Chapter 11

Betrothal and Marriage

Second Expanded 2026 Edition

My betrothal to Stan took place two weeks after my arrival during the spring Passover season to symbolise a new beginning for the family, and consisted of three elaborate ceremonies that occupied the whole day. The first ceremony was a "public" one, and by "public" was meant in the presence of New Covenant Community members and friends from all over Europe and the world, as plural marriage betrothals were never announced to the public...for obvious reasons. In the morning there was a service in Raj which the whole family attended, our own Community or Church members from England, Norway, Sweden, the USA, Canada, and Germany were present, with friends from other polygamous groups in attendance also, trebling the size of our household by the last day. Previously this had been a purely family and local congregational affair but since Anna's marriage to Stan, our Order had gained many more friends. Those who had come from afar arrived a few days before and settled themselves comfortably into local hôtels in Lublin; and then, after the morning service and lunch were over, went to other locations in Germany and Scandinavia for fellowship with other patriarchal communities, so that we could be left alone as a family for the remaining two ceremonies.

Since marriage was an allegorical antitype of the Church or Messianic Community and of the Wedding Supper of the Lamb, much was put into its solemnising ceremonies. Attending a New Covernant Christian meeting you would not ordinarily be aware of much in the way of ritual apart from water baptism by immersion. The Lord's Supper was conducted behind closed doors for christmated (confirmed) members as it had been when the Lord instituted it in the Upper Room during the Passover ceremony. Baptism was therefore the only completely public ordinance there was, an unapologetic witness to the world that we were followers of Jesus Christ. Other ordinances were performed out of sight of the usually critical - and sometimes hostile - gaze of the world as these were for the witness of believers only. They included footwashing, chrism (like the confirmation of some Protestant Churches but involving anointing with oil as well), the covenants of the several Priesthood Orders (Deacons, Elders and Patriarchs), and, of course, marriage itself, which was the most complex and lengthy of all.

Since the world so vehemently disapproved of plural marriage, and even persecuted those of us married in that way, it made no sense making this a public witness. The only sign we gave to the world that a plural wife was married and "off-limits" to potential suitors, was the wearing of a wedding ring in the conventional way, on the fourth finger, though whether on the right or left hand depended on the culture we were living in or visiting. Poland, like most other countries in Europe, always wears its wedding rings on the right hand. It's those from the USA and Canada (like myself and Sarah-Jane in the early days, and two more sister-wives later as well), but also the UK, France, Italy, Sweden, Finland and Mexico, who are the oddities! They're not the only ones, mind you - Iceland, Estonia, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, the Catholics of the Netherlands, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Australia, South Africa and Iran, are also "left-handers". When we were in any of these countries, Stan allowed us to change our wedding rings over to the other hand if we wanted to, though I don't think any of us actually did for a variety of reasons. The Jews place the wedding ring on the index finger of the right hand during the vow-taking ceremony so that everyone can see it better during the ceremony, but afterwards transfer it to the left hand to better blend in with the traditions of western countries. So we're similar to them in that one respect.

My first two weeks back in Raj consisted of a great deal of instruction, mostly by Stan and Sarah-Jane, his fifth wife, whom Stan had appointed as my primary teacher after himself. I literally stuck to her like a limpet for the first three months, imitating and obeying their instructions like a dutiful student-wife! I was entitled to ask her anything I wanted to know about marriage and Stan's ways, both so that I would have no surprises later but also because Stan insisted on a basic or "common order" in his family, which all were required to obey unconditionally. One or two particularly intimate things she was not allowed to discuss with me - "pearl principles" she called them - as I would learn those directly from Stan on our wedding night, but for the most part no question was off limits. In this way Stan ensured that we would avoid misunderstandings and be completely open with one another, thus preserving that necessary depth in our common relationship for an echad (onenss) plural marriage to thrive. This Teacher-Pupil relationship with Sarah-Jane would last at least a year while I learned submission, the intimacies of love, and fully adapted to the smooth running of the marriage and of the household both before and after being fully married to Stan.

Both before the bethrothal ceremony and my full wedding, I was to spend 24 hours almost exclusively with each of the sister-wives in turn in order to be taught all they knew and to learn of their experiences from their own respective betrothals and full weddings. I had no idea there were so many different ways of being intimate or how different women could be in their responses to the same or similar situations! This was in addition to what was learned by natural, daily and almost imperceptible "cross-fertilisation", as Stan called it. I was in their company round the clock so Stan barely saw me for two weeks, except at mealtimes and family devotions. I practically lived in thee sister-wives' apartments when we weren't downstairs with the rest of the family so that I could see how they managed their babies and young children particularly but, most importantly of all, so we could have deep, very personal conversations alone, and pray together. We'd often talk and commune this way late into the night, so when Stan saw our bleary eyes the next morning at breakfast, he knew that we had well spent our time together. I shall ever be grateful for that opportunity. And if Stan was ever away for any length of time, we would quite spontaneously spend similar times with each other, sometimes several of us - or even all of us - together. No one ever felt alone. What a precious foundation Stan laid!

I came to appreciate this incredible openness between us sister-wives so much as I grew in my marriage and as we sister-wives grew in ours collectively with Stan. This is something monogamists - and those plural marriages which Stan disapprovingly calls 'multiple monogamy' because there are so many barriers between the wives that they practically live separate, monogmous lives in their own homes - neither of these women-types can ever really understand the echad way living under one roof. They usually make wrong assumptions and just concoct in their own mind fantasies of what our marriages must be like...usually negatively because they're already prejudiced in their thinking.

For the remainder of the two weeks - eight days as there were then only six sister-wives - I was around Sarah-Jane, my primary female mentor, day and night, exclusively, learning more from her. Aside from the initial betrothal week, I mostly lived with her in her apartment. Stan insisted what we all get to know each other well and to therefore maintain deep trust always, and especially with our twins with whom we had the most in common. Some twins even moved in permanently with each other (with Stan's blessing) because they got on so well and effectively 'merged' their families together, thus coming to more and more resemble the family arragements in the Holy City which one day will come to earth when Christ returns.

This, Stan taught, was the equivalent of believers confessing their sins to one another in the local congregation (James 5:16) so that no barriers of sin would ever exist between Father's children, and to so allow a free-flowing of the Holy Spirit. We became, in time, open books to each other. You have no idea the sense of security that brought and how it completely eliminated jealousy! I used to jokingly say to Stan that I "knew" my sister-wives before he ever "knew" me (a play on words of King James Bible English)...which was what he always intended.

More than anything else this "Holy City Way", as he called it, or "Holy Echad Marriage Pattern", distinguished us from practically all the other Christian and Messianic polygamous groups, most of which Stan despised, because they were all about the husband and had little to do with the wives and the cultivation of their sisterly inter-personal relationships. And though Stan was unquestionably the head - whom we all learned to obey joyfully and without reservation, commonly addressing him as Sarah did Abraham, to show not only love but also deep respect for him (Genesis 18:2; 1 Peter 3:6) - conforming to all his ways and domestic order...this deep relationship between the sister-wives not only, as it were, equalised everything but also made us feel married to each other too, with a similar depth of commitment. We really felt like full participants and not simply "rotated" for our husband's exclusive convenience and pleasure. We learned to treasure and long to be with one another too, and in many ways this was a mature version of the exceptionally close lifelong Platonic "bestie" friendship bonds that we girl's formed in our teenage years, only these marital ones were much, much, closer, deeper more trusting and supportive...more like the soul-mate bonds we enjoyed with our husband. One of the unexpected spin-offs of this plural bonding that Stan insisted on was that it completely eliminated rivalry, the initial curse of Jacob's family when the patriarch was still immature and carnal. This was the closest thing to the oneness of the Body of Christ.

