I am republishing this as a companion piece to Elisothel’s essay “The Mormon Priestess“. It was in the early stages of thinking about her observations of the temple which would ultimately led to that essay and our discussions about them that led us to write this post about our marriage. We felt this description about how each of us initially came to terms with our temple marriage in light of might be of interest to readers of “The Mormon Priestess”.
She Says
I have to confess an unrighteous desire.
Oh yes, I have displayed my ample share of snark online, and I can’t deny a certain mischievous penchant for pot-stirring here and there, but that is not the motive today. What I speak of is an actual thing – not a complaint, not an “issue”, but a hole in the sails I use to navigate the universe, a true burning coal in the brain which may burst to flame if ever it breathes oxygen, but which, though locked away, smolders still.
I do not comprehend the inception of this unrighteous desire being from the devil, or pride, or any unclean thing. Perhaps it is a thorn placed by divine commission, perhaps it is a cross I’m called to bear, but whatever it is, it is real. I swear I did not write this to offend you – the only disclaimer I can offer.
I can affirm my strong testimony concerning some things – especially those I long to believe fully, like eternal families, eternal love, eternal life, eternal progression. And though I haven’t figured out how, I do think there are ways to be faithful and happy without knowing all the answers to hard questions. Faith is a prerequisite for a spiritual life after all.
I take my temple marriage very seriously. I want to walk through the veil of mortality and into exaltation holding my husband’s hand. I do see our work as husband and wife and mother and father as the most important thing we do. These things sing to me and echo off the cliffs of Mount Zion.
But still, I wish, I deeply darkly wish, that I could marry my husband again in a fashion different from my temple wedding.
I did not always feel this way. The last time I went to the temple, which was about two years ago now, I was in spiritual turmoil and went there seeking either gospel answers or else the strength to bear my uncertainties. I was sitting in the Celestial room and for some reason found solace in the rainbows reflected on the walls from beveled glass. It was the only thing speaking to me that day. Then I heard the voice…
“Sister, would you have time to assist us with proxy sealings?”
As the eternal marriage doctrine is the thing that most makes me desire to salvage my testimony, I felt this a divine intervention, to invite me again to an altar to hear my sealing vows. I held out my cup, waiting for the Spirit to fill it unto brimming over.
As I knelt with a stranger and performed the proxy sealings, a change did come, but not the one I wanted.
I listened. Over and over, with each new sealing, I heard the promise I had once made, and it startled me. I heard the assent to my promise that my husband had made…and that he made no promise in return. The enormity of it hit me, that in the marriage ceremony, I gave myself away, literally, and my husband promised me nothing. He simply received me. He did not give himself to me, I did not accept him, I was “his” but he not “mine.” The world fell away, and I saw my reflection in those sealing room mirrors, scaling further and smaller until I could see it no more – eternitied into obscurity.
My mind flew back over the endowment. I charted the covenants I had made and the promises I had received… All the covenants were to God, and all the promises from Him. My husband and I had exchanged no vows to each other. I could think of other imbalances beyond the sealing room (not listed here) and wondered, having made all my vows to the Church, had I married this institution, and not my husband?
No promises to each other, no aspirations or intention, no declaration, no mutual giving and receiving, but instead a giving and a taking, a transaction, a legalism. A making of a “his” not a “we.” Not a covenant, not even a contract with agreement and recourse, but the signing over of a deed. I walked out of that sealing room a changed person, and I haven’t been back to the temple since.
After that Sealing Room Day, my perspective on my marriage….didn’t change much actually. I waited for it to change, but every spiritual fiber I tugged at would start to unravel me if I did. To live in my marriage, I had to subscribe to my original romantic, naive, modern vision of a union, a partnership, a friendship, a mutual endeavor. So what started to evolve was not my perspective on my marriage, but my perspective on the “temple” in my “temple marriage”. Is this temple marriage what I really wanted? Do the sealing words matter? Can I live my marriage any way I want irrespective of the ritual form? I mean, this is eternity we’re talking about.
It made me start to think about what I had thought LDS marriage was, and what I really wanted. What, that is, I really still want: that original version of marriage, enshrined in a ceremony reflecting its ideals. I envision a place of light and attainment, holiness close to God. Maybe there are vows, maybe not, but whatever is given is given both ways. Our loved ones look on – even my mother, who, as a nonmember, had not been present at the sealing on our wedding day. Most of all, I envision that it is a forging together of our divine souls. I want a Sealing – not an unconditional surrender. I want to receive my husband unto me in front of God Angels and Witnesses – I want two to become one: not just me to become his, but him and I to become “us”.
It’s not like I can just go out and arrange a new wedding. No, I don’t want to walk down an aisle, or write some vows to say in front of a justice of the peace, throw a ring exchange party for our anniversary, or to elope with my husband to Vegas. I want the real thing, as I have always wanted it, and what I thought I already had before I really listened to the words.
I’m trying to figure out how this is an unrighteous desire. I know it must be somehow – I’m afraid to write about it, but haven’t encountered it spoken of elsewhere. I feel that if I let go of this yearning, this one, most important thing, this family bonding upon which I base my will to cling to Mormonism, then I will become a hollow tree. Without hyperbole, if I must accept the temple sealing as it is – well, scooping out my mind and heart will be the price.
Is this what God really wants for me?
