What is the sealing ordinance all about?
Alita says:
What is the sealing ordinance all about? Does anyone really understand it? The fact that the church markets sealing as the highest possible ordinance is interesting, especially when there’s no “further light and knowledge” on what that means. It obviously doesn’t mean that those two people *will* be married forever, just that they *can*. So why bother to get married in the temple when people can do your work posthumously?
What level of unrighteousness is strong enough to break a seal? If two people aren’t “in love” anymore, is that enough? If one person drinks coffee and doesn’t renew his recommend, is that “enough to break a sealing?”
What is the purpose of sealing children to parents? It’s one thing to be born in the covenant, but when parents are sealed to children who are already born, what purpose does that serve?
It’s funny that sealing is considered such a high and sacred ordinance when anyone of legal marrying age who can pass the TR question can get sealed to someone they’ve only known for a week, if they want. That seems trivial to me.
The current post on another blog leads me to think that maybe it’s all just propoganda and manipulation. Desire to attend the temple or even to marry in the temple says NOTHING about a couple’s dedication to each other, willingness to marry, understanding of gospel principles, or anything else. It CAN, but it doesn’t always. In fact, it rarely does.
Not everyone’s route is the same, nor should it be.
People definitely will not be stuck together if they are not “in love” or if one is off the straight and narrow and one is not. Sure, people can lie their way through a temple recommend interview and through all the other Temple ceremonies, but they can do that for baptism and all the rest too, so that’s the same as anything. I have always seen the first and most important covenant as being baptism, and everything else is just more specific and more detailed. I mean, when you get baptised you are saying “I am going to follow in Jesus’ footsteps”, and what doesn’t that include? As for the whole sealing thing, I see that as sort of an eternal glue for families, its not just for married couples, its supposed to be a way of keeping your whole family, across generations, together in a family unit, so thats why our children are sealed to us. As for what undoes the whole sealing? There are so many ways to sin, who knows? An easy answer is just that someone stops repenting, or trying to repent. How bad does the sin have to be? No clue.
Comment by Ann Nonymous — July 13, 2005 @ 7:25 pm
Here’s why “it only works if you are in love” makes no sense whatsoever”–
1. Evey day in temples all over the world, couples are sealed by proxy without anyone’s knowledge of whether they even liked or loved each other, much less were”in love”. As long as hey were together (sometimes marriage records aren’t even important” and evidence of children can be found, these people are “sealed” in units. Are you trying to say that if these people accept the gospel on the other side–say a serf from the middle ages and some lord who raped her and fathered her children–they will be sealed forever because of the ordinance? If they’re not sealed because they’re not “in love”–what a COLOSSAL waste of time the sealing ordinances are. Many people all over the world don’t and will never have the cookie cutter family unit in this life, whether or not they married or had children. There are millions of married couples who are not, and never were, “in love” with their spouses. And of course there are inequities in feeling. What if one righteous, temple sealed spouse loves his wife and the wife is not crazy about him? What then? In fact, modern notions of courtship and being “in love” are just that–modern. To say that the two involved in the covenant must love each other equally is laughable. But I can see how you might want to try and make sense out of nonsense.
If a woman marries in the temple and is sealed, and can’t break that sealing after a civil divorce, yet marries a non-member (obviously outside of the temple) and they are in love until the day they die, she is still sealed to the first husband. Yet if it were a man in that situation, he could be sealed (and be in love with) as many people as he wanted.
Does that make sense?
Sealings are just manipulations to make people feel good about their hormonal promises and to bind them to the church and keep them as tithe-payers.
Comment by Lola — July 14, 2005 @ 4:11 pm
Welcome to Open Forum Lola. It’s ok to let your hair down here. So what do you really think?
Comment by Steve EM — July 14, 2005 @ 7:18 pm
And lets look at the sealing thing for ALL eternity: I understand the ‘requirement’ of sealing husband to wife (Godhood and all that). What is the ETERNAL purpose of being sealed to children and/or parents? Why did BY (and other early leaders) have other men sealed to him?
Comment by anon for now — July 15, 2005 @ 2:39 am
Lola, just because we perform proxy ordinances doesnt mean the people we perform them for accept them. The Church intends to perform a proxy ordinance for everyone who has ever lived. Is that, at least in part, a waste of time? Yes, because we dont know who will and who will not accept them. But, since we dont know, then we have no choice than to perform them for everyone, and whether they accept it or not is up to them.
Anon for now, the idea behind sealing is to forge family links in the eternal world. Just like everyone has a temporal geneology, everyone is to have an eternal geneology as well. The sealing isnt just man-woman as husband-wife, its intended to forge everyone into one big huge heavenly family unit.
Comment by Kurt — July 15, 2005 @ 12:05 pm
The sealing is, in large part, man-woman as husband-wife. If it’s not all that important, the Church should dispense with the restrictive year-wait if a worthy couple doesn’t marry in the temple first, and it should allow couples to marry outside of the temple and then be sealed any old time they want.
Sealing is bribery, plain and simple. It makes no sense to “seal” couples or even families we don’t even know about (i.e. their family situations, etc.) and expect them to live as family units after death.
Comment by Rita — July 20, 2005 @ 5:10 pm
I had a bishop who admits it is all propaganda. It’s a nice idea and a good way to get people interested in the church (and paying tithing) but doesn’t work in the end.
Comment by Mandy — July 21, 2005 @ 1:49 am
I think it’s really, really sad that some people agonize over not being sealed to their non-member or inactive spouse and even think less of them when it really doesn’t even mean anything anyway.
Now that the church is largely comprised of convetsand partmember families, it seems the “sealed”/BIC familiy is “elite” and the run-of-the-mill family is on the bottom rung of the LDS social ladder.
All for nothing! What a joke!
Comment by Mike Williams — July 24, 2005 @ 9:18 pm
I think that being sealed is a symbol of something that a couple can strive for, eternal union. The symbol says little about a couples present commitment or love, but a hope for what can be. Of course those two people have to continue to desire to be united for the symbol to mean anything. I find the sealing ceremony to be a beautiful way to start an eternal journey.
The problem I have with how we talk about sealings is that we say you have to have this ordinance in our temples in order to be together eternally. I do not believe this. I think any couple who makes a commitment and desires to stay together after death and continue a journey together can do so.
Comment by Ally — July 25, 2005 @ 5:48 am
I don’t have all the answers on this sealing stuff, but what is the sealing power Jesus gave to Peter if not what we LDS think it is? Perhaps the sealing power facilitates recognition in the spirit world and post resurrection. I assume our sprit body and the perfected resurrected body looks different than our earthly body.
Comment by Steve EM — July 25, 2005 @ 1:16 pm