John, your mom and I appreciate and admire the kind of person that you have become, and the kind of lawyer you are. You represent what this law society is about. Brother's and sisters of the law society, and all over the world, I am deeply honored to be here tonight. I understand that the J. Reuben Clark Law Society now has more than 10,000 members
in more than 100 chapters—plus 135 student chapters—and that a third of the chapters
are located outside the United States. That international dimension reminds me of
a young man I met recently in the St. George Temple. He was about to leave on a mission
to Argentina. I asked him, “Do you speak any Spanish yet?” With utmost sincerity he replied, “I only
know one word in Spanish: aloha!” I tried to remain reverent in the temple. Well, even though aloha isn’t a
Spanish word, it works tonight, because it somehow says “hello” and “welcome”
in most any tongue. I have two related purposes tonight. First,
I’d like to tell you how I got into the once-boring but now almost too-dramatic field
of family law and what I found there. In this first part I’ll be talking as one lawyer
to another, but I hope my footnotes will also suggest some more-general perspectives. Second, against that background I’d like
to talk about marriage—including our own marriages and marriage as taught in the temple.
I realize that many devoted people do not now live in the kind of family situation they
either desire or deserve. Of course Church doctrine encourages marriage and discourages
divorce, but marrying is not always under our control, and there are times when divorce
is the better choice. Our Church leaders have long taught that despite divorce or being
single, no eternal blessing, even celestial glory, will be denied to those who are true
and faithful. Let me take you back to the Law School’s
early years and to the conversation that launched me into family law. Rex E. Lee and I were
meeting to discuss something he was writing. Rex was then the founding dean of BYU Law
School and would later become solicitor general of the United States. He would also later
become president of BYU, but for Rex, university administration would never be as interesting
as constitutional law. As we talked about recent constitutional developments,
we both cheered that the powerful idea of individual rights had energized the civil
rights movement, which was helping the United States overcome its embarrassing history of
racial discrimination. We also applauded how those same ideas had begun to help the country
eradicate discrimination against women. At one point I said to Rex, “The liberation
and equality movements are gaining such a head of steam. Do you think the very idea
of individual rights will ever develop so much momentum that it could overpower the
principles that should be balanced against it?” His brow furrowed. “What do you mean? Give
me an example.” I shrugged spontaneously. “What about children?
The law ‘discriminates’ against children on the basis of age—they can’t vote, drive
a car, or sign a binding contract. But is that discrimination bad for children or is
it good for them?” Then I wondered aloud if a children’s rights movement might follow
the civil rights and women’s movements. Spurred by that question, I did some research
and found that a sometimes-reckless children’s rights movement was indeed underway—illustrated
then by a state court decision that, in effect, let a teenager divorce her parents. I soon found other examples of excessive individualism.
For instance, one law professor argued for a constitutional “right of intimate association,”
urging that the law give the same legal rights to people in any intimate relationship that
it then gave to those in relationships based on marriage and kinship. Some scholars also
attacked marriage as a source of oppression against women. Advocates of sexual privacy
argued that unmarried cohabitation should be constitutionally equated with marriage.