I suppose I’ll find out eventually. In the meantime, when I see the temple, and the Spirit seems to dim and flicker as I think of the sealing room, as I hold my husband knowing that in the eyes of God I am “his”, my last recourse is to pray – not to save me from my unrighteous desire, but to affirm that someday, my husband shall, as any child’s Valentine implores, “be mine.”
He Says
I don’t have the best of memories when it comes to life’s events. Even the apexes and nadirs of my mortal existence are pretty hazy when I look back on them. I confess this even includes our wedding day. Ours was a small wedding, squeezed in during the one week break between spring and summer semesters at BYU. We got married in a temple, Idaho Falls, that was far from home. Neither of us had stepped foot in it before the day of our wedding nor have had the opportunity to return since. I don’t remember a single thing our temple sealer, a man we didn’t know, said, though I was appreciative that he kept it brief. The temple wedding vows are surprisingly short and simple, much more so than a standard “in sickness and in health” liturgy. In sum, it feels like our wedding day flitted by in some far away place.
Maybe this is why I don’t recall noticing that day the asymmetry of the wedding vows. I do remember being vaguely bothered by the hearken covenant in the endowment ceremony when we went for my wife to take out her endowments. What must if feel like to covenant to your husband when he gets to covenent directly with God? Even at 21 and only one semester into college I was pretty sure that the problem lay rooted in historical inequalities, but I was content (in my privilege) with the idea that what God really meant was for the covenant to be equal even if that isn’t what the ceremony said. So I brushed it off to some compartment in the back of my mind. I was in love and about to get married after all.
Today I feel much differently about the asymmetry in our temple covenants. As we are becoming one this has not brought me solace or led me to believe that the nature of the promises does not matter. Rather, I have become to feel ever more sharply the indignity and wrongness of having my wife’s covenant with God through me. The difference in the covenant underscores not our oneness but our separation – a separation that hurtfully casts my wife and I in a hierarchy with me on top. The closer I have become to my wife through the give and take required in daily life, the clearer it becomes that we both must give and receive, fully and equally for our marriage to be eternal. Yet, the wording of the temple ceremony sadly refuses to sacralize not only my giving of myself to my wife, but her reception of my gift. I won’t lie, it stings, but not nearly as much as I imagine it hurts my wife. In my head, and most importantly in my heart, I have rewritten the ceremony to include the natural beauty of symmetry and I cling to the symbols in the wedding ceremony that are symmetrical – the grip of the hands binding us in Christ and standing side by side in front of the eternity mirrors. These things feel right and godly.
15 years ago I was in love with a girl I had known since I was 13. I had tried dating other girls at the Y when I returned from my mission. That lasted a week and I didn’t go on a single date. Still, I partially agree with Spencer W. Kimball. I don’t believe in a predestined, single “soulmate”. Liz wasn’t my one true soulmate all those years ago. However, I believe that we are today. I have come to see the sealing power as something that has the power to seal us both forward and backward in time as we chose to commit and keep those commitments to each other. Our past selves and our personal histories feel like they have merged together as we have helped each other shape those experiences to become who we are. Our interactions all those years ago in middle school and high school have taken on different meaning precisely because we have ended up bound together. The longer we are together the more fused our pasts continue to become. Our eternal marriage is writing not only writing our future but also rewriting our pasts. Because this is what I have come to believe I feel empowered to revise our temple ceremony in my head and in my heart.
So in response to my soulmate whose pain I share, I say let’s use our divine agency to straighten, at least in our own minds, that which is crooked. We all must choose what we believe. Lets choose to believe in an eternal covenant of love and partnership, of symmetry and equality. Even if I was not asked to say the words, know that in my heart I gave myself to you that day and prayed silently that you received me. To the extent we each feel hollowed out, the answer is to let our love for each other fill those empty spaces and continue to seal our souls forward and backward through time and eternity.
If I was to do it over again? I would want a ring ceremony that your family could have attended. Just you, me, and our parents. You in your wedding dress and me in a tux instead of suit (sorry about that). We would each write our own vows. They would have been sappy and awkward, but so very sincere. Then we would get married in the temple because like you I too want to believe in eternal marriage. Because of you this is even more true today than it was all those years ago. When I kissed you over the altar I would have whispered in your ear quietly, “I give myself to you” and I would hope that you would have whispered back that you “received me.” We would have held the grip and stood in front of the mirrors just a little longer united equally in that moment no matter what anyone else’s words said.
That moment is gone and continues to slowly evaporate from my memory. So I propose we renew it on our terms and in our own way. It will be you and I alone and someplace beautiful – a place we can make holy, our own personal temple. I am sure the vows I write will be awkward and sappy, but they will be from my heart which yearns for a true equal partnership. These vows will not replace but complement, not critique but amend, not break apart but continue to forge together our souls. We will use the power of our temple sealing and our own agency to reinterpret and merge our past experience into a shared eternity. Then maybe our souls will not sigh, but instead rejoice together.
[Postscriptum: In the current wedding ceremony the bride's covenant contains both the word "give" and "receive". So the remaining asymmetry is that the husband never "gives" himself. Thanks to the readers that pointed this out. We have left the post unchanged as we still feel the general point regarding asymmetry especially in the context of our own experiences remains valid. As detailed in the Mormon Priestess essay, the biggest asymmetry is in washing and anointing where the wife is declared "queen and priestess" to her husband instead of God, followed by Eve making all her covenants in the endowment to Adam her husband instead of God.]