Chapter 18

The Heavenly Laboratory

One thing I never expected to see Stan doing was dancing ... if you could even call it that. Shortly after his marriage to Salme, when the house was all but empty one fine summer's evening, I chanced to be passing by his room and heard what I later heard was one of the slow movements from Beethoven's 5th Piano Concerto. The door was slightly ajar. Intrigued, I pushed my head around the door and to my amazement - since I had never seen it before - I saw Stan gracefully moving around the room in what looked like slow motion. His eyes were open but he seemed unaware of what was going on around him. The music had gripped his soul as he glided through the air using Tai Chi-like movements. At first he did not notice me but even when he spotted me through the corner of his eye he did not interrupt what he was doing save to give a slight smile of recognition. His hands moved slowly like a flower opening whilst moving through the aether at the same time. My mind was full of questions but I dared not speak until the music was over and he stood quietly facing me.

This was one of those many moments when I was faced by the unknown Stan. How much more of him was there to discover? I asked myself. Marriage reveals, like no other relationship, the seeming endlessness of the human soul. You think you know your husband and then, hey presto, a hidden door is open and you see a new world - not an unconnected one (for every aspect of us connects in some way, however obscurely it may at times seem), but one that leads you to a completely new scene. Like the different tempos in the Symphony he was listening to, I suddenly discovered a new "movement" in him.

The movement ended and Stan turned off the CD. I felt a little guilty interrupting what looked like a medition exercise.

"What are you doing, honey?" I asked him, trying desperately to conceal my surprise.

He smiled back and paused, as is his manner. Stan never feels obliged to answer a question immediately but is never so rude as to ignore a person unless he or she is being obnoxious. I learned that he moves at his pace when people question him, and not theirs - and vice versa when he is enquiring about them.

"My body was moving with my thoughts," he eventually replied.

I frowned. "Like a dance?" I asked.

"Sort of," he answered, and went to the window to open the curtains (drapes). The sunlight flooded in and transformed the room.

I sometimes got frustrated when Stan was in the kind of unhurried mood he was in now. I knew he was mentally agile and could outrun me by yards when in an intense conversation - that was irritating enough at times, but the opposite way of being was often even more frustrating.

"There are all kinds of movements around us," he continued. "The spirit moves at its pace, the mind at its, the heart at its, and the body at its pace."

He paused again and for a moment seemed to drift away. He was in one gear and I was definitely in another.

"Right now, at this moment of time, I am very quiet and peaceful. But you have been busy and are running at a much higher pace. Where shall we meet - at your tempo or mine?"

I was stopped in my tracks. "Ordinary" people didn't talk like this, but then, as I had realised long ago, Stan was no "ordinary" man. He seemed to have multiple levels of consciousness and was able to slip almost effortlessly from one into another. I admired the self-control he had and the way he could relate to completely different people in the same room.

One evening we were talking in one of our internet chat rooms, a ministry we had developed the previous winter and which was proving very successful. He had three different chat windows open on his computer. In one was a good polygamist friend from the States with whom he was joking and monkeying around, in a another was a woman enquiring about polygamy with whom he was having a deep theological discussion, and in the third was a woman who was suicidal whom he was giving critical pastoral counsel to. Three totally different people in three completely different mind- and heart-frames and yet he seemed to move between them as effortlessly as a chess-player playing three opponents simultaneously. But at no time did the three conversations ever overlap. At no time did the mirth in one room spill over into the deep empathy and care in the other, or vice versa. I know I would have got completely confused. So I had asked him afterwards how he did this.

"I don't," he said unapologetically. "I surrender myself to the Ruach haQodesh (Holy Spirit) and they do it for me."

"They??" I asked.

He looked up at me as though I had asked a stupid question.

"Yes, my love, They."

He waited for me to respond so that he would not have to spoonfeed me what he considered I ought to have known. I paused and then remembered.

"Oh, you mean the Seven Spirits," I said excitedly as the light went on inside. "But how does that work?"