In addition to learning and fitting into the Holy Echad Marriage ways of the Królewiec family there were also lots of practical domestic skills to be learned too. With so much talent under one roof, I had a large pool of experience to draw upon and learned so much so quickly! It was far better than college by a long shot! By receiving instruction from Stan and Sarah-Jane, and by daily observing and interacting with the others, I learned not only all the romantic ways of my sister-wives - the subtle nuances in glances, the different ways the others approached, touched, embraced and kissed him, individual preferences in love-making, and the like - but amongst us were also excellent cooks, homeschooling teachers, artists, gymnasts, writers, public speakers, interior designers, musicians, health experts, scientists, mathematicians, clerks, needlework and textile artists, gardeners and women with so many other skills. As the family grew larger, we became practically a self-sufficient community. And when other families would join us later after we had moved from Poland, we would become our own virtual village able to draw upon the skills of other patriarchs and our own children as they became adults, for amongst us were farmers, plumbers, electricians, builders, IT experts, and so forth.

But we were foremost a spiritual community, each patriarchal family becoming its own mini-"church". And when these linked together, as they would later after we had moved from Raj, we became a model of the way the Millennium would be run, consisting of congregations of patriarchal families, which was one of the major purposes of plural marriage. Like our husband (who was a Patriarch), all the sister-wives held the various offices that you would expect to find in any regular church or messianic assembly: Kryztina, Kasia, Isabel and Suszana were all Eldresses, Sarah-Jane and and Anna were both Deaconesses, and all had duties which they knew well. The elder teens were commonly Deacons- and Deaconesses-in-training. This was, I was to learn, an incredibly functional and practical family too.

I had never been baptised and so on my third day back I was immersed in the river Czechówka which was very cold indeed! In a way I was glad, because it was a reminder that there was much of a worldly nature that yet needed purging out of me. My baptism was not into Christ, which I had received as a believer at the hands of the Baptists, but into the covenant that our Order represented. Those who had not previously been believers were therefore baptised both into Christ and into the Covenant of Messianic Israel, there now being no male circumcision in the New Covenant, the two aspects being essentially one and the same for us.

I had never before heard of baptism into anything or anyone other than Christ, so Stan explained. He asked me to open my NIV (New International Version), which is what my church in Missouri had used, and read aloud the first four verses from First Corinthians, chapter 10:

"For I do not want you to be ignorant of the fact, brothers, that our forefathers were all under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea. They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. They all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ" (1 Corinthians 10:1-4, NIV).

"Ah," said Stan, "you have identified the central mystery of baptism, or perhaps immersion would be a better word as that's what 'baptism' means. This is a theological metaphor and describes Israel's collective, communal or family experience at the Red Sea and is used by Paul to explain how believers are united with Christ. The imagery is marital because baptism is a picture of marriage. Moses' was Israel's allegorical husband under what we sometimes call the Mosaic, Levitical, Old or First Covenant. By "passing through the sea", Israel left Egypt's control forever. Egypt is a picture of the world, or Babylon, itself a picture of sin. It's a picture of a transfer of allegiance too, from Pharaoh to Moses as their allegorical husband. Passing 'under' the Read Sea was also a public marker that they would remember and celebrate every Passover marking them as Moses' followers, tying their destiny to his."

"Wow!" I exclaimed, as I began to see deeper things. "Then shouldn't I be baptized into you as your wife too?? I mean, aren't I sort of transfering my allegiance from my father to you in marriage too?"

Stan beamed. "Well done Hélène, you're understanding...Keep going!"

I thought more on this.

"Think about your own 'baptism' into your father," continued Stan. "When did that happen?

He saw the puzzled look on my face.

"Oh!" I cried, "when my mother gave birth to me!!" And then a whole flood of symbols tumbled into my mind. So this is what Stan had meant! This was what he called a "divine tavnith moment" - a moment when you start dipping into the Divine Stream of Truth and start understanding biblical principles from multiple angles, because once you hit a divine pattern or tavnith, everything connects.

"Israel experienced deliverance from Egypt collectively, like a family living plural marriage. When they passed through the Red Sea, they symbolically passed from death to life. Going between the walls of sea water was like entering the grave; and emerging on the other side was a kind of resurrection to freedom. But that wasn't all that 'surrounded' them, Hélène, was it? Think about it. On the left and the right they were hemmed in by the Red Sea, under their feet they rested their feet securely, but they were still exposed the the sky above, weren't they?"

I thought about this and then it clicked.

"Of course! They were hemmed in above by the CLOUD!! That meant they were surrounded on all sides. This literally was a womb. They were being 'delivered' to the shore! They were being born again!!"

I could see Stan was pleased with me and that made me feel good. More thoughts tumbled into my mind, moved by the Holy Spirit, but these ones were intimate and I was embarrassed.

"It's alright, you can speak what the Spirit is telling you. After all we are going to be married very soon," he said smiling reassuringly.

I blushed and fumbled for the right words, and then I dared speak them, mostly because Sarah-Jane was with us and was encouraging me.

"When 'you come into me' for the first time and break my hymen and I release my waters, isn't that pretty much the same principle? Isn't that a kind of 'baptism' too?"

Stan and Sarah-Jane both nodded. Wow! This was so exciting! Sarah-Jane interjected.

"The crossing of the Red Sea was a formal initiation ceremony for the nation of Israel. It's the moment Israel truly began. That's baptism. Then followed the covenent when they assembled at Mount Sinai and were given the terms for their membership as God's Israel."

"The Torah!" I cried. "Israel's marriage contract! Yes, it all makes perfect sense."

"But there's more, Hélène, always more," said Stan. "This is an infinitely deep truth which you will be immersing your mind and heart into for the rest of your life. It contains the mystery of marriage that can only be fully understood through plural marriage. You see, Paul is using this historical event as a prophetic shadow or what is called a 'type' to teach New Covenant believers. Plural marriage is also a type or prophetic picture of the collective relationship of the Body of Christ - the Bride - with Christ Himself as the Bridegroom. Just as Israel was bound to Moses through the sea crossing, just as you were bound to your father through your birth into the world while you were unmarried, and just as you will become physically bound to me through sexual intercourse, so Christians are bound to Jesus through baptism (Romans 6:3). Just as on our wedding night you will be making a break with your present life of singleness and dependency on your father, just as the Israelites made a break with their slavery to Pharaoh, so in passing through the waters of baptism through complete immersion - not sprinkling, I might add - so in being baptised into Christ the new believers make a collective, covenantal break from the slavery of sin."

"Then shouldn't I therefore technically be baptized into you too, Stan? ...I mean, a water baptism, to symbolise my immersion into your life and ways?" - my mind was spinning with excitement.

"Yes, Hélène, that's one of the private family ordinances of full marriage," said Sarah-Jane. "You were baptised the other day into Christ and into Messianic Israel. Before you consummate your marriage with Stan, Stan will water-baptise you into himself with all of us sister-wives present as witnesses." She paused, smiling with a twinkle in her eye as though she was privy to something more.

Stan took up the thread from Sarah-Jane.

