generational estrangement of my family can be healed in the temple

 

Kirk Rollins

@nicoraytruth

Here is what I dream. I dream that the generational estrangement of my family can be healed in the temple. Not talked about. Not forgiven in some vague way that costs nothing. Healed. I dream of kneeling at that altar with the names no one alive can explain, my grandparents and their silence, the aunt, the cousin who carried the damage in his body, the faces in North Carolina I was never allowed to know, and that through those ordinances, through that strange mysticism of water and oil and a whispered name, something would move that no court and no apology and no deathbed ever could. Some nights I hate the ones who cut the cord. I hate them for the thin table, for the half empty circle around my son, for the suspicion I still carry the darkness of estrangement is in me too. And I love them, every one, in the same breath, and I have stopped trying to make those two things agree. So what I am asking for is not my love. My love is too small, it arrives too late, and it is soaked in anger. I am asking for the divine act of eternal love itself, the love that built the stars, to reach back through the veil to the ones who cut the cord and the ones who were cut by it, and gather them into the chain again, link by link, whether or not any of them ever managed it here. And when I say the chain I no longer mean only mine. This is what Joseph Smith was reaching for at the end of his life. He was not building a heaven of private rooms where a man goes in alone and shuts the door behind him. He was reaching for the whole human family, welded into one chain from the first parents to the last child, every generation joined to the one before it and the one after, because he had come to believe that the dead cannot be made perfect without us and we cannot be made perfect without our dead, and that a heaven of strangers is no heaven at all. He called seeking after our dead the greatest responsibility God had laid on us, and he meant it so literally that he set a font on the backs of twelve oxen to do it. The Family Proclamation says the same thing in quieter words. It says family relationships were meant to be perpetuated beyond the grave, that the ordinances of the temple exist so families can be bound forever, that this is the eternal destiny God intends for His children. When I was a young man, I saw a greeting card it as a nice greeting card. Now I am a man with scars that sees a promise that the branch that went dark in North Carolina hangs on the very same chain as the children asleep down the hall from me, and that no link on it is finally lost. I cannot prove any of this. But it is absolute beauty. Maybe that is evidence of truth. Because a belief like that does not sit still. It goes to work in the living. It sends a man to the funeral he was going to skip, makes him answer the letter he was going to let die, puts him in the car toward the cousin’s children he has been avoiding for years. It spreads outward as one continuous act of beauty, breaking down walls that were built before I was born, pulling the old suspicion out of the blood, until the pain of alienation and separation and estrangement finally runs out of generations to fall on. Not a family patched. The human family gathered, and mine one short length of the cord.

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https://x.com/nicoraytruth/status/2067406740979913116

In my family's rubble: The Family Proclamation

Years ago, there was a mormon lawyer in Los Angeles who tried to tell me what members believe, and I did not understand a word of it for years.

He was an older man, a trust and estates attorney, which is to say a man who had spent his whole working life standing at the exact seam where families come apart. He drew the lines along which people divide their dead. Who gets the house. Who gets the land. Who gets the name, and who gets nothing and remembers it for the rest of their life. If anyone on earth had earned the right to grow cynical about families, it was him. But he wasn’t. His family was his bedrock. All the kids were compassionate and truly gifts.

When I was a young lawyer, I asked what the Church actually taught. What the thing underneath all of it really was. He did not reach for the Book of Mormon. He did not give me a list of doctrines. He pointed at the wall.

There was a document framed there. The Family Proclamation. “If you really want to know what we believe,” he said, “it is that. Right there on the wall.”

So I read it. And I felt almost nothing.

I want to be honest about that, because I think it matters. I read it and I agreed with it the way you agree with a weather report. Yes, sure, families are important, marriage is important, fine. But I had walked in half expecting to be scandalized, the way the world is always promising you will be scandalized by the Mormons, and the scandal never came. It struck me as decent and obvious and a little quaint. I handed it back. I went on with my life. I had come in waiting to be shaken, and what I thought I had been given was a greeting card.

It has taken me the better part of my adult life to understand that I was holding the most radical document I had ever touched, and that the reason I could not feel it was simple. You cannot read a thing like that with your eyes. You have to read it with your scars. And at that age I did not have any yet.

Here is what I know about my own family, which is mostly a way of saying here is how little I know.

My grandfather was estranged from his people. My grandmother was estranged from hers, over money, over land, over the kind of power that money and land become when a family decides they are worth more than the people they were meant to serve. I do not even know all the details. That is the cruelest part of estrangement. It does not only sever the relationship. It severs the memory of why, until all that is left is a silence no one alive can explain.