"Yahweh our Father is omniscient - He knows everything. He is completely connected to every living thing. He knows what you and every member of our family is doing simultaneously And as if that isn't enough, he knows what every creature on this world and in the heavens is doing and thinking. He is so sensitive that He even notices a sparrow when it drops out of the sky."

I sat down, intrigued by what was coming.

"But we aren't God," he continued. "We are finite and mortal, and yet we are made in His image with abilities we probably still haven't discovered. We know that three-quarters of our brain is never used - it's as though it's in a Cinderella-like sleep, waiting for the Cosmic Prince to awaken it.

"When we are ministering in Christ's Name and are walking in obedience to His commandments, the Ruach haQodesh works through us, giving the words of wisdom we are to say. Wisdom is female - it's one of the names of the Spirit - and She has seven functions or modes (Revelation 1:4; 3:1; 4:6; 5:6). In spite of our finiteness and the limitations of this three-dimensional body, we have the capacity to minister to up to seven people simultaneously when we are properly attuned ..."

"Seven!" I exclaimed in disbelief.

Stan smiled. "Well, I don't think I could manage that yet," he said laughing. "On one of my very good and alert days I could probably handle four."

I thought about our own polygamous situation. Here was Stan, with eleven wives, and he seemd to know and understand all of us without too much difficulty. He admitted that if he was very tired that he might, on occasion, get a little confused, and that under such circumstance there was a tendency to blur us as we became one to him. But under normal circumstances this was no problem for him, and that as his family increased in size it seemed to get even easier. I asked him to tell me more about his experience in that area.

"It's a funny thing," he continued, "but as more wives have joined our family, I find my capacity to relate to you individually and collectively has become enhanced. The same with friends and acquaintances. There is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that when we live plural marriage according to Yahweh's holy laws that those silent and hidden parts of our brains seem to awaken and our abilities multiply, like in the parable of the talents ..."

The Parable of the Talents was one of Stan's favourites.

"The gifts of God multiply exponentially (like the muliplication of a cell - with each division it doubles, e.g. 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc): Every time you exercise them properly, you get twice the capacity in return. That's how the love of Christ multiplies and why it has miraculous properties. The natural gifts of man multiply in a more-or-less linear fashion in an individual (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc). So when we operate in the flesh, there is no real miracle. Christ hints at this multiplication principle in the spiritual realms all over the place, and especially in the miracles of the multiplication of the fishes and loaves (Mark 6:41ff). The real miracles happen on the spiritual plane because that's where love originates.

"Plural marriage is the most intense working medium for the multiplication of love and grace that can be found. That is why I believe it is the most blessed human estate. The husband must multiply love just as Christ multipled the loaves and fishes, but that love isn't for himself - it's for his wives, just as the bread and fishes were for the multitude. It's all about passing on the gifts you receive to others, because that's grace or unmerited loving-kindness. How different that is from the pagan New Age thinking which is all about what you can get for yourself. And because that operates out of the fleshy nature or psyche, it functions on a linear plane only. But we, who believe in Christ, operate out of the Spirit - which is Seven Spirits (Revelation 1;4; 3:1; 4:5; 5:6; Proverbs 9:1 ) - which multiplies exponentially but only if we pass it on by loving others before self."

My eyes widened as I understood. Stan smiled warmly at me.

"Hélène, darling, we don't realise just how blessed we are living this way of life. We are actually living in a kind of miniature divine laboratory where we can experience first-hand how the Most High works. Here none of the rules of the fallen world apply, nor are our rewards its paultry blessings. Here we operate under the laws of heaven and here we are constantly feasting."

Stan gazed out of the window and soaked up the panoramic view, taking a deep breath as though he was drinking it in, and then looked back at me.

"There is an entirely different rhythm and harmony in holy plural marriage. In worldly music, there are two staves - treble and bass - but in this way of life there are seven. Do you remember Kasia's essay about the "Symphony of Plural Marriage"?

I nodded.