"We prize unity of the kind Jesus spoke at length about in the 17th chapter of the Gospel of John which I encourage you to read often because it contains deep revelation about the founding principles of both literal and allegorical plural marriage. There is nothing worse or more painful than a fractured relationship, whether with our Saviour, between the saints, or with me as your husband and with your sister-wives. Nothing else is more important. That's why baptism is such a central gospel ordinance because it reminds us of this unity. So, yes, my love, you will be immersed or baptised into me in an ordinance when we all gather together on the evening before our full marriage. We prefer to call this by its Hebrew name - a mikveh - as this was the term used by the Israelites to denote ritual washings, which are quite separate from Christian baptism which is exclusively into the death and resurrection of Christ. The "marriage baptisms" are a little different as husbands aren't supernatural figures like our Lord, but merely human. The idea of submersion is the same - of ending a new life and starting a new one - but that's as far as the likeness goes. When you are immersed into me, you leave your old life behind and start a new one."

This was all new to me but it made sense. Stan continued.

"The nearest equivalent I can think of is the old French royal tradition known as remise. You're part French, Hélène, so I'm sure you've heard about that."

I hadn't...as usual, and he guessed I hadn't.

"Well," continued Stan, when the young Austrian Archduchess Maria Antonia, better known to us as Marie Antoinette (the French version) married the French Dauphin - the future King Louis XVI - she underwent the ritual known as 'remise'. When on her journey from Vienna in Austria to Versailles in France to get married, she stepped out of her carriage on a small, neutral island in the middle of the River Rhine which, as today, was the border between Germany and France. The year was 1770, and it was in May. But before she could officially set foot on French soil, she had to undergo this strict, highly symbolic ritual called the 'remise'. I see you're wondering what the word means - it translates to 'handover' in English, and it's still used in your language in jurisprudence, meaning to give up, surrender, or release a claim or right or title to another person.

"According to royal protocol, the future Queen of France could retain absolutely nothing from her foreign past. She had to leave behind her Austrian identity completely to be reborn as as French princess. Are you following me?"

I nodded, by now very interested indeed!

"The French court officials led Marie Antonia to a specially constructed, temporary wooden tent-like pavillion on the island. The pavillion was divided into two halves: the Austrian side and the French side."

"Oh!" I exclaimed, as the connectioins started forming in my by now very active brain.

Stan smiled. "Bear with me a little longer, sweetheart and then you can let rip with your thoughts and questions. Anyway, in a private chamber on the Austrian side, Maria Antonia was instructed to strip entirely naked. Every single item of her clothing, from her heavy traveling gown down to her intimate linens, stockings and shoes, was taken away. These garments represented her ties to the Habsburg Empire, her mother Empress Maria Teresa, and her childhood in Vienna. Even her beloved pet dog, Mops, was taken from her arms, as no Austrian animal could cross into France.

"There, in the second half of the pavillion into which she crossed, a delegation of French courtiers and ladies-in-waiting was waiting for her. They thoroughly inspected her, washed her, and began the elaborate process of dressing her in fine French attire, even restyling her hair. When the doors were opened, the transformation was complete. She walked across the literal and figurative borderline into the French room. Thereafter she boarded a new French carriage and resumed her journey toward her wedding in Versailles and to a destiny, as you know, which changed the course of European history."

Seeing the look of alarm, Stan chuckled.

"Don't worry, you won't ever be forbidden to go home to America to see your parents and friends, or abandon all your possessions! We're not a cult, you know?" He laughed and winked at me.

I breathed a sigh of relief. Later Stan's Swedish wife would bring her cat along when she got married.

"What about my clothes?" I said, starting to panic, worrying about divesting myself of them. It was then I caught Sarah-Jane grinning again.

"I'll let Sarah-Jane explain that to you," said Stan, seeing as I was embarrassed.

"It's alright, hun, there are no male courtiers around - only Stan and us, his wives," said Sarah-Jane. "We want complete openness and transparency in this marriage. And no," she said, reading my mind, "we don't go around naked in this family," and giggled.

Again I breathed a sigh of relief.

"Did you know that that the Eastern Orthodox Greek Church used to do regular baptisms naked and still does in some contexts? In fact they used to baptise seven times, like the baptism of Naaman in the Jordan River. For them it means 'putting off the old man' - the sinful legacy of Adam - and returning to the innocent, unashamed state of Adam and Eve before the Fall in the Garden of Eden. Men and women were separated to maintain modesty, and deaconesses assist the priest in the unrobing and anointing of women."

I didn't know anything about this, not even as a Baptist Why wasn't I ever told??

"Well, we don't do that anymore, for obvious reasons - the climate, for one, sexual immorality for another. We don't want sexual perverts and voyeurs defiling the sacred. This isn't the Garden of Eden but husband and wives shouldn't be embarrassed about nakedness. And we aren't, no more than many Amazonian Indian tribes and Africans are embarrassed about nakedesness. This is why we lay strict emphasis on purification of the soul. It's why we have the betrothal arrangements we do. We can't learn to permanently stop sinning until we have learned to live in purity again."

I was beginning to understand, if at first a little reluctantly.

"Hey, we're north Americans, I understand you, even if we Canadians are a bit more liberal...at least the worldly ones are," said Sarah-Jane reassuringly. "We were both brought up as conservative Baptists. We understand all about modesty and decency. That's even more important to us here in Raj. We absolutely believe in modesty and chastity here - you know that. We go out of our way to shield our children from all the filth of the world. We're extremely conservative, and we hate the liberal society we are forced to live in. But Stan and us wives aren't prudish with each other. Our dream and hope is Eden, and marriage should be like that before sin entered the world. Yet we're not nudists except in the privacy of our bedrooms. We're not hippies or Wiccans."

Stan excused himself as he had some important things to do and said he would return in a short while. He could see that I wanted to talk to Sarah-Jane privately. After Satan had left, Sarah-Jane took my hands and looked into my eyes before continuing.

"We want absolute trust and openness between us sister-wives, sweetheart. Please also know that everyone here is heterosexal. We're all straight. But you've been told that."

I breathed another sigh of relief even though I knew that already, at least in my mind. As Stan keeps on reminding us, though, the heart usually takes more time to catch up with the head.

"There's nothing worse than having secrets or wondering if Stan is treating us unequally, particularly when it comes to physical intimacy in the privacy of our bedrooms," continued Sarah-Jane. "This baptism into Stan 'in the buff' sets a precedent, which becomes a commitment to be open and honest about such things once you're fully married. Stan will tell you more. Just know, hun, that there are reasons for everything we do, and they are always spiritually rooted."

Sarah-Jane broke off when Stan re-entered the room.

"What have I missed, my darlings?" asked Stan, smiling.

"I was just telling your new wife that the reason we are baptised into you the way we are is spiritual in its intent," replied Sarah-Jane. Stan nodded and sat down opposite us. Sarah-Jane continued holding my hands. Stan was still in didactic mode and resumed where he had left off minutes before as though no time has passed at all.

"OK, back to Old Testament 'baptisms' as messianics in particular get confused about this. The Torah speaks of covenanted Israelites washing in "living water". Back then these washings took places in rivers, for example, but by the second century BC, when it became more affordable and people had larger houses, Judeans built their own 'mikveh baths', the nearest equivalent to a baptismal font. There they would ritually bathe to purify themselves, especially women after their menstrual cycle was over. They would strip naked and completely submerge themselves. They would often go there alone to meditate, pray and unwind. We have one in the basement here. That's what you will be 'baptised' in when you're baptised into me with your sister-wives as witnesses. That will be the 'signpost' in your life that you are a fully married sister-wife."

"We also use it to relax together in," said Sarah-Jane. "No children, just wives and Stan if he wants to join us. And no clothes or swinsuits allowed!"

Sarah-Jane laughed again when she saw the surprise on my face. She figured what I was probably thinking.

"Don't worry, no 'bedroom activity' there, honey, just conversation and what we usually do around the house when everyone's around."

