Here is a doctrinal discussion continuing on from our Lewis Family Camp theme:
God, Heaven, and Families
(compiled from Terryl and Fiona Givens, “The God Who Weeps” and “The Christ Who Heals”)
...[T]he apostle Peter recognized [that] the “precious and very great promises” given to us are that we “may become participants in the divine nature.”
What is the nature many of us seek to emulate? What do we mean by this imitation of Christ? As we saw in Enoch’s encounter with God, the principle attribute of the Divine is love– costly love. Witnessing God weeping over His children is only half the journey Enoch makes. What transpires next to the prophet may be the only– it is surely the most vivid– example given in scripture of what the actual process of acquiring the divine nature requires...
As Enoch plumbs the mystery of the weeping God, he learns just what it means to be like Him. Seeking insight and understanding into external things, Enoch is raised to a perspective from which he sees the world through God’s eyes. The experience is more shattering than reassuring. “And it came to pass that the Lord spake unto Enoch, and told Enoch all the doings of the children of men; wherefore Enoch knew, and looked upon their wickedness, and their misery, and wept and stretched forth his arms, and his heart swelled wide as eternity; and his bowels yearned; and all eternity shook.” (Moses 7:41)
Taught of the highest things by the weeping God, Enoch becomes the weeping prophet. His experience of the love that is indiscriminate in its reach and vulnerable in its consequences takes him to the heart of the divine nature. This is the mystery of godliness that Enoch does not just see, but now lives for himself.
Enoch’s encounter with God, his vicarious experience of infinite love, serves as a template for the path he– and all of us– hope to follow. That this path has as its end a communal heaven, and not a solitary salvation, is clear by the vision’s end...
At the last day, the ultimate consolation, and the shape of heaven, are revealed. God’s righteousness will “sweep the earth as with a flood, to gather out” those who will have Him to be their God. Then, the Lord days to Enoch, “thou and all thy city [shall] meet them there, and we will receive them into our bosom, and they shall see us, and we will fall upon their necks, and they shall fall upon our necks, and we will kiss each other; And there shall be mine abode, and it shall be Zion.”
The beauty and power of this image is in its concreteness. God and His people, the living and the departed, heaven and earth, embrace. The immense distance between the spiritual and the mundane collapses, and we find holiness in the ordinary. Luke’s tale of the prodigal son turns out to be not symbolic foreshadowing, but literal foretaste, of a great reunion. As the evangelist told the story, when the son “was a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.”
In Enoch’s version, heaven shocks by its familiarity. God, is would appear, is first and foremost a relational Being, and the heaven toward which we aspire consists of loving relationships that are eternal. God’s title as Father is universally acknowledged throughout the Judeo-Christian traditions, but how that title is understood varies widely. We find an understanding that moves in the direction of a literal, familial relationship is more reasonable than one that emphasizes the metaphorical or figurative. (Weeps, pp.105-106)
...Heaven is not a reward for merit or a repair of Adam’s catastrophe; it is an eternal sociality of celestial beings, existing, striving, and creatively engaging in loving relation. [The] Atonement is primarily about healing the pains and strains of injured relationships incurred en route to that destination, fractures among ourselves as humans and with those gentle Parents patiently working to improve and guide us. The perfect harmony and synergy of a collaborative Godhead is not just a model for our own relationships, but a healing enterprise in which we are invited to participate, to collaborate. (Heals, p.74)
...[Regarding the death of his brother Alvin, Joseph stated] “It has been hard for me to live on earth and see [him] taken from us...” Joseph refused to believe that we could ever be comforted, in this world or the world to come, separate and apart from those we love. When the principle of baptism for the dead was revealed to him, the great significance he found in the revelation was not the fact that our ancestors could be saved, but that they could be saved with us. That was the whole point of Malachi’s prophecy, as Joseph taught a few months before his death: temples, priesthood, ordinances– they all existed in order that relatives “may Come forth in the first resurrection & be exalted to thrones of glory with us, & here is the chain that binds the hearts of the Fathers to the Children, and the Children to the Fathers which fulfills the mission of Elijah.” The revealed practice of evangelizing and baptizing the dead and performing their temple ordinances erases the dominion of hell over all of the earth’s unbaptized dead. It bridges a gulf that had separated millions of believing Christians from the their forbears as well as from the divine family.
The promise made by the Savior is one of unimaginable joy–perfect, untainted, unqualified joy: “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain.” But if God shall wipe away all tears, he can only do so by triumphing over the cause of those tears, which is death’s severing of our most intimate family ties and connections. Any joy we savor in the absence of our loved ones is a partial joy, a fractured joy. Heaven apart from those we love is just hell by another name. Joseph said as much: “let me be resurrected with the saints, “ he said to his people in Nauvoo, “whether I ascend to heaven, or descend to hell, or go to any other place.”