"Well, it's like that. There are seven basic "lines" but each of these multiplies many times over into sub-lines. You'll find that the Principle of Seven saturates the Bible, both in the Old and New Testaments. There were seven loaves and seven baskets (Mark 8:6,8), and Mary Magdalene, before she was redeemed, had to have seven demons cast out of her (Mark 16:9). The seven primary spiritual dimensions in her life were subverted by demonic entities and had to be completely redeemed before she could be made whole and qualify to be a bride of Christ. The same cleansing process has to take place within us if we want to escape the corrective part of hell."

"You mean, the Seven Overcomings? (Revelation 2:7,11,17,26; 3:5,12,21; 21:7)" I asked.

Stan was pleased. "Exactly. There are seven areas of our lives that need to be cleansed out before the Spirit can fill us. Each of the Seven Spirits fills one of our seven spiritual "rooms". Sexual purity is one. Submission to adversity is another. You know the ones I mean because we've discussed them in such depth before."

"So, to be baptised in the Spirit is actually a seven-fold process?" I asked.

"Yes, right. Do you recall that Naaman had to be washed seven times to be healed? (2 Kings 5) I believe the Eastern Orthodox Church even used to practice a seven-fold baptism once, but you'd have to ask Kasia about that.

"There is, if you like, the actual admission of Christ into our lives by repenting, forsaking sin, and inviting Him to be Lord and Saviour. But that only gets the sinner past the front door. He's in the foyer or hall only. The next stage is allowing Him in each of the seven rooms of our spiritual house. Only once He has clear access to these and the seven demons of Mary Magdalene have been cast out, can we truly say we have "overcome" and are ready for the highest heavenly rewards."

"So the doctrine in the churches that all we have to do is invite Yah'shua to be our Saviour is false?" I squirmed a bit.

"False? No - it's a half-truth. That's where our spiritual revolution starts. It's like signing on the dotted line to join the army. You're in, and you're bound by contract and receive all the privileges the military gives you like food, a place to live, and so on, as it were, but you've still got to train and you've still got to work your way up the ranks if you want to better yourself and your prospects. Getting in is undoubtedly the most important part but it's only the beginning. It's where army life starts. You don't just sit around and say to yourself, 'once in the army, always in the army' and do nothing more.

"But that's not what I most wanted to say. The plural wife principle of Isaiah 4:1 has another dimension we need to discuss more fully sometime. The seven women begging admission into the family represent, on a human level, the Seven Spirits desiring entrance into our souls to take possession of our rooms, for Christ their Bridegroom's sake. Once they're in, Christ is in. It's a process, exactly like the creation of the world in seven days. And it's called the process of sanctification. Whether we become a Corporal or a General is up to us."

"So, what does this have to do with the "dance" you were doing, honey?" I asked him.

"Each room of our seven-fold spirits has a different vibration, a different key-note, a different pace or rhythm. Our sexuality is one of those, and it's one of the first we have to get cleaned out. Do you remember how Yah'shua said that if you clean your room out of one demon, seven take their place? (Matthew 12:44-45)"

"Yes," I replied, "and the seven were more wicked than the first".

"There are octave ranges upwards to purity and downwards to sin," he continued, as I listened fascinated. "That is one of the things we are supposed to learn from the musical scale. We fall into sin by octaves and we are redeemed from sin in octaves too. In heaven there are three octave ranges corresponding to the degrees of glory described by Paul. But that's a big subject and not for now ..."

Stan had an annoying tendency to break-off discussions just as they were getting interesting. But I understood that he did so in order to teach in a systematic way and so not get us off on tangents.

"I have, of course, over-simplified everything to make it more comprehensible."

I groaned. I always thought I had "understood" something only to discover there were higher levels of understanding and that what I had thought I had "wrapped up" was just an approximation or "rough sketch".

"Anyway," said Stan, obviously getting a little tired of the line of conversation, "I was just moving in the rhythm of one my "inner rooms", and in particular, one of it's "corners", if you will, which I call Beauty. I was meditating on the beauty of Yahweh's Creation and praising Him in my heart for the intricacy and wonder of flowers."