I giggled, feeling more relaxed, and stopped looking for the worst interpretations I could think of.

"Anyone can go when they want to. It's a bit like a communal bath and a place to let barriers down. It's very relaxing and fun. We don't use it so much in the winter because of the cost of heating up so much hot water - as you know the economy is tight here. That's in part what all the solar panels are for on the roof," explained Stan. "Every time we go there we are reminded of the marriage baptisms we all partook of."

In our next home we had a couple of these mikveh fonts, one small (for one or two people) and one large (for our by then very big family of sixteen) but by then we were generating our own hydro-electricity and could bathe more often.

"So all of you use the mikveh a lot?" I asked, wondering if anyone had struggled with being skyclad.

"We only started doing this when we moved to Lublin as obviously our flat in Białystok made such activity impossible. And yes," he said, reading my mind, "some of your Polish sister-wives had issues when we started the practice. But the most staunch opponent in the early days, Isabel, has since become its keenest user! If she gets so much as a hint that anyone is going down and she's free, she'll join you! The same with Kasia who took to it immediately and had to be prevented from using it too often and using up all the hot water!"

We all laughed. I was feeling better now and actually looking forward to having my first mikveh and to bathing with Sarah-Jane and the others.

"If I find any of you with wrinkled-up skin looking like pink prunes," said Stan teasingly, "I'll know you've been overusing the facility!"

We laughed again.

"One or two of you are water-babies. So you know, Hélène, the mikveh room isn't open all the time otherwise no one would get anything done. It's closed on Sabbaths and Festivals except for regular congregational baptisms and there are special times when the children can use it for swimming lessons and play...in proper swimming attire. Finally, the mikveh font is emptied once a week and there's a rota for draining, cleaning and refilling it. So you're responsible for its maintenance."

After nodding my understanding, the conversation switched back to what we had been discussing about the Red Sea crossing under Moses. It all made sense now. Just as Moses had received instruction at Sinai on behalf of Israel, and just as I had received gospel instruction from my father, so now I was receiving instruction from my husband and from my teacher-wife Sarah-Jane! I saw that the familiar New Testament baptism was really two ordinances-in-one - literal water baptism and the taking of a covenant.

"The early church fathers well understood this symbolism - you only have to read Origen, Tertullian, Basil the Great and John Chrysostom to see they knew," said Stan continuing. "All of them saw water-immersion as a transitioning from death to life. Stepping into the divided sea walls with the Cloud above and the solid ground beneath, was seen as entering a tomb and emerging on the opposite shore, representing resurrection into a new life of freedom. The Fathers correctly saw the "sea and the cloud" as reflecting Christ's own teaching in John 3:5 that believers had to be born of "water and the Spirit!. The cloud provided shade by day and turned into a pillar of fire at dusk to give light by night. They saw this as the Holy Spirit illuminating the minds of the newly baptised (who, by the way, were often called 'the illuminated' in the early church) and shielding them from the scorching heat of worldly temptations. So this is a combined picture of illumination or revelation and grace. The cloud acted as a canopy or sukkah, signifying the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit, much like the Holy Spirit overshadowed Mary."

"And that's also why we observe Sukkot or the Feast of Tabernacles!" added Sarah-Jane.

"Oh my, oh my," I cried, "this is all too much...and all too wonderful! And now I see why plural marriage is coupled in Isaiah 4 with the return of the cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night at the end of this age on our return journey to the Promised land - they're inseparable!!"

Stan laughed. "There's a lot to understand, it's a never ending stream of illumination and revelation. Everyone gets shared insights as well as new insights. Sarah-Jane and the others will feed you with theirs, and you will feed them...and me...with yours. There's a reason this family is set up the way it is. No instruction in Scripture is amiss, none is irrelevant, so when nominal believers lie to you and tell you things like, 'that was all for back then but not now,' don't believe them. They want to put you on the same spiritual starvation diet as themselves."

"That's why in marriage Paul said we are to copy Sarah in her relationship with Abraham, and why we must obey Stan the way Sarah obeyed Abraham, and call him 'lord' or 'master' the way she did," contined Sarah-Jane, "in the same way we obey Christ and call Him 'lord' and 'master'. It's why the children of faith in Christ are also called the children of Abraham."

I had only ever heard Sarah-Jane call Stan 'my lord' once and that's when I overheard them talking and they weren't aware I was nearby. I had always thought that kind of language passed away with the Old Covenant because that's what the Baptists had taught me. And you'd never see a Christian Missourian housewife addressing her husband that way, though in the deep south I noticed some wives of the older generation still called their husbands, 'sir'.

Sarah-Jane continued: "We don't address Stan this way around unbelievers and other Christians because it would be misconstrued as oppression, a fruit of 'toxic masculinity', or something even worse. We'd be misunderstood. You can choose 'master', 'lord' or 'sir'. It's a way of showing deep respect and love. It teaches us humility and reverence for our husband who is a reflection of Christ. It's that reverence that makes us truly beautiful to our husband, not our bodies or the way we dress, which are secondary."

I remembered the Bible verse, and that explained why Stan never once flattered me or complimented me on my clothes or body when I was still single. Ever! It was always my character that grabbed his attention. Now I understood Paul as never before when he wrote:

"For this is the way the holy women of the past who put their hope in God used to make themselves beautiful. They were submissive to their own husbands, like Sarah, who obeyed Abraham and called him her master. You are her daughters if you do what is right and do not give way to fear" (1 Peter 3:5-6, NIV).

I didn't know what came over me at first - it was the Holy Spirit - but I dropped to my knees before Stan and looked up into his eyes, and said, "My lord...my master!". Sarah-Jane knelt next to me, took my hand, and said, "Our lord and master!". Stan seemed to radiate an aura of peace and love and I couild tell we had moved his heart in this act of submission. We looked into each other's eyes and noticed we were both moist. This was so beautiful. "Thank you, Father, for showing me this," I said to God quietly inside.

Stan smiled and drew us both to our feet and embraced us. Love cascaded into my heart and I knew this was so right and true. Once more, we nestled into Stan's bosom, as we had done on the couch before I left Raj after my first visit. The love I felt for both of them - Stan and Sarah-Jane - was just cascading into my heart like a waterfall, causing this well of joy to overflow. "HalleluYah! Praise the Lord!" I silently cried within. Sarah-Jane's eyes and mine met and I knew then we three were one. It was out of this world.

"What would you like right now, Hélène, from the depth of your heart?"

I didn't hesitate.

"To be kissed by you, my lord," came my instant reply, "long and deep."

"Sarah-Jane, show Hélène how I will kiss her on our marriage night."

I hadn't expected that response, but I had forgotten that we weren't fully married yet, and that I had already stolen a kiss from him prematurely on the trip from Warsaw Airport to Lublin. Sarah-Jane smiled sweetly at me, paused as if waiting for my permission, and when I nodded, pressed her lips to mine and gave me the most gorgeous, gentle, soft feminine kiss mingled with something else I couldn't fathom and in a way I could never have imagined possible. Wow! Stan was like that?? Is that the affect his other wives had on him?? Was this what I would be receiving in this extraordinary marriage? It blew my mind away, left me speechless, and planted a new longing in my heart for Stan that I hadn't expected. How did that work? Was it always going to be so wonderful? Were there always going to be so many lovely surprises? As if reading my mind, Sarah-Jane said, "It will be even better!" My jaw dropped that she could so easily read my heart. I hugged her and Stan so hard that I thought buttons would start flying off our blouses. Stan calmly smiled and nodded in that 'Stanian' way, thanked Sarah-Jane, told her to spend some time with me now, and then left us to go about his business. My eyes followed him longingly as he disappeared out of the room. Sarah-Jane, still reading my thoughts, took my hand and asked, "Shall we go and sit down in the library and cuddle for a bit?"

