The Sacred Heart of Mormonism. “I am not a God afar off, I am a…
By: Nathan Smith
Tags: Spirituality, Philosophy, Mormon, Religion, God

“I am not a God afar off, I am a brother and friend;

Within your bosoms I reside, and you reside in me:

Lo! we are One; forgiving all Evil; Not seeking recompense!” — William Blake, Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (c. 1803–1820), ch. 1, plate 4, lines 18–28

The Latter-day Saint temple experience being what it is, I’ve had to learn how to write about “something” without actually writing about “something.”

There are very particular portions of the temple endowment ordinance which participants promise never to disclose, except in a highly particular ritual context (nothing fun, spooky, or sexy, I assure you), but the aura surrounding those things is tremendously taboo for many Mormons. Consider it something like the Pharisaic philosophy of hedging in the Law with additional requirements, not as a means of disrespecting the Law or becoming overly anal about it, but as ensuring that one never violates a tenet of the Law by putting further distance between oneself and the very possibility. I believe a similar impulse, often with the same ad hoc theological rationalization, can be found among many Latter-day Saints. The sensation of “sacred anxiety,” of experiencing a buzzing angst the closer one comes to the “Sacred” (whatever it may be; and there are, of course, varying answers), is prevalent in religious communities with defined organizations, hierarchies, or systematic theologies.

In short: there’s something special at the center, cascading outward in various contingent forms (rituals, texts, organizations, etc.), which derives much of its value from being held beyond the tedium and typical experiences of the everyday community, while yet exerting an oddly demanding influence upon that community. It’s the tension of transcendence and immanence, we could say. But much of what’s special about the Mormon temple seems to lie just beyond that threshold where many (though certainly not all; perhaps not even most) Latter-day Saints are unwilling to go. I can respect that, and not only because I’ve experienced the endowment numerous times myself. I too hold to my promise to not disclose particular symbols used in the ordinance (they’re not hard to find, but I’m uninterested in giving them to you). I think many Latter-day Saints reinforce this sacred boundary with anxiety because it’s easier to believe something awful will happen if you transgress that boundary than to waste away your minutes, hours, and days contemplating in the celestial room at the center of a temple “what it all means” (a practice that is unfortunately discouraged, though for understandable reasons; some temples are quite busy). So many Latter-day Saints may experience not only indignation (understandably) when they happen upon some hidden-cam exposé of their most sacred rituals and symbols on YouTube or the like, but anxiety as well — a kind of palpable (albeit often undefined) fear that something bad could happen. I’ve felt it before, the sense that you’re dealing with something “heavier” than what you typically encounter — a sign that you’re inching toward the Sacred at the heart of a community.

I appreciate Hugh Nibley’s view on this matter of inadvertently brushing the sacred boundary:

“Even though everyone may discover what goes on in the temple, and many have already revealed it, the important thing is that I do not reveal these things; they must remain sacred to me. I must preserve a zone of sanctity which cannot be violated whether or not anyone else in the room has the remotest idea what the situation really is. … No matter what happens, it will, then, always remain secret; only I know exactly the weight and force of the covenants I have made — I and the Lord with whom I have made them — unless I choose to reveal them. If I do not, then they are secret and sacred no matter what others may say or do. Anyone who would reveal these things has not understood them, and therefore that person has not given them away. You cannot reveal what you do not know!” — Hugh Nibley, Temple and Cosmos: Beyond This Ignorant Present (Deseret Book, 1992), 64

While I think sacred anxiety is natural to many religious people with distinct sacred boundaries, it needn’t be such a visceral trauma every time one accidentally brushes the border. Perhaps, to build on Nibley’s idea, sacred anxiety may be somewhat misdirected anyway. Rather than fearing that something terrible may happen were one to disclose these things, perhaps we may simply say that to do so is to deaden them, in a way similar to how removing a light bulb from its socket turns it into nothing more than a cumbersome, useless object. Put another way: perhaps these symbols, to borrow a Buddhist aphorism, are fingers pointing to the moon; to this one may add the characteristically Buddhist warning to not conflate the former with the latter.