Allowing me to respond to such issues, in 1983 the Michigan Law Review published my
article “The Constitutional Status of Marriage, Kinship, and Sexual Privacy—Balancing the
Individual and Social Interests.” Note two terms in that title: social interests
and individual interests. I ran across these terms in what has been called “the best
known essay in the history of family law,” written by Harvard Law School dean Roscoe
Pound. Pound defined the “social interests” in family law as society’s interest in maintaining
marriage as a stable social institution in which parents protect, nurture, and teach
their children the qualities of character that maintain a stable society. He distinguished
this social interest from what he called “the individual interests in domestic relations,”
noting that “when the legal system recognizes certain individual rights, it does so because
. . . society as a whole will benefit” thereby. In a key insight, Pound warned that lawyers
and judges must compare individual and social interests on what he called “the same [analytical]
plane,” lest the very decision to categorize one claim as “individual” and the other
as “social” cause us to “decide the question in advance in our very way of putting
it.” During the last half century, U.S. courts
and legislatures have increasingly neglected what was obvious to Roscoe Pound about the
social interests in marriage and parenting. Primarily through the use of constitutional
law categories, many courts and legal scholars have come to assume that individual interests
are somehow more “fundamental” or “compelling” than social interests. As a result, just as
Pound feared, our system has decided many difficult issues of family policy in advance,
simply by the way we put the question. Individual interests have thus been carried on such a
tidal wave of constitutional law that the contemporary mind now sees hardly any social
interests in our legal and cultural understanding of marriage and parenting. I know that's a fairly bold statement. Let me try to illustrate just one little example. One researcher found that the
Supreme Court’s cases about marriage prior to about 1970 “turned on the importance
of marriage to society,” but its later cases began to “turn on the importance of the
relationship to the individual.” And we may never know how much of this change was
the result of truly serious policy analysis and how much of it was because constitutional
law simply began to preempt family law. It’s often hard to tell when the law causes social
change and when the law simply reflects social change. One obvious but huge historical factor is
that, since the 1960s, our culture has experienced colossal changes in the attitudes and values
that affect family life. Indeed, Mary Ann Glendon of the Harvard Law School calls this
development “the transformation of American family law”—the biggest cultural shift
in 500 years in attitudes about family life. To illustrate this transformation, I will share a few headlines from an altitude of
about 40,000 feet—without attempting to draw the fine distinctions we would identify
closer to the ground. Also, I will speak mostly about U.S. law, although the laws of most
developed countries have followed these same trends. In a nutshell, advocates began using the constitutionally
charged language of individual rights to challenge laws that were intended to support the interests
of children and society in stable family structures. And courts began to accept these arguments,
despite the fact that the individual rights protections in the U.S. Constitution were
originally enacted to protect individuals from invasions by the state, not to protect
them from people who are not state actors, such as those in their own families. For instance, the courts expanded the parental
rights of unwed fathers and began to give child custody and adoption rights to unmarried
individuals. This uprooted the long-established preference that family law had given, whenever
possible, to the formal two-parent biological family. Both experience and social science
research clearly showed—and still show—that a home led by married, biological parents
almost always provides the best child-rearing environment. But over time the unwed parent
cases both contributed to and were influenced by skyrocketing rates of illegitimacy and
unmarried cohabitation. Further, in Roe v. Wade in 1973 the Supreme
Court granted individual women the right to choose an abortion, thereby rejecting long-held
beliefs in our culture about not only the social interests held by unborn children but
also the social purposes served by allowing elected legislators to decide collectively
about a question as value laden and sensitive as when life begins. Also, no-fault divorce was first adopted in
California in 1968, and gradually became the law in ever state. No-fault significantly changed how people thought of marriage. Under the old divorce laws, married people couldn't just choose to end their marriage—they had to prove spousal misconduct, and lawyers helped them make that case in court, like showing adultery or mental cruelty, and only a judge could determine whether a divorce was justified because he or she represented the state's social interest in the marriage. As originally conceived, no-fault divorce
had worthy goals. It added irretrievable marriage breakdown, regardless of personal fault, as
an additional basis for divorce, which simplified divorce actions and reduced messy personal
litigation. In theory, only a judge could decide whether a marriage was indeed beyond repair. But in practice, family court judges began to defer to the
personal preference of a couple, and eventually they deferred to whichever partner wanted
to end the marriage. So, as one Canadian lawyer put it, no-fault
divorce no longer “looked at marriage . . . as a [social] institution.” Rather, no-fault
saw marriage as “an essentially private relationship between adults terminable at
the will of either” without regard to the consequences for children, let alone the effect
of divorce on society. Before long, judges’ doubts about society’s right to enforce
wedding vows gave married couples the false impression that their personal promises held
no great social or moral value. As these new legal assumptions have blended
with larger cultural swings, most Americans no longer see marriage as a relatively permanent
social institution; rather, they see it as a temporary, private source of personal fulfillment.