I got up and went for an embrace and kiss and got seven times as much as I was expecting from him as though he were taking me into that inner Room of his to bless me for listening so attentively to him

"What I am holding here," said Stan as he gazed into my eyes with a romantic twinkle, "is a Bouquet of Roses".

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Jenny's answer to Stan had been very brief. It had taken her a long time to think about the wording. She had gone to a couple of Elders for advice - the minister of her local Lutheran Church and a Christian Patriarch from another polygamous ministry. She was careful and sensitive, revealing the grace that Stan so much liked in her.

Dear Cousin Stan

Thank you so much for your kind and encouraging messages over the last few days. You've really lifted my spirits.

Stan, I have held your marriage proposal up in prayer for the last week, asking God to guide me in this important decision. God's leading in my heart has been to tell you that I am not the right woman to join your family. I was taken aback by your offer of marriage, because although God has given you a revelation about who you should marry, I don't think it's me. I pray that when you do meet this woman she'll also know right away that she was intended for you.

I wanted to spend a lot of time thinking about this because I wanted to make sure I wasn't listening to fear or worry instead of God's word in my heart. I've spoken with two of my Patriarchal brothers and they counselled me and helped me prayerfully sort the issue out.

I am very fond of all of you and hope that you will still consider me a sister in Jesus.

In His name,

Jenny

Stan was not, of course, very happy about the "two Patriarchal brothers" whom he knew, in spite of not knowing them personally, would have very different views of the Gospel to himself and to plural marriage in general, but there was nothing he could do about that. Finding good counsellors is not an easy matter in affairs of the heart since everyone is coloured by their personal beliefs to some extent. Resigned to her answer, he replied the same day.

Dearest Jenny

Grace and peace in our Lord and Saviour Yah'shua!

I am, of course, deeply saddened by your reply but at the same time respect your free agency. I was surprised, actually, that you had arrived at a decision so quickly as I hoped I had conveyed to you my understanding of your need for more space following the disclosures of your recent brush with unhappiness.

I don't, of course, know who your two patriarchal councellors are, their belief structure (which is always pertinent in such matters) or what counsel they may have given you, nor how much you shared with them about us. But in view of the smallness of the Patriarchal community, I doubt that it took them long to figure who I was even if my name wasn't mentioned by you. And quite a large segment of it is hostile to us, for reasons best known to themselves, though some of these are stated in the FICP site. It would, of course, be nice to know.

Obviously both of us can't have been right in our spiritual leadings. Maybe it was me. I know my timing has never been the best. However, I think I am a pretty good judge in these matters, and cannot deny the revelation given to me.

I don't, of course, want you to feel you are being chased by the Hound of the Baskervilles so I will leave it at that. I know you are struggling with various things so I will not propose again. However, we remain open should you ever wish to approach us. And of course, you are still more than welcome to visit us this summer. That you are a sister in Christ goes with out saying.

We remain here for you as always.

May His blessing and healing be yours according to your faithfulness to His Word,

In His love,

Stan & family

Jenny's reply followed swiftly:

Dear Cousin Stan,

Thanks so much for your gracious reply. I want to calm any fears that you have about people thinking that I was asking about you. I asked my Lutheran minister, and an old friend of the family, here about the situation, and I asked one of the All-American Polygamy Ministry list members that I correspond with. In both cases I changed the names and locations and every distinguishing birthmark, hair colour and shoe size to protect the innocent.


I've never come across anything negative about you from AAP members. Last week I suggested to a brother that he should contact you for support because his wife has a serious spiritual problem and you are more pro-female than the AAP Ministry site. He said he had looked at your site while doing a web search in the past and there wasn't much up at the time. He said that when he looked last week he found the site intelligent and impressive. This is as much as I have ever heard mentioned about you from any AAP Ministry members.


