Heaven Is Not a Place — The Parable of the “Happy Home”
By: Nathan Smith
Tags: Christianity, Mormon, Temple, Transformation, Religion

“Why say, ‘We want to hear from the stand concerning the mysteries — the eternal mysteries of the kingdom of God, that which we have never heard.’ I might say to such, O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the Prophets have spoken. Is it a mystery to you, sisters, how to knit a stocking? You all answer, ‘No, not at all.’ “But bring an individual from a world where they never had stockings, and it is as much of a mystery to that person, as anything you have ever thought of could be to you, because he would be perfectly ignorant of all ideas pertaining to that art. “You may now be inclined to say, ‘O, this is too simple and childlike, we wish to hear the mysteries of the kingdoms of the Gods who have existed from eternity, and of all the kingdoms in which they will dwell; we desire to have these things portrayed to our understandings.’ “Allow me to inform you that you are in the midst of it all now, that you are in just as good a kingdom as you will ever attain to, from now to all eternity, unless you make it yourselves by the grace of God, by the will of God, by the eternal Priesthood of God, which is a code of laws perfectly calculated to govern and control eternal matter. If you and I do not by this means make that better kingdom which we anticipate, we shall never enjoy it. “We can only enjoy the kingdom we have labored to make.” — Brigham Young, discourse delivered in the Bowery, Great Salt Lake City, 15 June 1856, reported by G.D. Watt; Journal of Discourses, vol. 3, 333–344

There once was a family at the end of their rope. The children detested their parents, and the parents had no idea what to do with their children; each sibling fought with the other, contentious as ever; the spouses each quietly resented one another, either erupting into sudden bursts of anger or simmering in distant silence. It seemed there was no love in that home, and each family member knew they needed help.

One day they received two visitors.

The first visitor was a real estate agent who came to pitch to the family a marvelous new house in a well-rated private community. The agent said that once the family moved into this new neighborhood, they would once again be happy; the house on the market was so spectacular that it would make them a happy home. Generously, the agent even offered to accompany the family to the bank to acquire a loan, help them make their surefire offer on the splendid house, and to take care of all the necessary paperwork and legal necessities — the agent would even help them move. Once the house is purchased and the family is all moved in, the agent exclaimed, they would have no other option but to be happy!

Later that day, the family received a second visitor: a therapist. The therapist sat with the family and explained that much of the family’s dysfunction was directly linked to their unhealthy habits. Over some time the family had created toxic behavioral patterns which had gone unnoticed and thus unchecked, gradually creating the hostile home environment now threatening their relationships. To curtail and perhaps repair the damage, the therapist proposed that the family attend a clinic for therapy — as individuals, a couple, and a family. Additionally, the therapist assured the family they would be given helpful tools and habits they could take with them into their day-to-day lives, to help mitigate any strain or struggles when the therapist was not around. With everyone’s concerted efforts, the therapist assured them, the family could replace their toxic patterns with healthier ones, restore their home, and find fulfillment in their relationships. The therapist even offered to do this pro bono, at no cost.

Of the two visitors that day, which do you believe would have the greatest chance of helping the family?

I believe these two visitors express the two paradigms in which Mormons and those of other religious traditions have pitched various visions of the afterlife. One theology (that of the real estate agent) describes the celestial kingdom as “a place you go,” while another theology (that of the therapist) describes the celestial kingdom as that which is created and constituted by celestial persons in healthy relationships. One heaven is given, often as the reward for the completion of tasks which have no ostensible connection to their rewards other than their connection to the giver; the other heaven is one created, its fruits having everything to do with the effort its constructors put in. I believe Mormonism, at its best, has insisted upon this latter theology — that of the therapist, so to speak.