So when marriage commitments intrude on personal preferences, people are more likely to walk
away. Thus today is the age of what has been called the “nonbinding commitment”—whatever
that oxymoron means. Talking about no-fault divorce actually leads
us quite logically to a brief comment on gay marriage. Now isn’t the time for an extended
discussion of this very difficult and poignant topic, but I do note that only fifteen years
ago no country in the world had legally recognized same-gender marriage. So how could the very
idea of gay marriage burst upon the international scene precisely when the historic concept
of marriage had lost so much public value during the previous four decades? Well, the “personal autonomy” theory of
the first U.S. pro-gay marriage case in 2001 simply extended the same individualistic legal
concept that had created no-fault divorce: When a court upholds an individual’s right
to end a marriage, regardless of social consequences (as can happen with no-fault divorce), that
principle may also seem to support an individual’s right to start a marriage, regardless of social
consequences (as can happen with same-gender marriage). In other words, if man-woman marriage is no
longer a big deal for society but just a matter of individual preference, it’s little wonder
that many people would now say of gay marriage, “It’s no big deal—let people do whatever
they want.” That’s what can happen when we lose track of society’s interest in marriage
and children. We know that God loves all of His children and that we must treat one another
with compassion and tolerance—regardless of private conduct that we may or may not
understand. But it is a very different matter to endorse or promote that conduct by allowing
the appropriation of a legal concept—marriage—whose primary and historic purpose is to further
social interests. Consider briefly the stunning effect of these
changes on marriage and children during the last fifty years. In the United States the divorce rate has
more than doubled, although it has dipped slightly in recent years. Today about half
of all first marriages end in divorce and about 60 percent of second marriages do. The
United States is the world’s most divorce-prone country. Today more than 40 percent of U.S. births
are to unmarried parents. In 1960 that number was about 5 percent. And as Elder Dallin H.
Oaks recently noted, 50 percent of today’s teens consider out-of-wedlock childbearing
a “worthwhile lifestyle.” The percentage of children in single-parent families has
increased threefold, from 9 percent to 26 percent. The number of unmarried couples has
increased by about fifteen times. As Elder Oaks also noted, more than half of today’s
U.S. marriages are preceded by unmarried cohabitation. What was abnormal fifty years ago is the new
normal. In Scandinavia 82 percent of firstborn children are born
outside of marriage. When we lived in Germany recently, we sensed among Europeans that in
many ways, it seems, marriage is no more. Marriage has gone away. As a French writer
put it, marriage has “lost its magic for young people,” who increasingly feel that
“love is essentially a private matter which leaves no room” for the larger society to
say anything about their marriage or their children. Nonetheless, the children of divorced or unwed
parents have about three times as many serious behavioral, emotional, and developmental problems
as children in two-parent families. By every measure of child well-being, these children
are far worse off. And when children are dysfunctional, society will become dysfunctional. Here are
some examples Since about 1960 in the United States, juvenile crime and child abuse have quintupled.
Psychological disorders among children have all worsened, from drug abuse to eating disorders;
depression among children has increased 1,000 percent.
Domestic violence against women has increased. Poverty has shifted increasingly to children. I was reassured reading The New York Times earlier this week; these are not old statistics. About four days ago, The New York Times reported a major study showing that the children of single parents have strikingly less upward economic mobility than other children have. Economic inequality is a big issue in this country, and that's the key variable from this major study. What does it say about these last fifty years and family life? How serious are these problems? A few years
ago President Gordon B. Hinckley said, “In my judgment, the greatest challenge facing
this nation is the problem of the family, brought on by misguided parents and resulting
in misguided children.” He also said, “The family is falling apart. Not only in America,
but now across the world. This is a matter of serious concern. I think it is my most
serious concern.” Shortly after President Hinckley said these words, the First Presidency
and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles gave us “The Family: A Proclamation to the World.” For a nonreligious viewpoint, consider this
indictment from a recent Time magazine article about infidelity among political leaders: There is no other single force causing as
much measurable hardship and human misery in this country as the collapse of marriage.