My feelings about the rightness of this union would have been the same whether I was recently involved or not, so please don't feel that timing was a factor. My decision is based on my personality and religious life.


I wish you all the best,


Jenny

The words "personality" and "religious life" seemed to leap out of the page at Stan like a frog hopping out of a pan of boiling water. When he shared Jenny's letter with us at the dinner table that evening, he explained what happened:

"It was as though the whole of Jenny's letter just "disappeared" with the exception of the words "personality" and "religious". And then, equally dramatically, each of the two words seemed to zoom into my face as though thrust under a microscope and I was suddenly in the spirit of the writer. I was being shown by the Ruach haQodesh what had prompted these words on the spiritual plane and what I saw shocked me."

He paused, his face ashen.

"What happened next, Stan?" asked Anna anxiously. The rest of us were all staring at him intently.

"Well, for the rest of the day I was writing ..."

"We know," laughed Kryztina, and every one else laughed too. When Stan was strongly driven by the Spirit we weren't even allowed to come near him until what the Lord had given him had been completed. And that day he had been writing for hours non-stop, not even pausing for lunch.

"It just came and came like a tidal wave of revelation," said Stan. "I wrote several long articles in which Yahweh explained to me in more detail than at any time before what these two words of Jenny actually meant. I knew that they were an excuse, and that I had to respect her decision, but I wanted to know why. She didn't try to explain her reasons for saying "no" beyond those two words and it was also plain that she didn't want to. But I had to know - not only for myself, but also because I knew that other men might receive similar answers to the one Jenny gave and would probably be in turmoil. There is nothing worse than hearing someone say "no" and not getting getting to know why. And the reasons given are rarely actually the true ones, though sometimes they are."

Salme butted in.

"Was that the article called Too Old to Change you showed me before supper, darling?"

"Yes," replied Stan, "that was one of them," and said no more.

I wondered why there had been a sudden injection of passion in his writings. Whatever the "Jenny affair" had done, it had accomplished the lofty purpose of helping the wider Christian Polygamy movement understand new aspects of polygamous life. One thing I noticed about Stan is that whenever something happens to him personally, positive or negative, he always translates the experience into an object lesson for others, and always with the view of blessing others and to save them the pain he might have gone through, or encouraging them with the blessings he has received.

For many weeks afterwards Stan struggled with Solomonic "hard questions" (1 Kings 10:1; 2 Chronicles 9:1). He examined all his motives, the revelatory process, his heart, and pretty well everything he could think of. It was his natural disposition to first try and find fault with himself before pointing a finger at someone else. Had he been deceived by his own feelings? Had Jenny been right? He had seen a woman in vision some years before who matched Jenny's appearance and location. But even more importantly than that, he had detected in her spirit that she was his. In addition, there were Jenny's and Märta's dreams. He was absolutely sure she was the woman. He had tested the data so carefully and sought guidance from the Lord, as he always did, leaving no stone unturned, before he had taken the leap of faith to propose marriage to her. And we, his sister-wives, had also obtained a similar testimony based on our friendship with her.

Jenny returned to her normal way of life but continued to be interested in plural marriage. From time to time Stan, Kasia and I would come across her in a Patriarchy internet chat room or on a bulletin board (as we were the most active internet users) but correspondence between her and us soon reduced to a trickle.

Knowing there was nothing more he could do, Stan resumed daily business as usual. But he could not help wondering what the Lord was up to. He had convinced himself that Jenny would be the twelfth and last plural wife and that he could settle down, place a seal on his heart (Song of Solomon 8:6) and focus entirely on the by now very large existing family, Kadesh-Naphtali and the ministry.

We had noticed at around about the time Jenny came into our lives that Stan was giving signals about wanting to stop adding wives to the family. He had already received flak from one plural marriage ministry which had criticised him for "multiplying wives" (Deuteronomy 17:17) which had visibly annoyed him. Though he considered twelve wives to be too many for most patriarchs (most seemed to be settling with two, some with three, and very rarely one would find one with four or five), he and we knew that this was within his capacity. There was an unwritten "understanding" in the Order that twelve wives probably should be the ceiling for those in apostolic callings yet there was nothing fixed about this. But Stan took it seriously and was mentally preparing himself to "close the doors" to more women.