On a related note: in the nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche condemned the Christianity of his contemporary Europe for deifying “Nothing”; or, put another way, for having a general disdain for Life. Resenting and attempting to escape the suffering inherent to life, Nietzsche insisted, European Christendom had created an “afterlife” to which they might flee upon death, evading the evils of “this life.” This worldview invested such value in an afterlife to the point that mortality seemed to be nothing in comparison. After the Enlightenment, when normative religion began to wane in the West, many Europeans rejected Christianity’s metaphysical claims, including that of the soul and its persistence after death — its afterlife. But, said Nietzsche, all these ex-Christian Europeans had done was slough off the problematic view of an afterlife; yet they had not restored the value to this life which Christendom had shifted to the afterlife. As a result, Europeans found themselves living in a world devoid of value, slipping into aimless nihilism. In response to this nihilism, much of the religious world has doubled-down on traditional formulations, while others have simply dropped the topic altogether. However, some have attempted to re-frame the conversation on a fundamental level. I believe Mormonism is a part of this latter response.

Rather than a dramatic break from “this life,” Mormonism describes (y)our afterlife as an indefinite extension of (y)our life here and now, into eternity, beyond death. Further, rendering life infinite, relationships we create here and now will follow us beyond death (cf. D&C 130:2). In sum, (y)our life after death will differ from (y)our life before death in the same way that (y)our life tomorrow will differ from (y)our life today. In this way Mormonism seems to blur the lines between “this life” and “the afterlife” as to do away with their distinction entirely —seeing a singular and uninterrupted Life. Moreover, “in the ordinances [of the priesthood], the power of godliness is manifest” (D&C 84:19–20; emphasis mine), or unveiled before our eyes. Rather than beginning things altogether, the Mormon ritual complex reveals the cosmic narrative in which everyone and everything is always already playing a part, challenging participants to take part in that cosmic unfolding more deliberately now.

For example: like a civil marriage ceremony, a sealing gives one an opportunity to deliberately lay their lives upon an altar in sacrifice to their spouse, similar to the way in which Christ sacrifices for each and every human being. By this ritual action, two people consciously commit themselves in Christ-like love to each other in marriage, with the understanding that that relationship, and any relationships which may blossom from it — between in-laws as families join, the spouses and their children, their children’s children, etc. — do not need to end but can last as long as all participants are willing to put in the necessary effort. Rather than directly effect an eternal relationship between the two newlyweds, a sealing may be a moment for them and their families to come together and acknowledge what has already begun between them, and to promise their mutual fidelity to one another before their families and community. However, these eternal relationships are not vouchsafed by ritual. These relationships may be expressed through ritual, but they are vouchsafed by action, whether or not one participates in the temple.

For clarification, we might consider Paul’s letter to a community of Christ-followers in Rome. Though Paul describes Jews and gentiles (non-Jews), and circumcision and “uncircumcision,” in the following passage, we may easily imagine in their stead the terms “Mormon” and “non-Mormon,” “baptism” or “sealing” and “unbaptism” or “unsealing,” to apply Paul’s point:

“But if you call yourself a Jew and rely on the law and boast of your relation to God and know his will and determine what is best because you are instructed in the law, and if you are sure that you are a guide to the blind, a light to those who are in darkness, a corrector of the foolish, a teacher of children, having in the law the embodiment of knowledge and truth, you, then, that teach others, will you not teach yourself? While you preach against stealing, do you steal? You that forbid adultery, do you commit adultery? You that abhor idols, do you rob temples? You that boast in the law, do you dishonor God by breaking the law? For, as it is written, ‘The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.’ “Circumcision indeed is of value if you obey the law; but if you break the law, your circumcision has become uncircumcision. So, if those who are uncircumcised keep the requirements of the law, will not their uncircumcision be regarded as circumcision? Then those who are physically uncircumcised but keep the law will condemn you that have the written code and circumcision but break the law. For a person is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is true circumcision something external and physical. Rather, a person is a Jew who is one inwardly, and real circumcision is a matter of the heart — it is spiritual and not literal. Such a person receives praise not from others but from God.” — Romans 2:17–29:, New Revised Standard Version

By distinguishing the letter from the spirit of the Law, Paul describes what Giorgio Agamben in The Time That Remains calls “the Cut of Apelles,” a double-cut. Rather than merely divide the world into Jew and non-Jew, or even to do away with that distinction altogether, Paul doubles the distinction, creating a category Agamben calls the “non-non-Jew.” For Paul, the letter of the Law may express the spirit thereof, but what matters ultimately is the latter, not the former. In this schema, one may possess the letter of the Law (as a Jew) and yet not follow it, thus lacking the spirit of the Law; conversely, one may lack the letter of the Law (as a gentile or non-Jew), and yet follow of themselves the spirit of the Law. Whether Jew or non-Jew, what matters is whether one is faithful to the spirit of the Law — if one is a non-non-Jew.