...We believe in a real, literal heaven, and that families (and the whole web of kin and friends Joseph called “sociality”) can continue forever. Heaven is not a place we enjoy with other people; heaven is eternal companionship with other people...” (Heals, pp. 105-107)
When God created man and woman, He brought them together. That a man should cling to his wife and she to him, on the way to becoming "one flesh," was a pattern and order He estab1ished while they were still in paradise. It was not a compensating comfort for their passage through a fallen world, but a sacramental union established in paradise, and anticipating no end. Marriage is a heavenly order, modeled on a divine template– a relationship that may be sealed on earth, in order to be "bound in heaven." "Divine families encircled by his fire and light are the very essence of life and eternal life; without them this earth– indeed this cosmos– will have missed the measure of its creation." (Weeps, p. 107, quoting Truman Madsen)
What God envisions for us, what His Son prayed most earnestly for toward the end of His life, was for us to achieve the harmony He shares with His Father. In essence, we are invited to participate in the heavenly family of God Himself. Not through metaphorical melding, but through the studied arduous practice of a holy life that prepares us to love as he does. [Orson] Pratt wrote that “our natural affections. . . are the main-springs of life and happiness– they are the cement of all virtues and heavenly society. . .From this union of affection, spring all the other relationships, social joys and affections, diffused through every branch of human existence. Man was designed for a social being.” (Weeps, pp. 107-108)
We pass through birth and death as individuals. But the years in between are filled with the unceasing search for community, for companionship, for intimacy. ...love is most essentially a term that address the complex forms of connection we make to other beings, and ... those connections are so various and layered that the Greeks needed at least four words to capture what we reduce to one amorphous catchall... Affection, friendship, romance, and charity (storge, philia, eros, and agape) dominate our social existence, revealing our lives to be an ongoing, comprehensive effort to find and secure relationships and connections on every conceivable level.
Relationships are the core of our existence because they are the core of God’s, and we are in his image. God’s nature and life are the simple extension of that which is most elemental, and most worthwhile, about our life here on earth. However rapturous or imperfect, fulsome or shattered, our knowledge of love has been, we sense it is the very basis and purpose for our existence. It is a belonging that we crave because it is one that we have always known.
Embracing the ancient connection that binds mortals to God restores to us a glorious beginning and portends a glorious future. It affirms that we are of divine parentage, with a home in the heavens... This sense of identity makes our search for the divine nature an act of filial love and emulation... It means that “nothing is going to startle us more when we pass through the veil to the other side that to realize how well we know our Father and how familiar His face is to us.” (Ezra Taft Benson paraphrasing Brigham Young in 1977 talk)
...[T]he emphasis on a heaven that recovers and extends relationships forged in this life and before, gives meaning and focus to our life in the here and now.... (Weeps, pp. 109-111)
...Enoch’s vision is particularly instructive. It makes heaven and the process of building it, continuous with the best– but also most taxing– elements of the present...
In the vision of Enoch, God gave the name of Zion to his abode. And Zion, he told Enoch, was where the earthly and heavenly societies meet, where “we will fall upon their necks, and they shall fall upon our necks.” This vision of heaven as he convergence of two societies, an earthly and a heavenly, is a beautiful template for the work we face as humans: fitting ourselves, our families, our communities, to be participants in a celestial society. What this means is that our present relationships are both the laboratory in which we labor to perfect ourselves and the source of that enjoyment that will constitute our true heaven.
What we call the virtues are precisely those attributes of character that best suit us to live harmoniously, even joyfully, in society. Kindness only exists when there is someone to whom we show forth kindness. Patience is only manifest when another calls it forth. So it is with mercy, generosity, and self-control. What we may have thought was our private pathway to salvation, was intended all along as a collaborative enterprise, though we often miss the point. The confusion if understandable, since our current generation’s preference of “spirituality” over “religion” is often a sleight of hand that confused true discipleship with self-absorption.
Holiness is found in how we treat others, not in how we contemplate the cosmos. As our experiences in marriage, families and friendship teach us, it takes relationships to provide the friction that wears down our rough edges and sanctifies us. And then, and only then, those relationships become the environment in which those perfected virtues are best enjoyed. We need those virtues not just here, but externally because “the same sociality that exists here, will exist there, only it will be coupled with celestial glory, which glory we do not now enjoy.” (Weeps, pp. 112-113)
What we are most certain of, is that “Our natural affections... are the cement of all virtuous and heavenly society.” Ultimately we understand God’s nature, and human salvation, to be the simple amplification of that which is most elemental, and most worthwhile, about our life here on earth. The divine nature of man, and the divine nature of God, are shown to be the same– they are rooted in the will to love, at the price of pain, but in the certainty of joy. Heaven holds out the promise of a belonging that is destined to extend and surpass any that we have ever known in this wounded world.
So we learn, and we love. What we have learned, and how we have loved, endure. Those are the two constants in our continuing existence. Weeps, pp. 117-118)