Some are rather uncomfortable with the idea of Mormons having “secrets,” assuming that “secret” must mean “sinister,” but I think that’s overly presumptuous already. One popular response many Latter-day Saints have been tempted to give is that the temple is not “secret” but “sacred,” but this gives into the same false dichotomy that something is either “secret/evil” or “open/sacred/good.” That’s a longer conversation, but perhaps we can re-contextualize sacred silence. Rather than silence before an otherwise touchy God who “will not be mocked,” perhaps to simply show the symbols off is to demean them into what we typically demean everything else ostensibly religious into: a quick, one-and-done kind of tech manual you can read quickly, understand, then throw away. Instead, rather than merely didactic manuals (or tedious articles), these symbols are instead meant to trigger experiences of the sacred at once aloof from yet demanding upon a community. To share them openly is to pretend that that is all they are, self-explanatory and at face value; to hold sacred silence is to refuse to attempt the futile task of putting the sacred into the tedious and often problematic language of the everyday — to pretend that we’re dealing with just another piece of trivia we can hear, sigh at, then forget altogether.

It’s an odd bind to be in, because, as I said above, it puts me in the position of being essentially unable to write to other Latter-day Saints (let alone to non-Mormons) about what I believe is essentially the center and foundation of Mormonism (at least within the LDS Church). On the other hand, far from an after-the-fact rationalization haphazardly cobbled together to explain why I can’t talk about this or that, experience has taught me that the Sacred is notoriously difficult to put into words (at least for me!), an experience I read back onto the sacred silence surrounding the Mormon temple experience (rather than the other way around). I’ve dropped tid-bits here and there in my writing, but much of my writing has been only around the topic, if not eventually deferring to conclusions not as answers but as terminus points where I can’t speak much further anyway.

It seems to me that “religious” communities (an odd and frankly problematic category, but we’ll use it for now) typically construct or at least hold onto and hand down symbols — rituals, texts, temples, gods, heroes, stories, etc. — because they encapsulate something of the Sacred of that community, around which they orient themselves on a fundamental level while yet keeping that sacred something far enough away as to not let it be battered by the uncertainty of otherwise transient everyday life. It’s a feeling I get when I hear about human tribes near the end of the Ice Age worshiping gods that look a lot like the animals they hunted or interacted with the most, of Egyptians contemplating the dogs of the deadly desert in the dog-headed god of death Anubis, of the Dogon calling upon Amma who holds all things together, Buddhists carving statues and building temples to the one person or few people to ever achieve the enlightenment they’re after, and so on and so on. These aren’t just passing ideas or places to visit on occasion to “pay respects,” but principles which serve as the “strange attractors” which render the typical chaos of their lives into some intelligible and thus manageable pattern. We build temples to the things we value the very most in our lives, regardless of what others may think, or whether they may strike every member of the community as equally important.

In this vein, I’d wonder what sits at the center of the Latter-day Saint temple and thus at the center of Mormonism (at least in one interpretation of Mormonism within the LDS Church). I don’t think it must be something unique to the LDS Church, unknown to all others, in order to be meaningful; but it’s a question that comes to my mind often. I’m tempted at times to say that at the center of the temple, we could say (at the risk of slipping into too much short-hand), is “Elohim.”

By and large in Latter-day Saint discourse, “Elohim” is defined as a heterosexual, cisgender, monogamous couple (the LDS Church currently acts out that interpretation in sealings, for instance); but while that could work for me in my particular life (as a straight, cisgender, monogamous male), I also know it’s exceptionally exclusionary to so many other good, beautiful, and true lives that take shapes other than my own. To do so is to cast off an entire portion of the body of Elohim. However, I think that, to borrow a cue from Dialogue’s editor Taylor Petrey, Mormonism has a “post-heterosexual” potential. I think Elohim even presumes it, in a way. In any event, Mormonism’s understanding of its central symbols has indeed evolved dramatically since 1830; perhaps this is another direction in which Mormon culture’s interpretations could develop.