"Oh, yes please," I almost begged, still overwhelmed by emotion and grateful for her loving concern. I wanted Stan so badly. I looked into my twin's eyes and then I knew that I would always love this beautiful Canadian sister-wife, and that we would love Stan together forever in an unbreakable bond.

"Would you mind showing me that kiss again?" I asked pleadingly. She smiled, leaned over, and showed me again. My head spun once more, my heart felt it would burst! And my heart yearned for Stan all the more.

"Could you teach me some more?" I asked almost whimsically, losing all inhibition. We giggled. And for the next half an hour she did. I was so relaxed and contented that I never noticed Kasia drop by for a book and pause to smile approvingly, or Stan pop his head through the door 20 minutes later to see if I was alright. And when he saw that I was, he smiled another Stanian smile while shaking his head, quietly mumbling something like "mes êtres de feu" in French and returned to his work. He was pleased that Sarah-Jane was preparing me so well for him.

It soon became obvious to me that I had a great deal of Bible studying to do and that today's foray into baptism was but a teaser, a small deposit of what was to come. I was so keen that I devoured a 23-part course written by the Founder in just 12 days, a small miracle for me! I was up at 6 a.m. and spent at least four hours a day in private Bible study in order to finish the course at a time when all I wanted to do was be around Stan and my sister-wives. But Stan insisted, and the others backed him up all the way, so I had little choice but to be obedient. Though reluctant at first, my daily diet of God's Word soon became a fascination, and then a delight, so that by the time I had finished the course, I had gotten into a habit of a minimum of 1 hour's private Bible study per day thereafter, with up to another hour each evening with the family after supper, except on the Sabbath as we had teaching in the assembly. Add that to the time I spent alone with Father in prayer morning and night, and you will get some idea of what my daily life would now be primed with. Christ would for real be the center of everything.

And those times were deep. With Stan, Sarah-Jane and the others as my teachers, and occasionally one or two of the elder children who surprised me by their knowledge, we would plunge deeply into one chapter in the Bible, turning over every word and phrase with Greek and Hebrew interlinear Bibles close at hand, digging down to the rocky core. After a year I knew my Bible so well and had such confidence in it that my Baptist friends back home would have been envious. Or would they? Because what I learned would have overturned much of their worldview for sure.

After the Betrothal, I was soon teaching the Scriptures to the kids as well. And that is how it always worked: the moment you had understood something in the Scriptures, you were immediately authorised to teach it in a Community and Family capacity.

Everyone was a teacher, a calling I came to treasure highly, remembering how Paul told Timothy of the blessedness and necessity of this spiritual vocation: "...a slave of the Lord must not quarrel: instead, he must be affable toward everyone, skilled in teaching, willing to suffer wrong" (2 Tim.2:24).

It didn't take me long to realise that there was no boundary between "church" and "family", that the two were, to all intents and purposes, one and the same in Stan's home. This hadn't come easily to Isabel, I learned, who in the early days had tried to keep the two strictly separate and in so doing found herself overtken by double-mindedness, leading to one of her estrangements with Stan. In those early days, when the family was small, consisting of herself, Kryztina and Kasia (for Suszana had left long before), there had been lots of struggles, especially after the first children had started arriving. This, Stan told me, had been the time he had seriously wondered if plural marriage was worth it or not.

"Had you met us at that time, Hélène," he told me, "you would probably never have joined our family. We were still trying to find our feet. Most of the members of our local church knew we were polygamists but many didn't. We taught it occasionally as a true principle whenever Bible stories included references to families living this way like Jacob or David, much as all churches do, but it was very much in the background for fear that we migh drive away investigators and new members if we went too deeply into the subject. Those were the turbulent Białystok days."

I was not surprised. In my Baptist Church, as in every other Protestant Church, the polygamy of the patriarchs was taught very much 'in passing' as a product of their age that God merely tolerated until Christ came. Any hint of approval would have immediately generated pushback.

"I was constantly testing the waters in those days trying to find out the best way to change the public mindset, no small matter in conservative-Catholic Poland." Stan paused, as if reliving those days again. "We were much more timid about talking about anything potentially controversial, a mistake that unfortunately impacted the family when it was young. If you are timid about a truth, you learn to become a different person around those who are hostile to that truth and try not to offend them, for any number of reasons.

"You wouldn't have recognised us back then, Hélène, I'm ashamed to say. You wouldn't have recognised me. I was so cautious that I became timid and weak. And I hated I had become that way. On paper, I was bold, but in front of people I was weak. I feared people's opinions, and especially the state's power to take away my children or put me in jail, more than I feared Yahweh. And that impacted my wives, especially Isabel who very definitely preferred the imagined safety of the timid way. I was a bad example."

Stan's face showed he meant what he said.

"One day, Hélène, I realised that I had to man-up. I had to become a proper leader. I had to change. And that meant taking risks. Big ones. It wasn't easy for me, I'll freely admit. You're an American, you haven't lived under communism as we Poles and Russians have. You always knew freedom of expresion in the States even if you did, and still do, have problems. But communists know how to make you cower. They know how to threaten. They know how to instill terror. They're the ultimate state-terrorists. These were the days of the Wojciech Jaruzelski régime when priests would be abduced by the Security Services and their bodies turn up floating in rivers showing signs of having been tortured. We risked the integrity of our family every day, and did so even when I was a monogamist with Suszana. We never knew when the state machine might come after us. And as maybe you can imagine, I was even more feeble and weak-minded before Isabel and Kasia came into our lives."

I found it hard to believe. I had no idea how vulnerable and frightened Stan had once been. It didn't seem possible looking at him now. It's easy to forget the painful struggles East European polygamists had in the early days. Taking the leap of faith to simply take two wives simultaneously had been tough enough for Stan. I can only imagine the stress involved, like trying to force oil and water to mix, because the flesh never dies willingly.

"Believe me, Hélène, I am still ashamed as I look back...ashamed that I was ashamed of God. It was an admission that maybe, after all, plural marriage wasn't for our day and age. I often thought that maybe I was trying to force God's hand in trying to restore it in Poland. It not only seemed utterly impossible to live it in a communist country but was actually insane. Even being a regular Protestant Christian was tough. If you didn't belong to a registered church, you risked arrest and imprisonment. So adding polygamy to an already frighening situation became, well, how can I put it, terrifying.

"Oh, you could could theorietically have all the affairs you wanted in a socialist state, and the communist élites certainly did; but Catholics in Poland - and to a similar extent in Lutheran East Germany and the Eastern Orthodox countries of the Soviet Block like Romania and Bulgaria - lived by their own traditions and rules for the most part. That conservative family element forged over one-and-a-half millennia was always present in the majority. It took the communists a long time to overcome that because its citizens still fiercely protected marriage and family. They knew it would take them at least a generation to destroy and that they could only do so by indoctrinating the children at school. It was the same with the fascists. Hitler understood this very well too.

I began thinking out aloud: "So having the audacity to suggest that plural marriage was ok in a monogamy-only Catholic culture slowly being taken over by militant atheistic Marxism...." Then it dawned on me Stan would have made enemies of both the state and those who should have been his natural allies. He was caught between a rock and a hard place. I think I would have gone paranoid in such a situation!

"Yes," continued Stan. "So Isabel played it very safe, especially after the arrival of our first child. She was one person amongst fellow Christians in the city and in our neighbourhood and another person entirely at home..."