I, and one or two others like Elisa and Andreea, had other feelings, though. Nothing very tangible, just a "woman's intuition" that more would come. We didn't mention it to Stan at first because we knew the thought probably wouldn't go down well. None in the family were opposed to more sister-wives though some had begun to "wonder" if maybe the Lord had not filled our cup to the brim now.

"Hey, you don't know your scriptures," Sarah-Jane had once jokingly said when this matter had been raised. "Don't you know that David says, 'My cup runs over"! (Ps.23:5, NKJV). We'll just have to get a bigger cup!"

Anna scolded her. "Don't be flippant with Scripture, Sarah-Jane," she said, annoyed.

Sarah-Jane scowled and mumbled something under her breath about the Lord setting her table in the presence of her 'enemies', hinting at Anna. Sensing a brewing conflict between Sarah-Jane and Anna, Stan stepped in and told them to apologise to each other and make up. They did so reluctanly.

"That was a feeble hug!" said Stan. "Do it again".

Both scowled at him but didn't realise he was using a well-worn tactic to turn their animosity off each other and on to Stan so that he could deal with it in his own way as the one "aggrieved". They hugged again, but still Stan wasn't satisfied.

"Again!" he said, "and put a bit of passion into it!"

The others we starting to giggle but neither Sarah-Jane nor Anna were amused. When they hugged this time, Stan took them both in his arms and squeezed them together until they were almost breathless.

"Stop! Stop!" cried Sarah-Jane starting to laugh. Soon Anna was laughing too and the whole room was in a minor uproar as the three of them collapsed onto the floor in stitches. Stan's methods were sometimes unorthodox but they usually worked, though he would vary the methods depending on the personalities. What was reassuring to all of us was that he knew us all so well and how to handle us in different situations. Sometimes he would fail and then he would get angry with himself for not solving the problem. He did expect some effort on the part of the aggrieved parties. Such incidents were, mercifully, very, very rare.

Three months after Jenny turned her back on the family, two more American women suddenly and unexpectedly came into our lives. In spite of Stan sending out subtle signals that he wasn't really interested in receiving any more wives, they still persisted in wanting to know about us. And the less subtle he became, the more determined they became.

"Aren't they getting the message?" said an exasperated Stan to me one day.

"Maybe you're not getting the message, dear" I replied.

"What do you mean?" he asked, a little annoyed.

"I mean, isn't this the Lord's business? I know you and we've got free agency, but since we've agreed to submit ourselves completely to Yahweh and do His will, then surely you have to be open to the women if they're sincere and honestly seeking a family?"

Stan nodded.

"Besides, don't you know why they're so interested in you?" I asked.

"Tell me," he said.

"Well, they've been chased and hounded by men in the polygamy community and have been sickened by their worldliness and flesh-centredness. You are the only one who's keeping them at bay! And they're asking themselves why."

"And?" said Stan.

"Well, you are the only one who has never asked to see their pictures or for a description of their features. All you have ever done is asked them about their relationship to God and to other people. They're attracted to you because you're not looking at them like pieces of meat in a butcher's shop - you're interested in their souls and not just their bodies. And that's what all decent women are looking for. There are plenty advertising themselves as meat and they'll find husbands who frequent the butchers' shops. Don't you see? You probably belong together."

He sighed in resignation.

"David was right - you can't run away from your responsibilities (Psalm 139:7)." He looked at me and smiled. "All right, sweetheart, invite them both over here for a visit." But what he didn't know was that three of us had already invited them, and when he got to know we had one over his head, he was both hurt and furious. Furthermore, our presumption and disrespect of our husband would come to be a source of trouble for us. I had now, in any case, only persuaded his mind - his heart still held them at bay.