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Editor’s
note: This is chapter 20 of the book Covenant Hearts: Marriage and
the Joy of Human Love. Click here
to buy this book.
Having explored the personal covenants
between wives and husbands, we now look at “social covenants,”
the interests other people have in our marriages. Covenant marriage
especially includes our ties to that sacred circle we call our posterity
— our children and their children. It also includes our ties
to ancestors, extended families, and the larger community.
The doctrine of baptism illustrates
how our covenants with God also create covenants with other people.
Alma said,
As ye are desirous to come
into the fold of God, and to be called his people, and are willing
to bear one another’s burdens, that they may be light; yea,
and are willing to mourn with those that mourn; yea, and comfort
those that stand in need of comfort... if this be the desire of
your hearts, what have you against being baptized in the name
of the Lord, as a witness before him that ye have entered into
a covenant with him (Mosiah 18:8–10).
One new convert felt lonely and discouraged
because the members of her branch did not help bear her burdens
and comfort her. Then when she read Alma’s words more carefully
with the sister missionaries, they discovered together that he had
not promised that her membership in the Church guaranteed that other
members would comfort her; rather, her membership covenants asked
her to comfort them!
Once she saw that, she began reaching
out to her branch members, and as she served them, her loneliness
gradually disappeared.
We also see the idea that personal
covenants lead to community covenants in the doctrine of building
Zion. We come unto Christ individually, we work to become pure in
heart personally, but as we do, we and others who share those desires
join together to build Zion — the community where the pure
in heart dwell (D&C 97:21) and where the people are “of
one heart and one mind” and dwell “in righteousness”
together (Moses 7:18).
Marie and I were once in the grey-green
beauty of Belfast, Ireland. We noticed that many Irish women wore
an unusually styled and attractive wedding ring. They called it
the Claddagh Ring, named for a region near Galway where, at some
moment in unrecorded antiquity, the Claddagh wedding tradition began.
At the ring’s center is a heart with two hands holding it,
one on each side. A small crown rests on top of the heart.
We asked merchants in Belfast’s
jewelry stores about the meaning of the symbols. They weren’t
much help, saying such things as, “Oh, the heart is about
love, romance — that sort of thing.” Then we discovered
in a book on Irish wedding traditions that each part of the Claddagh
design was symbolic to those who created it.
Originally the ring was made of three
parts, and it involved three people. The bride carried her part
of the ring to the altar on her ring finger — a thin ring
supporting a central element, a heart, with a small hand holding
one side of the heart. This represented her hand in the gesture
of offering of her heart.
At the ceremony, the groom would place
on her finger a second ring strand, which carried another tiny hand
cupped to hold the other side of the heart. This represented the
joining of their two hearts, held now by two thin rings cupping
the heart on either side, one from each marriage partner.
Then a priest or state official would
complete the wedding by adding a third thin strand to the ring on
the bride’s finger. This strand placed a small crown on the
top of the heart — a symbol that God, the church, and the
community were parties to the wedding and had a stake in its future.
Thus the Claddagh Ring depicted marriage not just as a two-way promise
but as multiple covenants: those between the husband and wife, both
of them with God, and both of them with the community.
“Marriage,” said Wendell
Berry, is “not just a bond between two people but... a bond
between those two people and their forebears, their children, and
their neighbors.”1
Weddings are community events. People
don’t wait in line and bring gifts when people sign a business
contract. But the world over, people collectively celebrate weddings
— kinfolk, neighbors, and friends who often feel real emotion
about the event, because they sense that they somehow have a stake
in what the marriage means and how it goes.
Two Themes
This understanding of wedding bonds
suggests two themes about covenant marriage. One theme is that marriage
“joins” — it is a “welding together,”
to use Joseph Smith’s term (D&C 128:18) — a single
man and a single woman in a way that is too personal and too permanent
for a mere contract to accomplish. Only a sacred covenant can create
this awesome “joining.”
Thus do these two single souls “die”
into their new life, their new “union with one another as
a soul ‘dies’ into its union with God.”2 But from
this dying, as through a resurrection, a new sense of joined souls
comes forth in the fruit and the freedom of new family life, posterity,
and spiritual development.
The second theme is that the couple
speak their sacred vows not only to each other but in front of their
extended family and their community. Their bonds of belonging thus
commit them outwardly to society, forward to their future children,
and backward to their ancestors.