"No wonder," I said, thinking out loud again. "How about Kryztina and Kasia? How did they cope?"

Stan stared at me intently. "Kasia was young and bold. She was the strongest of the three, helped by the fact that her family was very liberal and tolerant. She was also the most passionate and for a long time was my 'right-hand woman' which shamed the others somewhat. Remember too that she was Russian in a country effctively occuplied by her countrymen, so respect was more forthcoming. Kryztina's family was not so liberal - indeed, her mother was a Christian and her father a communist!"

I gasped, "I never knew!"

Don't get me wrong, Kryztina's father was one of the few 'decent' communists. Yet her mother had to walk circumspectly. So, yes, Kryztina was somewhere in the middle of these three wives, shaped in some ways by her own home experience and navigating two different poles (pardon the pun)."

I giggled.

"At times she would gravitate towards Isabel, and at other times, Kasia, but mostly toward Isabel as Kasia was passionate and, being much younger, didn't have their hang-ups."

"Was there ever any jealousy between them?" I asked.

I could tell there was from Stan's sad look and stopped myself from asking more.

"You'll have to ask them personally," was all he would say, making it clear he preferred that they express their feelings in their own way which he could probably not do justice to.

This conversation was helping me understand Suszana, Kryztina and Kasia so much better. They were very different from Anna and Sarah-Jane and now I understood why. It made more sense of the tensions that sometimes flared up between them when the past was recalled, so I trod warily at such moments. I could see the dilemmas both in having children in such a situation and the risks involved. Polygamists in the West had their own problems to be sure, but the communist world was something else altogether. And unless you have lived in a totalitarian state, you have no clue. I certainly didn't.

"So you see, Hélène," said Stan, wanting to round-off the conversation, "you would have found us very different if you had met us back then and you would have faced a whole set of different circumstances. Today we're entirely different but never forget the early struggles we had that made what we now have possible. Appreciate their sacrifices. Know that mistakes were made by all of us that in hindsight were probably unavoidable given our ignorance and lack of experience. We were all alone with no mentors, no one to confide in. That's a very stressful environment. I won't beat about the bush - it was tough - very tough - on the first of your sister-wives. And it was tough on me because I had to hold this altogether whilst struggling hard with my own issues.

"The only way I managed to survive and eventually prosper was the will to change myself - and I mean, survive 'big time', to borrow your vernacular, because I came close to having breakdowns more than once under all the pressure both at home and outside in society. It required iron-clad discipline which didn't always come easily to me. I had to repent and stand in the gap of everyone else's fears and be seen as strong when I was myself at times dead scared. That's what being a leader and a patriarch means living this way of life. If a man isn't prepared to put his own needs on the backburner, and learn to stand alone in Christ, he has no business living this way of life...he will only bring chaos and misery to his family. And that's why I am particularly harsh on fellow polygamists who for the most part are entirely wrongly motivated."

"Thank you, my lord. I'm very grateful you shared this with me," I said appreciatively. Seeing this side of Stan, which outsiders very rarely see, made me love him more for who he was. He had his faults and weaknesses like the rest of us.

I now saw for the first time, I think, how important the Lord's timing is. The Królewiec past was not my inheritance, but the present, but I needed to know and understand it, both to know Stan and his first wives, if we were to be one. Here, today, in Stan's family, I found Christianity alive in a way that I had never experienced in Kansas City. It permeated everything. But maybe - just maybe - I would have been repelled if I had met Stan's family back then. No, not maybe, I would have been repelled. I would have moved on, I'm ashamed to admit. From that moment onwards, my respect for Stan and his first four wives grew exponentially. We, who came later, had no idea how blessed we were enjoying the fruit of their struggles and pain, which some of them were still wrestling with.

One day Stan said to us: "If we are to truly come to know God, which according to Christ is life eternal, then we have got to get into serious training in God's Word. Some of you may have heard that many years ago the 1968 Olympics were held in Mexico City which presented enormous problems for the athletes who were not used to competing at such high altitudes. Accordingly, athletes arrived in Mexixo City early to get acclimatised. Because of the lower levels of oxygen in the rarified atmosphere, they had to train carefully and diligently to get their bodies to manufacture more red blood cells. After a couple of weeks everyone was equipped to compete without collapsing for lack of oxygen.

"It's no different with us. We have got to get acclimatised to God's way of thinking by large daily doses of Scripture study. The world says it is brainwashing, forgetting that the constant bombardment of its own secular philosophy in the school classroom and in the media is no less so, and probably even more so. By literally getting baptised into the Word we are training our minds to think and our hearts to feel as Yahweh thinks and feels both consciously and unconsciously.

"Everything we do here comes out of a biblical background. We think as the ancients do, not as the moderns. We're accused of being "ancient" by the modernists but we are indifferent to their criticisms because we understand them a lot better than they understand us. The fact of the matter is that they are too modern to think as clearly as the ancients - they are too modern to be ancient! They think we're old-fashioned, we think they're new-fadshioned (as Stan liked to call it). But as for us, we are Bible-fashioned, because the Bible is what forms us.

"The more the Bible permeates your thinking and feeling the closer you will draw to God, and the quicker we will realise our goal to create a miniature millennial society. If we fail to do this, we will just set stumbling blocks up for one another. Those with worldly ideas will teach it not only to their own children but will influence the other children too, as well as the adults. We have to be united or we could disadvantage an entire generation. We have neither the time nor the resources to allow the kind of Sinai catastrophe that confronted Moses to repeat itself amongst us here. You're either in this completely or you will, I'm sorry to say, just drift out of the family. Being a member of this family implies 100 per cent commitment to the Gospel program too. Otherwise you will not spiritually acclimatise and have to leave for the less rarified air of the metaphorical "cities on the plains" below."

His point sunk home. He had not achieved his desires with all us sister-wives as one or two were still struggling. You could tell, because they would call him 'lord' or 'master' less frequently, or with a hint of resentment in their tone or facial expression when they did. The moment they renegged on Bible study (and prayer, for that matter) they, and we, noticed a change of spirit and a rapid descent into the darkness of worldly thinking and feeling. Stan had to be tough with them at times for their own good. We all knew the stakes were high and so all were on the lookout to help and support any wife who began to flag. I discovered that there was a certain threshhold in this as in other areas of life, that once you had crossed it, the journey became a lot easier.

It was, Stan assured us, the same with the athletes in Mexico City. At first training was a nightmare - they were short of oxygen, their bodies rebelled against strenuous exercise, and at times they felt like giving up. I understood this principle better when once we went to Zakopane high up in the Tatra mountains to the south of Lublin, for a weekend break.

Many wrongly suppose that the initial labour pains are an indicator of the future, and want no part of it. But labour pains come to an end - they never pass beyond a certain period of time. And I had the witness of the spiritually more mature of Stan's wives to see that this was so. The spiritually younger ones had an uphill struggle whereas the older ones, who had been at this a while, seemed at times to effortlessly navigate their problems, something that was inspirational and assuring to us younger ones, and of course to all the children too who, like us wives, had access to a mine of experience.

At first I wasn't sure whether I would remember all the things that were filling my mind but Stan told me not to worry:

"The important thing is that your subconscious mind is being trained. God didn't design us to have instant recall of everything we have ever learned. Rather, he has created a mechanism within our minds which enables us to recall selective data when the situation demands it. That was the promise Christ gave when He said the Comforter would bring to the disciples' remembrance all the things He had taught them (John 14:26). He knew they would "forget" but that the Spirit would enable them to remember.