Nevertheless, after raising this point, Paul goes on to ask a pressing question: “Then what advantage has the Jew? Or what is the value of circumcision? Much, in every way. For in the first place the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God” (Romans 3:1–2, NRSV). Thus for Paul, to insist upon the precedence of the non-non-Jew over the distinction between Jew and non-Jew (or on the non-non-Mormon, shall we say, over the distinction between Mormon and non-Mormon) is by no means to devalue Judaism (or Mormonism) but to contextualize it. Suffice it to say, we may compare the relationship between the letter of the Law and the spirit of the Law to that of a word and the thing to which it attempts to point. For instance, were I to find you crawling through the desert, dehydrated and on your last leg, it would be no help for me to kneel by your side and mouth, “Water, water, water!” You wouldn’t need the word, but the thing itself. However, that is not to devalue the word — or even language — only to put it in its proper context. I may help you to your feet, nod in a certain direction, and say, “Water, water, water,” indicating that that is what I’m taking you to get. Or you may happen upon an oasis yourself, no words necessary. The letter of the Law (or Mormonism, we might say) is a language by which the Gospel may express itself — but it is not the Good News itself.

I believe it was in this spirit that B.H. Roberts expressed the need for Mormonism to continually refine its letters, so as to more readily convey the spirit:

“I believe ‘Mormonism’ … calls for thoughtful disciples who will not be content with merely repeating some of the truths, but will develop the truths; and enlarge it by that development. Not half — not one-hundredth part — not a thousandth part of that which Joseph Smith revealed to the church has yet been unfolded, either to the church or to the world. The work of the expounder has scarcely begun. The Prophet planted by teaching the germ-truths of the great dispensation of the fulness of times. The watering and weeding is going on, and God is giving the increase, and will give it more abundantly in the future as more intelligent discipleship shall obtain. The disciples of ‘Mormonism,’ growing discontented with the necessarily primitive methods which have hitherto prevailed in sustaining the doctrine, will yet take profounder and broader views of the great doctrines committed to the Church; and, departing from mere repetition, will cast them in new formulas; cooperating in the works of the Spirit, until they help to give to the truths received a more forceful expression and carry it beyond the earlier and cruder stages of development.” — B. H. Roberts, “Book of Mormon Translation,” Improvement Era 9:9 (July 1906), 713

The goal is not to become a “good Mormon,” but through Mormonism to express and discover what it means to become what we might call a “non-non-Mormon.” To articulate and express what that means takes tremendous effort, a herculean work which must play out within every person who participates in the tradition, translating Mormonism into their particular lives and circumstances.

As I said, Mormonism insists that that which we create in this life we will take with us into the next, in the very same way that that which we create today we will take with us into tomorrow, in the same way that that which we created yesterday we took with us into today. Mormonism is not the construction of an afterlife wholly other than “this life,” but the extension of life here and now beyond death. In mortality, healthy relationships require vulnerability and honesty, compassion and forgiveness, patience and compromise, quality time and alone time — among several other factors. However, some popular Mormon rhetoric often disregards these necessities when discussing eternal relationships, narrowing the requirements for a healthy relationship beyond death to legalism and rituals — focusing upon the letter of the Law, to the detriment and even disregard of the spirit thereof. Yet this is the theology of the real estate agent, not that of the therapist, describing the celestial kingdom as an exclusive social club we find our way into, rather than as a kingdom constituted by those who create and sustain healthy eternal relationships. With love for his Mormon community, Joseph Smith said:

“…let me be resurrected with the Saints, whether I ascend to heaven or descend to hell, or go to any other place. And if we go to hell, we will turn the devils out of doors and make a heaven of it. Where this people are, there is good society. What do we care where we are, if the society be good? I don’t care what a man’s character is; if he’s my friend — a true friend, I will be a friend to him, and preach the Gospel of salvation to him, and give him good counsel, helping him out of his difficulties” — History of the Church, 5:517; 23 July 1843

We find a tremendous illustration of the therapist’s theology in a vision recounted by Joseph Smith, in Kirtland, Ohio on 21 January 1836 (D&C 137). In this vision, Smith sees the celestial kingdom, in which he finds Adam and Abraham, as well as his own mother and father (who were still alive at the time); however, most importantly, he sees his late older brother Alvin. To understand the gravitas of this vision, it’s necessary to add that Alvin died years prior to Smith’s founding of the Church in 1830, having never been baptized in his life, therefore believed by many to have been damned for eternity — and yet there he is, nestled in the arms of his mother and father, standing at the side of Adam and Abraham themselves, in the presence of Christ and God. Moreover, this vision was received and recorded some time before Smith instituted posthumous ordinances, rituals performed in remembrance of the dead who had not received them in their own lives.

The voice of the Lord enters the vision, narrating to Smith a scheme far different than the legalistic ritualism he and his family had inherited from their American Protestant milieu: “All who have died without a knowledge of this gospel,” the Lord says, “who would have received it if they had been permitted to tarry, shall be heirs of the celestial kingdom of God.” Further, the Lord adds that “all that shall die henceforth without a knowledge of it, who would have received it with all their hearts, shall be heirs of that kingdom” (D&C 137:7–8). To have “received [the gospel] with all their hearts” in such a way as to become “heirs of the celestial kingdom” holds no ritual element. Rather, the people mentioned in this text, those who “die without a knowledge of this gospel,” are described as living their lives in such a way that “they would have received it had they been permitted to tarry.” The message of this vision was not that God had supplied a loophole by which Alvin may navigate God’s bureaucracy — it was such a view of the afterlife that caused so much heartache among the Smiths in the first place. The answer was not a loophole but a reassurance, merited by who Alvin was, not what had been done in his behalf (cf. D&C 49:8–9). What saved Alvin Smith was not baptism, whether in his own life or by proxy in a temple, but the unbreakable bonds he shared with his family.

Proxy ordinances for the dead are also quite illustrative in themselves. Mormonism is laden with ironies, some of them even good ones, and I find Joseph Smith to be one of the greatest ironists of nineteenth-century America. One of these ironies is quite helpful. As mentioned above, Smith and his contemporaries lived in a religious atmosphere much like that of modern Mormon culture: suffused with an intense legalism, insisting that one must either belong to the proper sect, believe the proper doctrines, or submit to the proper rituals (such as baptism), all through the proper channels, in order to “go to heaven.” With Alvin’s death, as well as the deaths of several of Joseph Smith’s own children, the concept of “dying out of grace” or beyond the reach of these “saving” factors must have weighed heavily on Smith’s heart and mind. Such a perspective seemed to cause Smith only suffering — and needlessly so — but while many might have negated this legalism by doing away with ritual altogether, Smith instead sprinted in the other direction, introducing rituals for the dead.

As a missionary, I met a member of the LDS Church who explained this irony to me quite simply: he asked me and my missionary companion what our purpose was as missionaries. The preconditioned response was that as missionaries, “we baptize!” But he seemed unimpressed with that. He responded that that’s nice, but that everyone will be baptized, regardless of our efforts as missionaries; in a more literal view of Mormonism than my own, he described the temples of the LDS Church as already well at work, and that upon the return of Christ that posthumous work would continue, until every last person had received every ordinance — from baptism to sealing — by proxy. Feeling emotionally-charged absolutes with which I had wrestled for so long, and which I often loathed, melt away under this unnoticed irony — an exclusive ritual which every person would receive, no matter what — I heard this man ask me and my companion one more time, what was our purpose as missionaries? When we didn’t answer, he did: it was to alleviate the suffering of others.