It hurts children, it reduces mothers’ financial security, and it has landed with particular
devastation on those who can bear it least: the nation’s underclass. . . . The poor
[have uncoupled] parenthood from marriage, and the financially secure [blast] apart their
[own] unions if [they] aren’t having fun any more. These complex problems did not result solely
from changes in the law. In many ways legal changes simply reflect a larger cultural upheaval.
However, the inability of our legal and political system to contain the force of individual
rights ideas injected into family law has allowed many cultural dikes to break that
in better days might have held. Can anything be done to reverse this tide?
I don’t know. But if anyone can answer that question, it might be those who understand
the prophecies that unless the hearts of the parents and the hearts of the children turn
toward one another, the earth will be smitten with a curse. Are we already living in the
time of that curse? On some days I think we could be. But even if we are, the gospel’s
principles provide the long-term remedy. Years ago when I was on a family law panel
at a big eastern law school, someone said to me, “Aren’t you from BYU—the Mormons?
You’re the people who still believe in marriage! Will you please help the rest of us?” To be clear, I am not asking to return to
the family laws of yesteryear. Many of those laws needed reforms, but we could have done
that without resorting to the individualistic extremes that have inflicted so much damage
on both children and society. And how do we explain to our children and grandchildren why traditional
marriage must be preserved and even revered as we feel the earth move under our feet and
as even the mainstream threatens to leave the banks of its riverbed? Well, I hope this brief look at legal history
might whet your appetite to think more deeply about such family-related questions. And for
the sake of our families, our friends, and our own marriages, I also hope this historical
context will help explain why today’s culture no longer understands marriage in the way
God intended it. Building a good marriage isn’t easy. It isn’t supposed to be easy.
But when a confused culture confuses us about what marriage means, we may give up on ourselves
and on each other much too soon. Yet the gospel’s eternal perspective, as taught in the scriptures
and in the temple, can help us transcend the modern chaos until our marriages become the
most satisfying and sanctifying—even if also the most demanding—experiences of our
lives. What does all of this have to do with the temple? Every time we go to the temple, the
ordinances reorient us to the natural order of the universe, including the natural order
of marriage. Like the ancient mariner, we look to the heavens to get our bearings—and
we do that through the temple. Hugh Nibley wrote: The temple is built so as to represent the
organizing principles of the universe. It is the school where mortals learn about these
things. . . . the knot that ties heaven and earth together. Thus the temple has the power to write God’s
natural laws of marriage and family life into our hearts. We first learn the temple’s teachings about marriage in the story of Adam and Eve—the
primal story of the temple. A friend once asked me, “If Christ is at the center of
the gospel and the temple, why doesn’t the temple endowment teach the story of Christ’s
life? What’s all this about Adam and Eve?” As I have thought about his question, I have
come to believe that the life of Christ is the story of giving the Atonement. The story
of Adam and Eve is the story of receiving the Atonement—because they were the first
people to receive it—amid the sometimes formidable oppositions of mortality. I’d
like to invite my wife, Marie, to share some thoughts about Eve’s perspective on that
opposition. [Marie:] Adam and Eve were the first people
to receive the Atonement. They were also the first parents to know the love a new child
brings, the soul-stretching sacrifices of raising a child, and the agony of watching
children unwisely use their agency. What I have to share with you will feel like
an abrupt change in tone, but this poem by Arta Romney Ballif (a sister, by the way,
of President Marion G. Romney, one of the founding fathers of BYU Law School) takes
us into the heart of marriage and family life as they began on this earth. Take a deep
breath and come with me into Eve’s world as she probably saw it. The poem is called
“Lamentation.” And God said, “BE FRUITFUL, AND MULTIPLY—”
Multiply, multiply—echoes multiply God said, “I WILL GREATLY MULTIPLY THY SORROW—”
Thy sorrow, sorrow, sorrow— I have gotten a man from the Lord
I have traded the fruit of the garden for the fruit of my body
For a laughing bundle of humanity. And now another one who looks like Adam.
We shall call this one “Abel.” It is a lovely name, “Abel.” Cain, Abel, the world is yours.
God set the sun in the heavens to light your days,
To warm the flocks, to kernel the grain. He illuminated your nights with stars.