"People are surprised to learn that the New Testament contains over 1,000 new commandments. We can't possibly remember them all. The thing to do is to plant the seed so that our spirit can cause them to spout, for the most part unconsciously. Don't worry. Relax. Let the Ruach haQodesh (Holy Spirit) work for you!"

With this reassurance I pursued my studies all the more vigorously until I felt sure that I had mastered the introductory 23-part Bible course. Stan and Isabel (one of the eldress sister-wives) interviewed me and, once they were satisfied that I had understood and accepted all the principles, I was chrismated.

Chrism, which still exists although in a highly modified form in the Eastern Orthodox Church and which I witnessed later when visiting Zamość, is like the Lutheran ordinance of confirmation, only much more. Whereas baptism signifies the alpha of our salvation, which we obtain upon belief in, and confession of, Christ as our Lord and Saviour, chrism signifies its omega or completion at the end of life. It is a ceremony rich in symbolism attended only by Community members who themselves have been chrismated. The covenants are much deeper than those of baptism and entitle a person thereafter to partake of the Lord's Supper, which is based on the liturgy of the Didache as used by the Christians of about AD 150 in Syria and Egypt. Chrismated members partake of this Lord's Supper every Sabbath. It came to be the high point of my week.

Once chrismated and having taken my first Communion, I was ready to begin some intense instruction on the ceremonies and covenants of Betrothal, which is regarded by us as the most sacred marriage covenant. The vows are repeated three times, but each time getting deeper and deeper. The first covenent is, as I mentioned earlier, a semi-public ceremony, for members of the family, Messianic Community and their friends who accept plural marriage. It calls upon all those present to be witnesses of our life-long commitment to be man and wife, and to defend those vows against anyone hostile to them. The second, which is only for the immediate, intimate family at Raj and firstborn Community members like Björn, Misha and Sonja, usually takes place the following day, and calls upon all those present to witness an eternal commitment. This ceremony involves all the wives who are asked to give their consent and blessing and is very colourful, with all dressed in white and the room full of flowers. Husband and wives dance a sacred dance before Yahweh, our children and any guests, and then share in a meal afterwards.

On the third day Stan and his sister-wives enter a third set of covenants alone which are the deepest of them all, covenants which contemplate the mystery of the union of Christ with His allegorical Bride - the Body of Christ - and of Yahweh with Israel. These covenants involve the mutual support of the wives, promises to take care of one another's children, and of seeking to fulfil the Zionic quest. It is a most beautiful ceremony that lasts nearly two hours and is consummated, as it were, by a family Communion or Lord's Supper. After that we all spend a close time together before Satan and his new bride retire for the night.

Betrothal is full marriage without sex and is probably one of the most demanding of the marriage practices at Raj. Husband and wife sleep together covered in lower-body clothing and may not have intercourse. They may lightly kiss and touch above the waist but no more. It is the husband's responsibility to keep arousal to an absolute minimum and to thereby demonstrate the trustworthiness of his word to his new betrothed bride. It requires the greatest of self-control and forces you to make sure your reasons for marriage are first and foremost to serve Christ together and not just for self-gratification. For those whose passion has already been aroused, or gets aroused during this time, it is a great struggle indeed, but one which truly blesses the one overcoming.

For one week I mostly had Stan to myself. At night we could cuddle up to one another and lightly kiss, but no more. We always spent a little time in the Bible and in prayer whilst in bed. Sometimes Stan would, after asking my permission in order to show me respect, invite my twin Sarah-Jane to join us in those short Bible studies and prayer. She would snuggle up on Stan's other side while he read and we prayed. It was also her responsibility to be a chaperone if either felt the need to make sure propriety and accountability were maintained in what was for me, at first, a very unexpected and unfamiliar arrangement. I not only came to appreciate this safety net but it taught me the importance of properly maintained boundaries in such a complex family as our own. We were all our 'sisters' keepers' (Genesis 4:9), but twins the more so. Not that we were 'spies' or anything disagreeable or dysfunctional like that, but the arrangement was rather to foster echadness or oneness according to our Heavenly Father's ways.

Stan called Sarah-Jane in once only, on the first night, just before we went to sleep, and told me after the week was over that he would have brought her in every night if he had felt I needed the reassurance that he would behave properly as a gentleman and as a man of his word, for he had covenanted with me, with Sarah-Jane present, that he would strictly abide by the rules. I, in my turn, had covenanted to do the same. She brought in a duvet and slept on the couch just across from the bed on Stan's so that we could see each other. This was yet another way that Stan impressed on me that he would keep me safe and that he expected his rules to be obeyed. If I had wanted to, I could have called Sarah-Jane in to make sure Stan behaved, or if I felt he was breaking his word as regards the boundaries that were in place during the betrothal season. As it was, Sarah-Jane and I just smiled at each other. I could feel her love for me in this simple gesture of caring.

This week, like no other, taught me of the great inner battle that there could be between spirit and flesh once the flesh had been aroused but could not fulfil its desires. I consider this period of my marriage to have been, in many ways, one of the best spiritual tutors I ever had, even though physically it was at times torture. It was easier after the first week because I only lay with Stan once a week thereafter, returning to Sarah-Jane's apartment for the other six days. My "betrothal honeymoon" kindled deep, suspended passion within me but showed me like no other time in my life just what would be needed to ensure that the spirit was the master of my flesh. I learned what it was to set this passion as a "seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm" (Song of Solomon 8:6) until, after three months, I would become fully married and could make love for the first time. This is a deep mystery hard to explain but wonderful for self-discipline. I am so glad Stan refused to kiss me the way I had wanted him to during our discussion on marriage because it would have spoiled the deeper spiritual meaning of Betrothal. But thanks to Sarah-Jane I knew what was coming, only better! Sarah-Jane was such a blessing to me in the three months between Betrothal and Full Marriage, answering all my questions about love-making so that I would be well prepared. She truly took care of me.

Stan, though I knew he was aroused too, and who could have taken advantage of my weakness and vulnerability if he had wanted to - for I would probably have consented to full intercourse in spite of my covenants had he asked in the heat of passion - never stepped across the boundary, exhibiting a self-control which I thought was amazing. It reflected his determination to put Christ first in his marriages and to be the master of his flesh. Learning to bring the body - mind, heart, and passions - into order was, he said, an important spiritual exercise in overcoming. This was not in any way to suppress the natural impulses we had been created with, but to hold them in check like a racehorse on the starting line before the signal was given to go. Stan came to call it 'forbearance', the art of patience and self-control.

As I later discovered after being fully married, betrothal set the pattern for those times when either he, I, or both of us wanted to abstain from sex for a while for the purpose of prayer and meditation, as the apostle Paul had counselled (1 Corinthians 7:5). The times of mutually-consented celibacy we were to have during full marriage were like re-entering betrothal-mode, or even dedication-mode, something we had been trained for. As our relationship became deeper and even more Christ-centred I found I was able to control my passions like the switch of an electric light, which was one of the goals of our kind of marriage. Stan's desire was that the flesh, far from being suppressed, should become an obedient servant to us. He recognised the need for sex and considered it a kosher and important expression of love, to be enjoyed thankfully and enthusiastically. He believed that it brought harmony and health to the body, and was an essential part of the whole man or woman. At the same time he recognised that there would be a time when we would be without it, at the time between death and the resurrection, when we return to becoming spirit beings, and that we should learn to be without it when required. He therefore considered Betrothal to be an excellent time to start the struggle between flesh and spirit when the tension between the two would be at its greatest height.

