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Background: I came across a story of an adult woman who had a child on her own. Father unknown. She later joined the church. She went through the temple and when her daughter also went through the temple as an adult, they looked into being sealed. They found out that sealing could not happen because there was no father.
This story led into various replies, discussions and exchange of stories: One woman was married/sealed in the temple, her husband died and she married a non-member for her second marriage. All her children are from her second marriage. According to the church, all her children are sealed to her FIRST husband. Another woman had a similar situation with an adopted child who due to past dealings, could not be sealed to her family. There were lots of complicated stories of messy family dynamics and temple dealings not being able to happen.
My question: If the church was to quit emphasizing the importance of Eternal Families during missionary work, what else do you see as an excellent point for focus?
Ideas?
Jesus Christ. I wish our message was individual discipleship. Everything else is appendages.
Nobody ever listens to me though.
mom3 wrote:
Jesus Christ.
HERETIC!
With that attitude, you’ll be expecting the Church to celebrate Easter next.
IMHO – I don’t think most 18 an 19 year old missionaries even think of the complexity of the case nor even know the “policies”/beliefs of the church. They only think of the “normal” two people married with a few kids. I have always found it hard to figure out the day to day afterlife relationships with being both sealed to my parents, my siblings, my wife, and my kids. To me it makes more sense that I would be sealed to my wife, and get to visit often with all the others. Otherwise it gets too complicated.
Quote:HERETIC!
With that attitude, you’ll be expecting the Church to celebrate Easter next.
SHHH. Don’t tell anyone. I want it to be a surprise.
To quote Stephen Fry: Quote:And then she (sister giving a tour of temple square) said how in the afterlife all families will be reunited and you’ll be with your families forever. So I put my hand up and said, “But what happens if you’ve been good?”
Humor is the good natured side of a truth.
But thoughts…
The church sees itself as the authority on defining what it means to be a “family” (hint: nuclear only). Meanwhile the definition of family in the real world is much more fluid. Family has evolved to be the people you care about, regardless of relation. People define what a “family” means to them and the church is kinda stuck with its model of mom, dad, and their children; I say stuck because they attached saving ordinances to those relationships and so much of the purpose they’ve assigned to eternal life revolves around procreation.
As already mentioned in the thread, have we really though this eternal family thing through? What does being an eternal family really mean? You gotta live in the same mansion above? Hard pass. I’ve said it many times here, if being in each other’s presence 24/7 were so desirable then we’d all want to live with our parents even as adults, but society (at least American society) is such that we try to gain and maintain our independence. So take away sickness and no longer needing material wealth, like what supposedly exists in heaven, and everyone would be in a position where they could be independent.
Another factor. At best there’s a 6 or 7 generation window for relationships. I may know a few great grandparents, my grandparents, my parents, my siblings, my children, my grandchildren, and great grand children, but that’s about it. Slide up the scale and my great grandparents may have a relationship with their grandparents but I surely don’t. Those relationships will be much more meaningful to my great grandparents than they are to me. So is it really important for me to be sealed to my 50th generation family or is it more important for my 49th generation family? It’s their relationship, not mine.
I think what the eternal family concept really tries to get at is this fear that we’ll lose the people we care about in the afterlife. Specifically, we don’t want to permanently lose our spouse to death. We don’t want to lose our children to death. We don’t want to lose our parents to death. In general, people are afraid they will, and the concept of sealings that make the relationships eternal serve as a security blanket. Then we invent rules surrounding the use of sealings, then exceptions to the rules crop up and we start worrying about things again.
#1: First get to an afterlife.
#2: Then worry about it.
Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
Edited to add: I do like how the concept of sealing everyone can lead people towards the conclusion that everyone that you meet in life is family.
This is an oversimplification, but for me what is unique and what “sells” the church is two things: 1) Eternal families 2) unique authority to create eternal families. This is a double edged sword and is a very “feel good” doctrine that works until you acknowledge the messiness of real life. It’s made worse when our leaders don’t announce new revelations to explain the messiness. There was a video in the 80’s and 90’s that missionaries often used, I think it was called “What is Real” but I might be wrong about the title. In this video a married couple was interested in the discussions until the missionaries taught about eternal families. Turned out that the family didn’t want to be together forever. The missionary answer was to heal the marriage so the investigators desired to be together. However, that doesn’t work in myriad circumstances as the original post expressed.
I think the answer is different that most have expressed here. We have to emphasize eternal families and authority to seal – but we have to accompany that with better answers than “it will all be figured out in the next life.” That answer rings hollow when we brag about living prophets and we’re no different than other churches. As Nibbler pointed out at some point the answer becomes “it will be sorted out later” but at a minimum it has to be more fair.
Just last week an older couple who was married civilly two years ago asked me if they could get sealed and I told the wife that she had to get her 1st sealing to her first husband, who is still alive, canceled. She was appalled and said she hadn’t seen her first husband for 30 years and he doesn’t have anything to do with the church and isn’t even a good man. However, the new husband is a widower and has no issues since he can be sealed to multiple women. Utterly unfair.
For me, it’s NOT the sealing that is the nice part of temple work but that we believe the dead have a chance too. I love the principle of family centeredness and working to promote security, love, refuge, safety, support, and harmony within the home. For some there needs to be a literal interpretation in order to get and stay motivated. Exclusivity also helps – you can only have an eternal family IF you jump through these hoops. Then it can be used as both a carrot and a stick which I am not a big fan of.