President Gordon B. Hinckley has felt
this joining of the generations in both his past and his future.
He told the students at BYU-Idaho:
As I sat in the temple the
other day looking at my great-grandchildren, a peculiar thing
happened... I suddenly realized that I stood midway, with three
generations with which I am familiar behind me and three generations
ahead of me.
My heart literally turned to
my fathers. My heart also turned to my posterity. I envisioned
a chain of the generations [that] goes back... into the distant
past... It now reaches for three generations beyond me. I pictured
that chain in my mind’s eye, to date unbroken and shining
and strong.”
He thought of a time when, as a boy
on his family farm, he tried to repair a chain that had snapped
when he attempted to remove a tree with a tractor. He installed
a repair link, “but it was never the same.” The repair
link “never quite fit... It was always a misfit. It never
looked right.” So President Hinckley urged the students to
“never do anything that would weaken the [generational] chain
of which you are a fundamental part.”
Reflecting on being in the temple,
he added, “All that I have of mind and body, of tissue and
limb and joint and brain, have come as an inheritance from those
who were before me. And all that my posterity have has passed through
me to them. I cannot afford to break that chain. My posterity cannot
afford to break that chain.”
Then he recalled the tragedy of King
David’s son Absalom, whose mistakes had “broken the
link of the chain of his generations.” Upon hearing of Absalom’s
death, his father uttered words that evoke how parents feel when
turning their hearts to their children: “O my son Absalom,
my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom,
my son, my son!” (2 Samuel 18:33).3
What is this deeply ingrained sense
of belonging that we feel for our ancestors and our posterity? It
is clearly at the very heart of our theology, our sense of who we
are and where we belong in eternity as well as time. This “welding
link” eternally draws the hearts of the children and the fathers
together. And the joining we call marriage is the indispensable
bond that lets the present weld together the past and the future.
Joseph said that Elijah “shall
turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of
the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with
a curse” (D&C 128:17, quoting Malachi 4:5-6). He also
said “the earth will be smitten with a curse unless there
is a welding link... between the fathers and the children.”
How important is this welding link?
So crucial that “we without them cannot be made perfect; neither
can they without us be made perfect.” Indeed, it is “necessary
in the ushering in of the dispensation of the fulness of times...
that a whole and complete and perfect union, and welding together
of dispensations... take place” (D&C 128:18).
Welding links and weddings —
links in a great human chain that tie the generations endlessly
together. Our understanding of this eternal chain of being gives
Latter-day Saints a timeless doctrinal perspective on our own family’s
past and future — and therefore a perspective on our marriages
— that modern minds simply can’t seem to comprehend.
Because we cherish our posterity, we
have a unique stake in the future. Many LDS parents have endured
the jibes of people who believe they’re overpopulating the
earth when they have more than one or two children. One LDS mother
was shopping one day with her five young sons trailing her grocery
cart like little ducklings behind a mother duck. A woman approached
her and asked, “Excuse me, are all those kids yours, or is
this a picnic?”
The mother replied, “Yes, they’re
all mine. And it’s no picnic.” The woman looked over
those five bright little faces once more, shook her head, and said,
“Give it up, honey. Give it up.”
Yet many developed countries today
face quite the opposite problem — an alarming “birth
dearth.” Women need to maintain a lifetime average of 2.1
births total fertility rate (TFR) to sustain a nation’s population.