Plural marriage does not, in any case, permit you to fall into many of the potential vices of monogamy where one man and one woman become entirely absorbed in one another. From the day I was betrothed, and before, I was always aware of the fact that I was one of many. By its very nature plural marriage forces you to centre your life on the spiritual, which Stan and we wives considered to be one of its most outstanding virtues. Physical love is by its very nature a very possessive thing and was an activity, I discovered, where jealosy lay dormant waiting to be awakened in its ire if one was not spiritually focussed in the right way. There is an emotional and mental component of jealosy also, and one of the greatest shocks I had - because the discovery so upturned much of what I had believed about spirituality - was that what the Bible called the "flesh nature" was not, actually, that which was purely physical. I had assumed, because of Paul's stinging attack on "fleshy ways", that the flesh was nothing more or less than the physical body, a gnostic mediaeval concept that was never a part of the Hebrew mindset at all.

The Catholics quite early on, under the influence of one of their greatest theologians, Augustine, author of the classic, City of God, had borrowed from the gnostics the false idea that the physical body was intrinsically bad and that the spirit alone was good. I learned that he had arrived at this position in part because of the licentious life he had lived as a Manichaean before becoming a Catholic. After his conversion, he had simply swung to the opposite extreme and assumed that everything and anything sexual was in some way dirty, and that sex was to be avoided if at all possible, except for procreation. Better still, he taught, don't get married at all! He found his justification in the writings of Paul, somehow failing to notice that Paul's call for celibacy was not a general one but sound advice during an emergency when the believers were being violently persecuted, imprisoned and martyred in the Roman arena as this was obviously not a good time to start a family.

Under Stan's tutorship, I learned that in the Hebrew mind no such spirit-physical body distinction was ever made. A human being is a whole being, a spirit-flesh "soul", who has within his make up a rather unpleasant carnal nature inherited from Adam which is at war with a spiritual one. This carnal nature Paul, perhaps unfortunately, called the "flesh". Stan insisted, along with the Hebrews, that we regard the body as a whole entity and not try to dissect it, an activity, he claimed, which led to a kind of schizophrenia and other psychological disorders. He taught, showing from the scriptures, that every aspect of the human being - mind, heart, conscience, and body - had both a carnal and spiritual side. Wrong thoughts and impure feelings, coupled with a defiled conscience caused by the carnal, Adamic nature resident in the literal physical flesh, led to sin, as did sex outside the bounds set by God. Thoughts, feelings, and sexual impulses had both good and bad components. The trick was to separate them out, recognise which came from a fallen nature - basically anything that tried to persuade us to break any of the commandments - and to ask Christ to empower us to 'crucify' them (Galatians 5:24).

Protestantism, I discovered, is very double-minded about sex. Whilst publicly repudiating the Catholic doctrine, which is very much derived from gnostic ideas, it still has very Catholic attitudes to it, albeit largely on an unconscious level. I began to understand where the animosity towards plural marriage came from and how the idea had evolved that Christ had to absolutely be celibate to in some way preserve His Deity since in their mind sex was, ultimately, something that was unclean and corrupting. And Christ, as we know, never sinned.

Before leaving the States I had bought a best-selling Protestant manual about sex and marriage by the LaHayes and tried to prepare myself for marriage through their teachings as best I could. It was interesting comparing their ideas with Stan's for I realised that the issues were very complex and yet also very simple. Stan insisted that we must, like God, be able to look in the mirror and say to ourselves, "I am that I am". This was not to imply that we were deity (God forbid, for that is a New Age, occultic idea) but rather to remind us that God created us as whole human beings or "souls" as Stan called us. We should not suppress our physical urges but rather purify and refine them through walking the Christian life. There were, he firmly believed, pure and virtuous thoughts, feelings and sexual impulses, and that was what we had to strive for. Furthermore, we needed to estabish an hierarchy of authority where the spirit presided over our thoughts, our thoughts over our feelings, and our feelings over our physical impuses, of which the sexual one was one of the most powerful and potentially the most unruly too. And all of this should be subject to Christ and His Word.

Our betrothal lasted three months. There was no fixed time but usually Stan expected anything up to a year, depending on individual needs. The length of betrothal would be determined in the main by the betrothed wife's spiritual progress. The shortest betrothal had been Isabel's, a mere two days, but this was in the early days before this system had been revealed to Stan. Most of the others had had betrothals of from three to nine months.

Learning to be in Stan's arms in bed without going deeper into union became easier by the second month. He had said that if I felt I could not manage the closeness, that we could simply separate to opposite sides of the bed. Once or twice we did, just holding hands, but at both times I found myself in his arms again on his side of the bed when I woke up the next morning!

I once asked Stan whether this method was appropriate for those who had had a sexual relationship with someone else before they had come to the family. There were, he said, exceptions, especially when Suszana had returned to the family. They did not lie in the same bed together after her return home even though they were re-betrothed. This was at her request which he had granted because of the inner turmoil she was in. He recognised that inner healing was first needed before any doors of intimacy should be reopened. All but one of the others had been virgins, a rare thing these days, and so ordinary betrothal had taken place with them.

I was fully married to Stan in July. There are only two full-marriage ceremonies as opposed to three betrothals - a private one for family and those of our Community, and one with just the other sister-wives. Less covenantal emphasis was placed on this compared to betrothal because all the essential marriage contracts were considered essentially done. It was now simply a question of consummating what already was. In this respect, Stan likened full marriage to Chrism, and betrothal to baptism - chrism and full marriage being the final seal, as it were, of the respective processes. The three months' wait in betrothal was rather like bringing a person to the boil and then turning her down to simmer, as Kryztina had once graphically portrayed her view of it to me! That was not the way I would have described it for myself - it was more like warming up, coming up nearly to the boil, and then having the temperature turned right down again to a manageable level. The others all had their different experiences based on their own temperaments.

With the guests gone, the children in bed and the eldest children babysitting, Stan, myself and the other six repaired to the upper room on the top floor for our own covenants. This was an important time for all - it was as much their marriage as it was Stan's and mine, for they knew they would become wives to a changed Stan, and be joined to me too through deep, godly, sanctified soul-ties. Accordingly, all their marriage contracts with Stan and each other were renewed with me as the seventh sister-wife and with each other, rather like a computer "reboot", Kasia called it - a "refreshment" of the whole marriage "system". I was becoming as much a part of them as they were of me. I would be partaking of a Stan who had come to differing degrees and types of echad unity with us, each of whom had contributed in shaping him, and he, us, under the overall umbrella of the Holy Spirit. It was this Stan, so very different from the Stan that, for instance, Suszana had first married, that I was being wed to. By uniting myself to Stan I was therefore, becoming mystically united to them through our being "one flesh" with Stan, as well by gaining access to the kind of unity which comes only through full marriage which women cannot experience in purity and holiness anywhere else or in any other kind of relationship. The sisterly bond we have is utterly unique. It is hard to explain, really, but it is real. Now I was to have many dear sisterly relations with the wives of other men in the fellowship, but none were to be as remotely deep, special or close as with those who were my sister-wives, with whom I could be more intimate. I shall attempt to explain this mystical union more fully as I unfold my story.

After the covenants with Stan, I covenanted with each of his six other sister-wives, and they with me, creating a multi-faced, Holy Spirit-mediated bond between them more wonderful than even the fraternal bond David and Jonathan had shared. How different we all were, yet we were to be mystically blended together in Christ to make not just seven sister-wives but a kind of "composite wife" too, in the same way as the Body of Messiah of all believers as a whole is the "composite bride" of Christ. That composite - that "mystical bride of Stan" - was something very unique and very, very precious, and only possible in righteously-lived plural marriage. It was our collective identity in Christ and the identity of our beloved husband. We were him, and he was us, in Christ!