The celestial kingdom is not a place you go, much less a place which will make you happy; even less so a place where you will simply be so happy as to not notice the absence of other members of your family (as one bastardized version of Mormonism puts it). As a happy home is built by those who can create and sustain healthy relationships, the celestial kingdom is built by celestial people who work to maintain those relationships beyond death. Furthermore, while such an effort may require internal transformation, it is nonetheless a communal process. For instance, no one can be moral in themselves, in the same way that a sphere in an absolute void could never move, for there would be nothing else it could move in relation to — movement would have no meaning for the sphere. Without others, morality would have little to no meaning to an individual. Moreover, no one can impute to another that inner nature required to become celestial, whether that means to be moral or something broader still. Ordinances cannot be made to do the work for us, as if they were a kind of folk magic or scientific mechanism; such a languid approach to ordinances would be no more beneficial than setting up camp in your garage would make you a car or being granted a diploma would convey to you the knowledge you should have acquired in your training. Instead, ordinances are symbols to help us articulate what eternal relationships may look like, structures to help us discipline our actions to serve that end, volitional covenants to periodically reaffirm our commitment to that gradually refined vision — they are means to that celestial end, not the celestial end in themselves.

On a somewhat related note, Latter-day Saints have often made a distinction between, for instance, “baptism of the dead” (phrasing they eschew) and baptism for the dead. While I agree with this distinction, I wonder if we’ve yet to really think through its ramifications: we cannot baptize the dead in any direct way, perhaps not simply because this can offend numerous people (for example, the surviving families of Holocaust victims who are told their Jewish ancestor was “baptized into the Mormon Church”), but perhaps because baptism can never be “of” a person, only “for” them. Rather than some dynamic change to the person themselves, baptism may be a tool by which one may affect that internal transformation, being an aid but never the be-all, end-all. To borrow a Buddhist aphorism, in the same way that a finger points to the moon, ordinances point to salvation and exaltation; they do not affect salvation or exaltation any more than the finger affects the moon, and they are not the only means by which one may find salvation and exaltation any more than the pointing finger is the only means by which one may notice the moon in the open sky — they are, nevertheless, tools which help us articulate what we mean by the terms salvation and exaltation, and which challenge us to consciously (and repeatedly) commit to aiming our developing selves in that direction.

So think of those you love most, and of those whom you may have once loved but now not as much, or even of those you’ve never loved in the first place — ask how you might act toward or think about them were you to realize that the relationship you share with them depends upon your mutual efforts, even into eternity. If a member of your family leaves the LDS Church, rather than wring your hands over whether they will return, or sermonize on what God will supposedly do to separate your family, or even speculate on all the ways in which they must now be less happy (or even miserable) “because they left the Church”— ask how you might act toward and think about your family member were you both already beyond the veil, in eternity. That which threatens your eternal relationships may not be a child leaving the Church or a spouse without a temple recommend, but the mutual discomfort, conflict, and alienation which can arise as a result — stresses one may wrongly attribute, by way of ignorance of defense mechanism, to the departure of the person who has disaffiliated from the LDS Church. Let Mormonism be that which helps families stay together, not that which tears them apart. Ordinances are not folk magic or beatific bureaucracy which will guarantee healthy relationships by legal bind or supernatural means; they are tools to aid us in becoming the kind of people who can create and sustain eternal relationships ourselves.

In What’s Wrong With the World, G.K. Chesterton wrote that “religion is not the church a man goes to but the cosmos he lives in.” Further, he adds, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult, and left untried.” Perhaps the Mormon ideal, too, is in a similar bind. What good are our ordinances if they cannot sustain our families in the moments that matter most, when our relationships may be most strained, such as in a faith transition or when a loved one no longer fits the culturally-accepted mold of “the ideal Latter-day Saint”?

The Good News is that we may have eternal relationships, not eternally-Mormon relationships. The possibility of healthy relationships beyond death is an existential grace, which, like any relationship here and now, requires work. So let us work together.

— — — — — — — — — —

Recommended Reading:

Related Posts