He made the trees and the fruit thereof yielding seed.
He made every living thing, the wheat, the sheep, the cattle,
For your enjoyment. And, behold, it is very good. Adam? Adam
Where art thou? Where are the boys?
The sky darkens with clouds. Adam, is that you?
Where is Abel? He is long caring for his flocks.
The sky is black and the rain hammers. Are the ewes lambing
In this storm? Why your troubled face, Adam
Are you ill? Why so pale, so agitated?
The wind will pass The lambs will birth
With Abel’s help. Dead?
What is dead? Merciful God! Hurry, bring warm water
I’ll bathe his wounds Bring clean clothes
Bring herbs. I’ll heal him. I am trying to understand.
You said, “Abel is dead.” But I am skilled with herbs
Remember when he was seven The fever? Remember how— Herbs will not heal?
Dead? And Cain? Where is Cain?
Listen to that thunder. Cain cursed?
What has happened to him? God said, “A FUGITIVE AND A VAGABOND”? But God can’t do that.
They are my sons, too. I gave them birth
In the valley of pain. Adam, try to understand
In the valley of pain I bore them
fugitive? vagabond? This is his home
This the soil he loved Where he toiled for golden wheat
For tasseled corn. To the hill country?
There are rocks in the hill country Cain can’t work in the hill country
The nights are cold Cold and lonely, and the wind gales. Quick, we must find him
A basket of bread and his coat I worry, thinking of him wandering
With no place to lay his head. Cain cursed?
A wanderer, a roamer? Who will bake his bread and mend his coat? Abel, my son, dead?
And Cain, my son, a fugitive? Two sons
Adam, we had two sons Both—Oh, Adam—
multiply sorrow Dear God, Why?
Tell me again about the fruit Why?
Please, tell me again Why? [Bruce:] Eve. Mother Eve. Your sorrow and your faithful questions bring a hush across
my heart. Father Lehi gives us the doctrinal context
for understanding Eve’s experience. He tells us that if Adam and Eve had not eaten from
the tree of knowledge they “would have remained in the garden of Eden” and “they would
have had no children; wherefore they would have remained in a state of innocence, having
no joy, for they knew no misery”—experienced parents will see a little connection here:
no children, no misery!—and further, “doing no good, for they knew no sin. . . . Adam
fell that men might be [mortal]; and men are [mortal] that they might have joy.” So,
paradoxically, sin, misery, and children create the context for learning what joy means—a
process made possible by the Atonement of Jesus Christ. Because of that Atonement we can learn from
our experiences without being condemned by them. And receiving the Atonement, as Adam
and Eve did, is not just a doctrine about erasing black marks; it is the core doctrine
that allows human development. That is why Adam and Eve didn’t return to the Garden
of Eden after they were forgiven. Rather, they held onto each other and moved forward,
together, into the world in which we now live. And there they kept growing, together, as
a couple. The temple’s primal story is quite consciously the story of a married couple
who help one another face continuous mortal opposition. For only in that sometimes-miserable
opposition could they learn to comprehend true joy. Now consider two implications from the Adam
and Eve story about our understanding of marriage. First is the Restoration’s positive view
about the Fall. We know that Adam and Eve chose wisely in the garden, because only mortality
could provide the experience needed to fulfil God’s plan for them—and for us. In contrast,
traditional Christianity teaches that Eve’s choice was a tragic—some would say stupid—mistake,
bringing down the wrath of God on all mankind. Some Christian churches still teach that because
women are the daughters of foolish Eve, wives should be dependent on their husbands. Reacting strongly against this idea, most
people today would say that a wife should be independent of her husband. And, in fairness,
they would add, a husband should also be independent of his wife. When both spouses are independent
of each other, we get today’s “nonbinding commitment,” and people leave when the fun
stops. So which is correct: dependence or independence?
