Road to Exile

Paul Toscano’s memoir recounts how the Brooklyn-born grandson of Sicilian immigrants became a discarded dissident of an unpopular American religion and discovered the dark side of the American dream. This is a tragicomedy of the American soul, of hollow hopes and untested ideals cracked by the crowbar of events, abandoned in shards, then revisited, individuated, revolutionized, and renewed by the workings of a relentless and ineffable grace. His story is an American story.

Excommunication, like revenge, is best served cold. Mine was—cold and quick on a clear autumn day. Excommunication! The word resonates like the bell of a gothic cathedral and seems as anachronistic as a rank of grinning gargoyles, as rebel monks, warrior popes, or heretics burning in a town square. It is a rite one might suppose had been relegated long ago to a footnote beyond the margins of modern life, a practice outdated as the related ritual of exorcism that serves the same end—the expulsion of the evil one. On September 19, 1993, the evil one to be expelled was I. Yes I, who as a youth had hankered to be an apostle of Jesus, was on this day branded an apostate of the Church I had chosen and then served in my fashion for over 30 years. In that same month, five other Mormon writers, believers, and critics of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were also excommunicated in a leader-orchestrated purge that would leave us branded and stigmatized as the infamous Mormon "September Six." This memoir is the story of how I came to be numbered among them.

Paul Toscano is a Salt Lake City bankruptcy lawyer, novelist, writer, and critic of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon). His published works include the critical essays compiled in The Sanctity of Dissent (1994) and The Sacrament of Doubt (2007). In 1990 he co-authored with his wife Margaret the seminal work: Strangers in Paradox: Explorations in Mormon Theology. He is the author of three online novels: Christ on Trial: An Easter Hymn and the first two volumes of his triology The Last Pendragons: Book 1 - The Eyes of Logres and Book 2 - The Oracles at Painted Mesa. The last of this trilogy is in progress: The Ladies, the Lion, and the Unicorn. The third book of essays, The Sabbath of Death, is scheduled for online publication by Christmas 2013.