I believe that the relationships that we form with those closest to us DO matter and will continue to matter in the eternities
mom3 wrote:
Jesus Christ.I wish our message was individual discipleship. Everything else is appendages.
Nobody ever listens to me though.
:thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup: I feel the same. Trouble is, that doesn’t set us apart from everyone else. My take on it is why do we need to be so different from everyone else? If God already directs people to find us, as many in the church believe, then wouldn’t he lead people to find us anyway?
LookingHard wrote:
IMHO – I don’t think most 18 an 19 year old missionaries even think of the complexity of the case nor even know the “policies”/beliefs of the church. They only think of the “normal” two people married with a few kids.I have always found it hard to figure out the day to day afterlife relationships with being both sealed to my parents, my siblings, my wife, and my kids. To me it makes more sense that I would be sealed to my wife, and get to visit often with all the others. Otherwise it gets too complicated.
And I don’t think most of the 18/19-year olds actually have a testimony of Jesus Christ and the atonement. As you point out, they don’t see the big picture.
Roy wrote:
I love the principle of family centeredness and working to promote security, love, refuge, safety, support, and harmony within the home.
This
Roy wrote:
For some there needs to be a literal interpretation in order to get and stay motivated. Exclusivity also helps – you can only have an eternal family IF you jump through these hoops. Then it can be used as both a carrot and a stick which I am not a big fan of.
My husband thinks like this. He feels that he is finally getting his life together spiritually – because he wants to with me for forever. When we have discussions that skirt disobeying the letter of the law in some areas, he points out that he wants to make the TBM choice to be an eternal family. Sometimes I want to point out I don’t want to be the “carrot” dangled in front of him for good behavior (but I don’t mostly because it would “out” me, and hurt his feelings unduly) …
Roy wrote:
I believe that the relationships that we form with those closest to us DO matter and will continue to matter in the eternities
I want to believe. I am striving to live my life so that those close relationships matter beyond my lifetime.
DarkJedi wrote:And I don’t think most of the 18/19-year olds actually have a testimony of Jesus Christ and the atonement. As you point out, they don’t see the big picture.
A lot of them are just obeying orders – the central problem of Mormonism. With some of them it’s painfully obvious they’re just doing what’s expected of them. A buddy of mine saw a couple on the bus making obscene comments about investigators – they must have thought they were off duty and no one was listening, because the bus was near empty. Well, a friend of a member was! Makes me wonder what they discuss back in their accommodation.
The nearly universal scope of the Atonement / grace. Seriously, I like being able to say that our pure version of God is more graciously powerful than just about any other Christian view. Eternal progression and theosis sets us apart, if we embrace it. It also is one of the central themes of the Bible, and I wish we emphasized our unique interpretations from the Bible more often, since I think many of them are obvious to anyone who isn’t constrained by so much of what came out of Middle Age Catholicism and the Protestant Reformation.
Our human view of the afterlife (at least for the good people) is defined in most all religions as being “more of what we love and none of what we don’t.” There’s more light, more love, more music, more smiling. There’s no sickness, sorrow or death. Furthermore, all the jerks are in Hell, so they can’t bother us there. So, in Mormonism, we project the relationships we cherish into the afterlife, too. I don’t see anything wrong with this; actually, I think it’s the single best doctrine of the Church, and I wish it were true. That may not be how everyone sees it, but it is how many see it. So, good for them.
From a long ago thread about “Death”:
On Own Now wrote:
My faith crisis led me to Christianity for awhile, but eventually landed me in Atheism. For me, at least, the single worst thing about Atheism is the belief that there is no afterlife. But not so much for me. I accept that I will vanish from existence someday and I am more or less OK with that idea. Yet, when I am confronted with the death of others, that is when Death has a Sting. The other day I had a few moments, so I called and talked to one of my kids. It was a great conversation. I was so happy to have the opportunity. After I hung up, I had the thought pop into my mind that I hadn’t talked to my dad for awhile, and that I should call him. The thought lingered for about 0.5 seconds and then sucked the air out of me. My dad has been gone for years. He was a wonderful man. His sudden, progressive, devastating and short-lived illness left children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren in a shock that has not gone away all this long time later. I found it an especially bitter pill to swallow because of my belief that there is no entity that exists now that was once my father. He only now exists in our memories. A new generation will rise that didn’t know him and my generation will fade; taking those memories with us. Even writing this causes the tears to well up in me. Over the intervening years, I have often thought of experiences that he and I shared together, with no one else. It is bitter-sweet to think of those things. Sweet, for obvious reasons, but bitter, because of my perspective that I alone have any recollection of those events. It is as if they only exist in my own mind.IMO, religion probably appeared when we first became aware of mortality. It’s one of the reasons that I don’t particularly care to argue against religious belief or for Atheism. My father went to his grave believing in an afterlife and it gave him comfort. I’m happy that many of you believe in an afterlife. I hope I’m wrong and you are right. Nothing would make me happier than to wake up on the other side and find JS there ushering me toward the line heading to the Great Bar of God, and telling me, “Brother On, you are probably not heading to the Celestial Kingdom, but I think you’ll still like where you wind up. It’s glorious and beautiful.” To which I will reply, “Sounds good. Do you know if my dad is around?”
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