Neither one. The restored gospel—unlike the rest of Christianity—teaches that Eve
and Adam’s choice in the garden was not a mistake at all. It was actually a heroic
choice. Thus the Restoration sees Eve—and all women—as noble beings who are complete
equals of men. So Eve is not dependent on Adam, nor is she independent from him. Rather,
Eve and Adam are interdependent with each other. And, as “A Proclamation to the World”
teaches, they are “equal partners” who “help one another” in everything they
do. We find a second significant implication for marriage in a later scene from the Adam
and Eve story. When they left the garden, the Lord directed them to build an altar and
offer animal sacrifices. After many days an angel asked Adam why he offered sacrifices. He said, “I know not, save the Lord commanded
me.” So the angel told him, “This thing is a
similitude of the sacrifice of the Only Begotten.” The lambs they sacrificed symbolized and pointed
them toward the Father’s future redemptive sacrifice of His Son. The angel then taught
Adam and Eve that Christ’s sacrifice and the plan of redemption gave meaning and purpose
to all of their opposition—from leaving Eden to Eve’s lamentation over her sons. Many of us go to the temple today the way
Adam and Eve did at first—simply because we are commanded, without knowing why. And
simple obedience is certainly better than not performing the ordinances at all. But
the Lord, who sent that angel, must have wanted them to know why—and I believe He wants
us to know why. Are today’s temple ordinances also “a
similitude . . . of the Only Begotten”? Think of how the temple’s altars are, like
the altar of Adam and Eve, altars of prayer, sacrifice, and covenants. Think of the dimensions
of sacrifice in all the covenants of the endowment. Since Christ completed His atoning mission,
we no longer offer animal sacrifices, but we do covenant to sacrifice. In what way?
Christ taught the Nephites, “Ye shall offer for a sacrifice unto me a broken heart and
a contrite spirit.” Animal sacrifices symbolized the Father’s
sacrifice of the Son, but the sacrifice of a broken heart and a contrite spirit symbolizes
the Son’s sacrifice of Himself. James E. Talmage wrote that Jesus “died of a broken
heart.” In similitude, we now offer ourselves—our own broken hearts—as a personal sacrifice.
As Elder Neal A. Maxwell said, “Real, personal sacrifice never was placing an animal on the
altar. Instead, it is a willingness to put the animal in us upon the altar and letting
it be consumed!” With these ideas on my mind, some months ago
I was about to seal a young couple in the St. George Temple. As I invited them to the
altar, he took her by the hand, and I realized that they were about to place upon that altar
of sacrifice their own broken hearts and contrite spirits—a selfless offering of themselves
to each other and to God in emulation of Christ’s sacrifice for them. And for what purpose?
So that through a lifetime of sacrificing for each other—that is, living as He did—they
might become ever more as He is. By trying to live that way every day, they would each
come closer to God, which would also bring them closer to each other. Thus, living the
covenants of the sealing ordinance would sanctify not only their marriage but also their hearts
and their very lives. This understanding of marriage differs starkly
and powerfully from the prevailing view of marriage in today’s culture. In His parable
of the Good Shepherd, Jesus described a hireling—someone who is paid to care for the sheep. When the
wolf comes, He said, the hireling “leaveth the sheep, and fleeth.” Why does the hireling
run away? Because, Jesus said, his “own the sheep are not.” By contrast, Jesus said
of Himself, “I am the good shepherd. . . . I lay down my life for the sheep.” Most people
in today’s society think of marriage as an informal arrangement between two hirelings,
and when a hireling feels threatened by some wolf of trouble, he will simply flee. If trouble
is coming, why should he risk his comfort or convenience, let alone his life? But when we offer in our marriage a broken
heart and a contrite spirit in similitude of the Good Shepherd, we will give our lives
for the sheep of our covenant, a day or even an hour at a time. That process invites us
to take selflessly upon ourselves both the afflictions and the joys of our companion,
emulating in our own limited way how the Savior takes upon Himself our afflictions. “Be
you afflicted in all his afflictions,” said the Lord to Peter Whitmer about his missionary
companion Oliver Cowdery. Isaiah echoed that phrase in describing Christ and those He redeems:
“In all their affliction he was afflicted, . . . and he . . . carried them all the days
of old.” Not long ago I asked some temple workers what
they thought it would mean to live the life of a broken heart and a contrite spirit in
marriage, to treat one’s spouse as Christ Himself would treat us. One of them said, “It means choosing to
be kind—all the time.” Another, “Trying to care more about someone
else’s needs than you do your own.” And another, “I will offer not only my heart
but also my arms and my hands.” And finally, “It’s the sacrifice of learning to
give up the natural man within me.” Another temple worker lost his wife after
she had suffered a debilitating illness for several years. After her funeral he told me,
“I thought I knew what love was—we’d had over fifty blessed years together. But
only in trying to care for her in these last few years did I discover what love is.”