While Joseph Smith seems to have largely thought of temple sealings as more or less between men and women (albeit in a polygamous context), he seems to have derived sealings from his larger view of Elohim (or “Eloheim”), a term which he always used in the plural for a council or family of beings. Working from there, perhaps we may say that, rather than an exclusively heteronormative couple, Elohim is instead all human relations as such, containing all and thus not limited to any one of its components. Elohim is that Plural One who sends, generates, or emanates Michael, who is Adam and Eve, and thus all humanity. In other words, Elohim is the most fundamental singularity rendered plural in that it brings each and every one of us into existence from out of itself. Sealings could invite us, then, in a ritual context, to see the Other as a splinter of the infinite Elohim — as a piece of God — and to become woven back together in such a way as to not dilute the authentic uniqueness of either the other or oneself.

As I said, I don’t think this is self-explanatory. Even so, I don’t think we need to limit Elohim purely to human relations. Our lives are composed of so much more — as is Elohim, it would seem. The endowment doesn’t just recollect the interactions of various beings with one another, but of those beings’ interactions with the worlds around them in creation, degradation, temptation, negotiation, redemption, and on and on. “Elohim” names our connections to one another as well as to all else — the earth and all of nature, to the universe. In that view, everything is a fragment of “Elohim,” which in this sense would be, therefore, not just another name for existence or the universe, but for all things simultaneously in their unimaginable and inexhaustible diversity and evolutionary complexity as well as their fundamental unity — always already at one, even if prone to forget that.

Rather than an exclusive focus on individuation — the emergence and articulation of an individual person — or collectivity — the overall life of the community — Elohim may instead inch closer to the concept of transindividuation. As one commentator defines the term:

“…it seems to me that thinking in terms of transindividuation is different than simply another description of the process of individuation; in the sense that transindividuation is always about what exceeds this process, both in the sense of the formation of a collective individuation, or the individuation of collectives, but also the preindividual relations that exceed any individuation. These relations are the basis of transformations both individual and political. This seems to me to be the ultimate test, or gamble, of thinking transindividuation — that it makes it possible to rethink and rearticulate the relationship between individual crises and collective transformation, the constitution of new types of organization, in an age of utter fragmentation and isolation.” — “Talkin’ Transindividuation and Collectivity: A Dialogue Between Jason Read and Jeremy Gilbert,” Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry 1 (4), 2019. (PDF)

Conceiving Elohim as transindividuation (or perhaps we may say intersubjectivity) — as opposed to only either individuality or collectivity, or even the tension between them — invites participants in the LDS temple to contemplate the ways in which they are always already nested in the same ground as all others. Rather than merely defining oneself through negation, in opposition to others, or by uncritically absorbing one’s surroundings, we may instead see ourselves much like Michael and Jehovah: not Gods creating the world from nothing, but persons working with pre-existing materials they themselves did not create and of which they themselves are composed.

In a somewhat Hegelian twist, whatever one may be in particular is only ever because of “all the rest” that one is not them — the true infinity against which one defines their finite self, “you” foregrounded against “everything else.” Elohim is a symbol which calls one to reconcile with that dialectic tension, rather than to answer it with antagonism, recognizing that were it not for that tension one would not exist at all.

“…infinite, in the sense in which it is taken by this reflection (namely, as opposed to the finite), has in it its Other just because it is opposed to it; that, therefore, it is limited and itself finite. Therefore, if it is asked how the infinite becomes finite, the answer is that there is no infinite which first is infinite and then must become finite or pass on to finitude, but that for itself it is already finite as much as infinite. … Or, rather, this should be said, that the infinite has ever passed out to finitude; that absolutely, it does not exist, by itself and without having its Other in itself …” — G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, tr. by W. H. Johnston and L. G. Struthers (The Macmillan Co., New York, 1929), I, 166 f

Of course, this isn’t an interpretation likely to take hold in Mormon culture (and perhaps it doesn’t need to), but it’s been a fundamental part of my own spirituality for some time now, albeit in varying terminologies and conceptual frameworks. In highly particular terms: Elohim is the totality of existence, that Whole of which everything is a part. If you will, Jesus is the one who lived faithful to that reality in his life of unconditional love. And, by extension, the endowment, as a “putting on” of the identity of Christ, is a ritualized invitation to seek that same experience as Jesus — to realize down to the marrow of your bones that all things and people, just as they are, belong and go together.