The global TFR was 6.0 in 1972, but had plunged to 2.9 by 2004.4
The United Nations projects a growth in world population from the
current 5.1 billion people to about 7.7 billion by 2050; however,
all of that growth will occur in the nonindustrialized, developing
nations. Until then the developed world is likely to remain at its
current level of 1.2 billion people.5 Then, some estimates predict
a swift worldwide decline after the global population peaks in 2050.6
Many developed nations, especially
those in Europe and Asia, and even some still-developing countries
(including China) will suffer major population declines in the next
several decades.7 In Germany, to take a typical European example,
if the current TFR of 1.4 per woman continues, the national population
will “wither from 82 million [in 2004] to an astonishing 24
million by 2100.”8 Japan predicts that its population will
peak at 127 million in 2006 and then drop to 64 million by the century’s
end.9
This unprecedented tailspin is one
of Europe’s hottest current political issues, because it means
that future generations won’t have enough workers to fund
existing retirement and social care obligations. As one sociologist
put it, “Never in the last 650 years, since the time of the
Black Plague, have birth and fertility rates fallen so far, so fast,
so low, for so long, in so many places.”10
The trend appears to have multiple
causes—increased migration toward cities, divorce, abortion,
later average age of marriage, and contraception.11 Whatever the
specific factors, one German interior minister spoke more generally:
“To reject children is to reject life.”12
Former German political leader Kurt
Biedenkopf calls the demographic downturn a “migration away
from the future” caused by a self-oriented hostility toward
children. Because of it, “our grandchildren’s generation”
will say, “you should have made provision for [your future],
but you preferred to be consumers rather than bring children into
the world.”13
A New York Times writer added, “Unless
it can face up to and reverse its neglect of parenting, Europe’s
economic future is grim.”14
As one friend put it, “Our houses
are getting larger, while our families are getting smaller.”15
This pattern is especially ironic in Europe, where concern for preserving
the environment enjoys high cultural priority. Many Europeans seem
more concerned about their future trees than about their future
children — who are the only ones who can take care of the
future trees.
In a related trend, one Australian
official sees an increasing proportion of the population who need
care, such as the elderly, but a decreasing proportion who are willing
to provide that care. His research found that married people are
far more likely to care for the elderly than are unmarried cohabitants.
Something about being married turns one’s heart to an elderly
parent.16
I think of the Claddagh Ring. Children
to fathers. Welding links.
The LDS Church is not immune from today’s
population decline. Because of fewer children per family, the number
of LDS high school graduates and potential missionaries from North
America has recently begun to decline. Moreover, in a comparison
of active Scandinavian and Germanic Latter-day Saints between 1996
and 2003, the number of adults remained about the same, but the
number of Primary children declined in only seven years by nearly
30 percent.17
Today’s erosion of “intergenerational
solidarity” through depopulation reflects a shift in Western
society from a child-centered culture that values marriage toward
an adult-centered culture that gives priority to personal freedom.18
This creates a global culture of “the diminished child,”
in which adults feel less obligation to their posterity and the
future society. In return, young people feel less concerned about
what they may owe or want to give older generations.
Historian Allan Carlson believe such
factors as more working mothers, divorces, and illegitimate births
are symptoms, not causes, of the recent change in attitudes —
a “contest between vital faith that welcomes children and
a secular individualism that does not want them.” For him,
“the ‘population control campaign’ [like someone
with anorexia, probably] cannot stop, even though it has already
gained [its] original ‘zero-growth’ ambitions.”
When adults devalue children and family life, “even a stable
world population contains too many children.”19 Carlson concludes
that “too many educated people [today] really don’t
care that much any more about the future.”20
I heard that attitude expressed in
a recent conversation on a train in Europe, when an elderly but
able German businessman responded to the question, “What should
your country do about the current population decline?” Said
he, “I’ll be dead in a few years. That’s not my
problem.”
Not caring about the future touches
a doctrinal and personal nerve for me. I had believed modern culture
was losing its way about families, marriage, sex, and children primarily
because so many people no longer care about the past. They have
walked away from centuries of tradition and social taboos, casually
uprooting deeply planted moral fences without seriously asking why
those fences were put up in the first place. And I knew that the
doctrines of the Restoration gave us the world’s best understanding
of why those boundaries exist.
Now I see another dimension of our
doctrinal uniqueness. We understand, as no one else really does,
both the history and also the future about being married and having
children. Through the Restoration we know not only where family
life came from but where it has the potential — even the destiny
— to go. The spirit of family present that links our sense
of family past to our sense of family future is a marriage —
one in which the partners feel in their very bones the natural commitments
that run both up and down the eternal chain of ancestry and posterity
and also extend outward to their community.
Latter-day Saints care about the multigenerational
family because our doctrine so fully comprehends both the past and
the future, in which marriage is the knot that holds all our human
intersections together. Conversely, there is a clear connection
between not caring about the past and not caring about the future.
The same spirit that thoughtlessly
rejects traditional standards of marriage and sexual expression
will just as uncritically reject cultural standards of loyalty to
future generations. Those without the gospel don’t feel “wedded”
to either side of the intergenerational chain of which President
Hinckley and Joseph Smith taught. The “me generation”
has no idea about the eternal plan that gives the “we generation”
its perspective and its meaning.
