yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater. How does this apply in the world theater when someone like Pastor Jones yells fire where there is none and there is no way to convince him or others like him of this fact? They see fire where there is none and in doing so create it.

Fifteen years ago, in that little apartment on the outskirts of Prague, I believed with my whole being that the Book of Mormon was a tool of the devil. So I destroyed it. Though I didn’t televise my actions as a statement of protest against Mormonism or demand an audience with the President, I also believed I was fighting Satan. I believed I was right and I acted accordingly. Like Pastor Jones did. Like the Afghan mob did.

Strangely, inside the ugliness of this kind of fundamentalist self-righteousness, this is where I am finding forgiveness: in the understanding that we are each doing what we believe is right in the world. Forgiveness of this reality is not permission to excuse it, however. Rather, it extends the challenge to remember that unconscionable acts of religious violence are not done by monsters without humanity but by humans who believe they are in the right. If they were merely monsters, then we would be absolved in destroying them. And this is temptingly easy to believe when human beings behave like monsters. Yet, when we discipline ourselves to remember they are prisoners to their own beliefs we are caught in a much more complex human drama from which we are not exempt and which requires a more honest accounting of the fundamentalisms that drive our own lives and political processes. In the public sphere, we cannot afford the hardening polarization of political and religious ideologies. Because if we settle for doing only what we believe is right or project that belief onto some idea of God or Government as our only rubric for action then we will eventually destroy ourselves with our rightness. Destruction is the ultimate and logical outcome of fundamentalism.

What is helping me to let go of my own fundamentalist thinking has been the deceptively simple practice of honoring what others say is right and true and sacred for them. Through a series of unexpected life events, I became a hospice chaplain and over the past eight years I have sat at the death beds of hundreds of people, many of whom held beliefs and ideas about Life and the Universe different from mine. And this one practice is saving me from myself.

Salvation comes when I sit with someone at the precipice of the mystery of death and remember how little beliefs matter. An Atheist co-worker recently told me that of all the deaths that she has witnessed, if she could testify that people who hold a belief in God have a qualitatively easier time dying than people who don’t, then maybe she would think there was some objective value in religion. But she couldn’t. Dying is hard. It might be the hardest work of our lives. Our beliefs don’t spare us the painful work of letting go. Sometimes, they even inhibit the process. What I’ve learned from those who are dying applies to life as well. What matters more than what we believe is true is our relationship to truth itself.

This was recently mirrored back to me, as strange as it might seem, when I streamed the first two seasons of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. When the show came out in 1990, I was only 13. And in a home where my parents wisely guarded the shows my brother and I could watch, Twin Peaks was not on their approved list. But even had I watched it ten years ago, I wouldn’t have been ready for it. I needed to wrestle my own fundamentalist demons before I could appreciate someone like Special Agent Dale Cooper who is now one of my favorite fictional characters of all time and the embodiment of what it means to pursue the truth in a way that does not harm others in the process.

(Warning: Major spoiler alert.)

As befitting his law enforcement role, Agent Cooper is devoted to truth and justice. When he arrives in Twin Peaks to investigate the murder of Laura Palmer, he is charmed by what initially appears to be idyllic small town life. But he quickly learns how troubled and chaotic the lives of the people who live there truly are. Somehow, this doesn’t shake his basic faith in the goodness of what he has found there. He possesses an enviable ability to go with the flow. Whether in his own dreams or in the shared dream of life in Twin Peaks, he doesn’t fight the way things are. Rather, he wonders. He wonders about what he sees and hears, believing that everything holds meaning even if he doesn’t understand what that might be yet.

Like I did, Agent Cooper inhabits a world in which demons are real and powerful. Yet, he doesn’t push anything away in fear. He engages reality no matter how strange, disturbing, and unbelievable that reality might be. (And if you’ve seen the show, you know how strange and disturbing things do become.) The challenge for Agent Cooper is one of connecting the dots. The truth lies within, he believes, but to find it requires a deep and unflinching quest into the unknown. Mostly importantly, though his commitment to finding the truth is incorruptible, his search for the truth is never divorced from his love for humanity.

