The same sociality, coupled with glory.
I met my wife in a small mountain town in rural Colorado, a place called Glenwood Springs. She was my neighbor. When I first saw her, it was like being struck by lightning. I knew in that instant that my life as I had known was over and something else had begun.
Years later I took her to the top of a mountain at night in Telluride and asked her to marry me. I did not want our story to be a thing that happened only down here. I wanted to point us upward from the very beginning.
And out of that love came my son, and I learned that a human being can feel things I did not know were in the catalog of what a person is. Joy beyond joy. The weight of a sleeping child against your chest that rearranges you and tells you, wordlessly, that you have touched the veil somehow.
This is why I cannot bear what traditional Christianity has tried to do to heaven, and why you should not bear it either.
Joseph Smith taught about the world to come is the most comforting and the most scandalous thing ever spoken over a grave.
For fourteen centuries Christendom painted the afterlife as an escape from this life, a dissolution of the self into light, a disembodied rest among clouds and harps where the particular person you are melts into a general bliss.
Joseph stood up and said no. He said the same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us there, only coupled with a glory we do not now enjoy.
The laughter at your own table is not left behind. The particular way my wife says my name, the particular weight of my son asleep against my chest, the face of the friend you buried and have grieved for years, none of it is left behind.
It goes with you, the same and yet glorified, recognizable, real, and never to be lost again. The dead are not gone and not asleep. They are awake and aware and pressing close against this world, separated from us by a veil thinner than a breath, and the reunion when it comes will not be the meeting of strangers but the picking up of a conversation that was only ever interrupted, never ended.
The mother you lost knows your name still. The father whose hands once blessed your head is waiting to take your hand again. Death is not the severing of the cord. It is only a door they walked through ahead of you, into the next room, with the light still on and the table still set.
And the deepest thing Joseph restored is the sealing.
The bonds we forge here can be made permanent by the authority that binds in heaven what is bound on earth, so that a marriage sealed in the temple is not dissolved by death but only deepened by it, and a family remains a family when the stars have burned down to ash.
This is the cord that does not break. Every other faith on the earth has told its lovers that the grave is the end of them, that whatever heaven holds it does not hold this, that the dead are loved only in memory now.
Joseph looked at that long sorrow and tore it in two. He said the love you build in the small unremarkable hours of an ordinary life is not a comfort for a few decades but the literal architecture of the world to come, the seed of thrones, the beginning of a family that will go on creating and rejoicing and ascending together, world without end.
Heaven is the keeping of everything you love, purified and made eternal and placed beyond the reach of death forever.
I think of the lightning in Glenwood Springs, the stars over Telluride, the weight of my son in the dark, and I do not believe for one moment that these were given to me only to be taken away. They were not the fleeting comforts of a brief life. They were the first pages of an eternal one.
The pioneers could bury their children in the snow and keep walking because they believed this with their whole souls, not as poetry but as fact, as solid as the ground under the grave. They knew the cord held. They knew the door had only opened, not closed.
Believe it the way they believed it. The same sociality, coupled with glory. The veil thin as breath. The cord unbroken. The table still set, and the light still on, and everyone you have ever loved and lost waiting in the next room for the door to open one last time and let you in.
Comments
Post a Comment