There is a whole branch of my family in North Carolina. People who came across on the Mayflower, generations before me, whose blood I am carrying around in my body at this very moment, whose faces I have never seen and never will. The reason I will never meet them is not death. Death I could almost forgive. Death at least is honest about what it takes, and it takes everyone, and it never pretended otherwise. The reason is grievance. Somewhere back along the line a person decided that a parcel of property was worth more than a piece of the family, and the cord was cut, and it stayed cut, and the branch went dark. I am the proof that it stayed dark. I am what it looks like, three generations downstream, when a family quietly unwelds itself over something as weightless as money.

And it did not stop there, because these things never stop where you would like them to. I watched it work its way down into my own lifetime. An aunt who fell into methamphetamine and then out of her marriage, the two of them coming apart at once, the way they so often do. A cousin who took the damage of all of it into his own body, neurologically, permanently, through no fault of his own, because he happened to be the child standing closest when the wave came through. And then his children, arriving into a house that was already burning, beginning their lives a full step behind before they had taken a single one of their own.

I am not telling you this to indict anyone. I need to be clear about that. I have nothing but love for every one of them. They were links in a chain that someone, long before they drew breath, had already begun to pull apart. What I am describing is not a parade of individual sins. It is a mechanism. You cut a cord at the top, and four generations later a child you will never meet is born into the rubble of a choice made before his grandparents existed. The butterfly beats its wings in one century, and the storm comes ashore on an infant in the next.

When you grow up inside a family that came apart, you do not only inherit the grief of it. You inherit the suspicion that you are carrying the same blade. That whatever it was in the blood that cut those cords is in you too, dormant, patient, waiting for the right resentment to wake it.

And there is a quieter cost than the dramatic ones, the kind I only learned to see once I was older, because it never announces itself the way addiction or an early grave does. It is simply absence. The gatherings that do not happen. I have no great loud table at the holidays, no room full of cousins and aunts and old ones telling the same stories louder every year, because the people who would have filled that room were scattered long before I was ever in a position to gather them. The estrangement did not only take individuals. It took the shape a family is supposed to have, the density of it, the overlap of three generations standing in one kitchen at one time. What came down to me instead was a thin table.

And I have thinned it further myself. I came to fatherhood late, at forty, and by the time my son arrived a great many of the people who should have been there to hold him were already in the ground. The circle that ought to have closed around him was half empty before he drew his first breath. Not because anyone wronged him. Only because a scattered family keeps short time, and the old die before the young arrive, and the hands that should have passed him down the line were not there to take him.

What I grieve is wider and older than anything I chose. It is the joy that should have been moving through this whole bloodline for a hundred years and was not, because somewhere back along the line my people decided that being right, or being paid, or being free of one another was worth more than staying welded. The Family Proclamation is not only a shield against tragedy. It is a multiplier of joy. A family that keeps the cord does not just avoid catastrophe. It accumulates gladness, generation laid upon generation, until there is so much of it that it spills over onto people who did nothing to earn it, the way it was always meant to. That is the inheritance whose outline I can see and never quite touch. Not a disaster that befell us. A fullness that never got to. The cut cord does not only bleed. It also fails to bloom.

I think now about that lawyer in Los Angeles, and the document framed on his wall, and the young man I was who could not read it. I understand at last what he was trying to hand me. He was not pointing at a greeting card. He was pointing at the floor plan of eternity, hung quietly between the diplomas, and he knew, the way only a man who spends his life among grieving families can know, that it was the one thing that answered the wound beneath all the other wounds.

And I think about my own house. The people whose world is in my hands now. I think about the old dread that still climbs onto my chest some nights and asks whether I will keep the cord or cut it, and I think the doctrine has finally handed me the only answer strong enough to live inside. I will keep it, because it was never mine to cut. It runs through me, but it does not begin in me and it does not end in me. It runs back through my grandparents and their silence, back past North Carolina and into the dark, and it runs forward through my children into a glory whose far edge I will not live to see. I am one link. The chain is not mine to break.

Because the doctrine tells me, quietly, scandalously, against everything the world is certain of about death, that not one of them is finally lost. Not my grandparents. Not my aunt. Not my cousin. Not the children, his or mine. Not the faces in North Carolina I will only meet on the far side. The branch is not dead. It is dark, and the dark is not the same thing as gone. The cord was not severed. It was only, and I keep coming back to this word, interrupted. The door did not close. It only opened. And everyone I have loved and lost, and everyone I have never met and was always meant to know, is at this very moment on the other side of a wall thinner than a single breath, in the next room, waiting. Not for the meeting of strangers. For the resumption of a conversation that was never finished. Only paused.

One day the door will open one last time, and let me in.

That is what the document on the wall was trying to tell me all those years ago, when I was too young and too unbroken to hear it. The heavens are not closed. They were never closed. And the family, mine and yours and the whole scattered human one, is not lost forever. It is being gathered. Link by link. Into the one cord that even death cannot break.