Nearly two centuries ago, Alexis de
Tocqueville foresaw these risks in societies that focus so much
on the me and the now that they lose their sense of connection to
the past and the future:
They owe nothing to any man,
they expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of always
considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to
imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands.
[This makes] every man forget
his ancestors, [and] it hides his descendants and separates his
contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself
alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within
the solitude of his own heart.21
In contrast, the Family Proclamation
states, “Children are an heritage of the Lord,” and
“God’s commandment... to multiply and replenish the
earth remains in force.”22
As President Boyd K. Packer said, “Do
not be afraid to bring children into the world. We are under covenant
to provide physical bodies so that spirits may enter mortality (see
Genesis 1:28; Moses 2:28). Children are the future of the restored
Church.”23 And in his classic tribute to the Mormon pioneers,
President J. Reuben Clark Jr. reserved his greatest admiration for
mothers who bore children on the trail: “Who will dare to
say that angels did not cluster round and guard her and ease her
rude bed, for she had given another choice spirit its mortal body,
that it might work out its God-given destiny?”24
Latter-day Saints know more about family
history than does any other group. We also understand that the tie
between parents and children is the key to a future with meaning.
As long ago as Moses, the Lord said, “Honour thy father and
thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord
thy God giveth thee” (Exodus 20:12; italics added). So He
asks that we “seek diligently to turn the hearts of the children
to their fathers, and the hearts of the fathers to the children”
(D&C 98:16).
We stand clasping the past with one
hand and the future with the other. That perspective helps us desire
a marriage that succeeds “for the sake of the children”
— not only for the sake of the immediate children but as part
of building a multigenerational Zion wherever we live. Without such
an eternal, intergenerational “welding link,” neither
we nor our ancestors nor our posterity can be made perfect.
Nothing brings more light to a child’s
face than the sacred assurance that he can be together, forever,
with his family. Conversely, nothing tears at his heart more than
sensing that the much-promised family belonging may be slipping
from his grasp. We do not marry for ourselves alone. Our children
are entitled to expect that we live not only for our future but
for theirs.
Notes:
1. Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom and
Community, 125.
2. Ibid., 138.
3. Hinckley, quoted in “‘Continue Bright, Strong the
Links of Your Generations,’” 13.
4. Myer, Birth Dearth, 54, 56.
5. Fornos, “Population Crisis Still Looms,” 6.
6. Dyer, “Global Phenomenon Is Being Born with Disappearing
Babies,” A13.
7. Myer, Birth Dearth, 56–57.
8. Landler, “Western Europe Fears What It Needs,” 3.
9. Doi, “From Boom to Bust,” W1.
10. Ben Wattenberg, quoted in Neuhaus, “Where Have All the
Children Gone?” 59.
11. See sources cited in Myer, Birth Dearth, 59–63.
12. State interior minister Otto Schily, quoted in Berth and Schneider,
“Germans No Longer Want Children,” 1; translation by
the author.
13. Biedenkopf, “Panic Rules,” 24 Apr. 2004.
14. Bowring, “West Ignores Low Birthrates at Its Peril,”
6.
15. Conversation with Lindsay Dil of Auckland, New Zealand, about
30 Mar. 2004.
16. About 12 percent of the Australian population was over age sixty-five
in 1999. That figure will rise to 25 percent in fifty years. Of
present caregivers for the elderly, more than 70 percent are married;
2 percent are living in unmarried relationships. Gobbo, address
to Australian Regional Conference of World Congress of Families
II.
17. Unpublished data compiled by Europe Central Area Translation
Office shows a decline in active LDS children in Denmark, Finland,
Norway, Sweden, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland (German-speaking
stakes) from 5,581 to 4,113 between 1996 and 2003.
18. Carlson, “Depopulation,” 6.
19. Ibid., 8; italics omitted.
20. Conversation with Allan Carlson in Melbourne, Australia, 6 Aug.
1999.
21. De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2:105–6; see also
Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart, 37-39.
22. First Presidency and Council of the Twelve Apostles, “The
Family: A Proclamation to the World,” 102.
23. Packer, “Do Not Fear,” 79.
24. Clark, “To Them of the Last Wagon,” 10.
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