By going where he had to go, in being afflicted in her afflictions, this man discovered wellsprings
of compassion deep in his own heart that a hireling will never know exist. The accumulation
of such discoveries produces the sanctifying process of becoming like the Good Shepherd—by
living and giving as He does. Not incidentally, that kind of living breathes irreplaceable
strength into the social interests of our culture. Before we conclude, I’d like to respond
to the question a friend asked recently: How close to perfection must we live to receive
the exalted promises of a temple sealing? Husbands and wives know each other so well,
especially those who seek for eternal blessings, that on some days we can honestly wonder if
we are living close enough to perfection—or if our spouse is. Whichever one of us we wonder
about, the question can be a hard one. I like the answer given in Moroni’s farewell
words: “[I]f ye shall [1] deny yourselves of all ungodliness, and [2] love God with
all your might, mind and strength, then is his grace sufficient for you, that . . . ye
may be perfect[ed] in Christ.” One way to rid ourselves of ungodliness is to stay close
to the temple, because in its ordinances “the power of godliness is manifest.” Further,
Moroni invited us to “love God with all your might.” That means loving to the extent
of our own unique personal capacity, not to the extent of some abstract and unreachable
scale of perfection. As we deny ourselves of ungodliness and honestly
love God as fully as we are able to, Christ’s perfecting grace can complete the process
of making us whole. I recently ran across a letter about marriage written in 1902 by
the First Presidency that suggests what this combination of Christ’s total sacrifice
and our own total sacrifice will look like: After reaching the perfected state of life,
people will have no other desire than to live in harmony with [righteousness], including
that which united them as husband and wife. . . . Those who attain to the first or celestial
resurrection must necessarily be pure and holy, and they will be perfect in body as
well. . . . Every man and woman that reaches this unspeakable condition of life will be
as beautiful as the angels that surround the throne of God; . . . for the weakness of the
flesh will then have been overcome and forgotten; and both [husband and wife] will be in harmony
with the laws that united them. A woman I know was married about fifty years
ago in the temple. After she and her husband had had several children, his turbulent life
led both to their divorce and to his excommunication from the Church. Then she gave up her own
Church membership and chose some thorny paths. Later on he passed away. I met her when her
forty-five-year-old daughter brought her to my office in the temple to explore if the
mother could ever return to the temple—something the mother was convinced could never happen.
After a mellow, peaceful conversation about learning from experience without being condemned
by it, we discussed the processes of repentance, rebaptism, and the restoration of temple blessings.
Then I said that the restoration ordinance would also restore her temple sealing. Was
she ready for that? After a pause, the daughter spoke first. She
said, “I have bipolar disorder. My son is bipolar. We know far more about that disorder
than we used to, and we take medications that help. Looking back, I believe my father was
bipolar, and that probably influenced many of the hard things in our family’s life.
I don’t judge him now.” Soon her mother said softly, “If I really
can return to the temple someday, I will be ready for my sealing to be restored.” As I watched them walk down the hall, I realized
that the temple and Elijah’s sealing power are sources of reconciliation, turning not
only the hearts of children to their fathers and mothers but turning the hearts of wives
and husbands toward one another. Brothers and sisters, I bear witness that
the order of marriage that God gave to Adam and Eve is worth whatever it takes—to find
it, to build it, and to keep it in our lives. I also testify that husbands and wives who
try to live like the Good Shepherd will discover and will give to each other the abundant life
of authentic joy. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