Nowhere is this more evident in the show—and perhaps in all of television history—than in the moment when he attends to the death of Leland Palmer. The horrifying truth that Agent Cooper finally discovers is that Leland Palmer killed his own daughter and, later, his niece. Leland’s culpability in this is mitigated by the fact that he was not aware of his own actions at the time. Years before, a murderous spirit named BOB (yes, BOB) possessed Leland to be a vessel to feed its bloodlust.

Agent Cooper entraps the demon-possessed Leland Palmer in a locked room. But before the parasitic demon leaves, he destroys its host by pummeling Leland Palmer’s body against the concrete walls of the room. BOB takes sadistic pleasure in informing Agent Cooper that when he leaves Leland Palmer will regain all of his memory and die in the horror of knowing that he killed his daughter with his own hands.

And it is a horrifying moment to witness the dawning of memory in Leland’s mind just moments before he dies. If there is ever a way to die in hell, this is it. Yet, Agent Cooper won’t let him go there without a fight. He gently holds Leland Palmer in his arms and coaches Leland to remember his own heart and to look towards the light. He speaks words to him that echo the counsel of the Tibetan Book of the Dead:

“Leland,” he says, “the time has come for you to seek the path. Your soul has set you face to face with the clear light and you are now about to experience it in all its reality, wherein all things are like the void and cloudless sky, and the naked, spotless intellect is like a transparent vacuum, without circumference or center. Leland, in this moment, know yourself, and abide in that state. . . Look to the light, Leland. Find the light.”

And in the last moments of Leland Palmer’s life, he does find the light and in the light he sees his daughter Laura on the other side. It is clear by his vision of her that she forgives him and loves him and all is well. For me, it is unclear whether Leland is able to hold to this light when he takes his last breath because something in his eyes changes in the heartbeat or two before he dies that speaks to me of someone again remembering the horror. There’s no way to know, of course, without asking the writers about their intentions, which may have been purposefully ambiguous. But for me, that moment is a reminder of how hard it is to hold to the light in ourselves and in others.

Yet, Agent Cooper holds to the light for him. True, Agent Cooper is a fictional character. Not the Buddha or Christ. But he embodies what all the great spiritual traditions teach: there is a light in this world that will not die. There is no demonic power that can extinguish it. And if we keep looking to the light, we will discover a capacity to love that defies logic when we remember the horrible truths about who we are as human beings. Here, in this light, there is no space for violence or cruelty in the name of what is right.

I am only learning this slowly. On my best days as a chaplain, I do what I can to be like Agent Cooper, to hold to the light in a person or situation no matter the horror and say, the light is here, look for the light, it is here in you and you will find your way. But as much as I hope to be of help in that moment, I am also aware of how this one practice of looking for the light is helping me. This one practice of looking for the light on behalf of another, no matter what they believe, is how my fundamentalism came to die a natural death.

Like any good fundamentalist, there is no one who cares more about the truth than Agent Cooper. But his devotion to the truth goes deeper than any fundamentalist idea of it. Not long after Leland Palmer’s death, Agent Cooper must face a trial of his own as he comes under investigation by Internal Affairs. Even when it becomes clear that he is being suspected of involvement in criminal activity of which he had no part, Agent Cooper does not launch a defense for himself. Instead, when he is questioned, Agent Cooper answers not like a lawyer but like a mystic, saying: “I’ve started to focus out beyond the edge of the board on a bigger game…The sound the wind makes through the pines. The sentience of animals. What we fear in the dark and what lies beyond the darkness.” The Internal Affairs agent responds: “What the hell are you talking about?” And Agent Cooper says: “I am talking about seeing beyond fear, Roger, about looking at the world with love.”

If only we could be fundamentalists about this kind of truth. If only our religious faith drove us to see what it is we fear in the dark and what lies beyond the darkness rather than to simply set on fire everything we don’t understand. If only our beliefs could be uncompromising about this one thing: to learn to see beyond fear and look at the world with love.

I only wish I’d known this before I joined the club of holy book destroyers.