After I've posted each section, I'll place the entire talk on the Mormon Culture page.
Marriage
I had loved before, but I knew not why. But now I loved--with a pureness--an intensity of elevated, exalted feeling... the wife of my bosom was an immortal eternal companion; a kind ministering angel, given to me as a comfort, and a crown of glory for ever and ever.
--Parley P. Pratt (1807-1857) on learning the concept of eternal marriage.
It is within families that truth is best learned, integrity cultivated, self-discipline is instilled, and love is matured. It is at home that we learn the values and standards by which we guide our lives. It is at home that we come to determine what we will stand for.
--Gorden B. Hinkly, Standing for Something (2000).
For the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband, else were your children unclean, but now are they holy.
--Doctrine and Covenants 74: 1
Marci truly saved my life. She is God's answer to a two-year long prayer that began with my cursing him that Thanksgiving night in El Paso, a prayer that basically said, "Okay God, my way hasn't worked and I can't go on anymore like this." Although it's hard for the intellectual mind to believe this, I truly believe I was miserable because I had drifted so far from where I was suppose to be by not praying regularly that I was not only emotionally and spiritually in a place I couldn't find her, but physically too. That voice that said, "Go home, start over," knew I couldn't find her at SUU while I lived in El Paso. Good stuff for movies right, but real life? Intellectually, at first it seems that you can't make it work. There are simply too many of us, too many independent wills--how can God direct my life without ruining someone else's life? After all, I'm sure I'm not the only one to have ever loved Marci? What about the others? Why me, not them? But even physics suggest time is relative. If God's time is not our time, even by using our rational minds, we can conclude that it is possible for each of us to still have independent wills and for God to still be a step ahead in order for him to provide us what we need, if we will but listen. After all, even as a mere mortal, I often know what my children need before they do, and I'm restricted by living in the same time as they do. Why is it so hard to believe that God, freed from the restrictions of time, cannot do the same for us, and that personal revelation is real, if we will but listen?
I'm not sure every marriage was meant to be. Obviously people can and do marry the wrong person. But I also know that marriage, if we'll work on it, does, as D & C, Section 74, literally have the power to to sanctify us, even when one spouse is not fully living the gospel. It is primarily in the home with those closest to us that we truly learn life's most important principle: love one another. It is in the home--that constant, close proximity--where we are truly tested, where in order to demonstrate our love we must give up our time, our money and our ego for the sake of others. It is in the home, we must learn to both carry and be carried, sanctify and be sanctified by another. Outside the home it's far too easy to profess love, even feel it generally, but never act on it. I love how John Lennon so honestly captures this. In, "I Don't Wanna Face It" he says, "You say you want to save humanity / it's people you just can't stand." Home is too tight a space to allow too great a disconnect between expressed anthems and action. To be successful in the home, we must live love. There simply is no way to evade the demands love and be successful in the home.
Perhaps, because of this, marriage and family is one key place where Mormonism varies significantly from other religions. Although almost all churches sustain and support the family structure, Mormonism is unique in that it believes the highest level of spirituality is reached only through the family. It takes one level of greatness to be Gandhi in society and an even greater of level of greatness to be Gandhi in the home. So, in our church, one does not give up family in order to reach the highest spiritual plain, as the Buddha did. Rather, family is the central unit of the church, of existence, and everything we do should be aligned with what is best for our family. We perfect ourselves as a unit, not as individual wills. Ideally, before we take that hunger fast to free India from Britain, we make sure our spouse and children agree to it. And if they don't support it, we don't do it, even if it is for the greater good. At first this may seem counter productive. What if Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. put the personal needs of their families before that of their nations? Where would we be?
I would flip that question around. Where would we be as a nation, as a world, if every home had a mother and father who applied the integrity of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. in their home? I would argue the Civil Rights Movement--in India, or America, or anywhere--would never have to even occur because a society that has true integrity in the home has integrity at large. And a society that has social inequities and injustices in society is teaching those erroneous ideas in the home. And yet in our society that is what we give up first on. As individuals, we struggle for decades to move forward in meaningfless careers and then step out of our marriage the moment it gets hard with little regard for our children, claiming we need space to grow spiritually. If your spiritual growth requires disregarding those who need you most, I think you need to seriously ask yourself if you are wanting growth or is it escape you seek?
Although I'm a Mormon, I'm a big fan of Buddhist philosophy and have found many of Buddha's teaching help me become a better person. And yet I've always had problems with Siddhartha's path to enlightenment. Perhaps the very real, but untold tale in the story of the Buddha (and numerous other soul-searchers) was the cold, sober realization that he left his wife and children in search of truth only to find that truth is found by sitting still, that wandering isn't freedom, but that freedom arises from the strength to stick with the mundane. Perhaps his brief moment of release was followed by the sober realization that he could have just as easily found enlightenment in his living room as under a tree. After all, it was his change in thinking, not the tree, that produced his release from suffering. How much greater would his reward have been to pass that teaching directly on to his children. If we want the most of what life has to offer, we will struggle to find ourselves within the walls of our homes first, which is why Doctrine and Covenants 74:1 emphasizes the hierarchy of marriage even over the gospel. Even in the case where one parent believes in the church and the other doesn't, that marriage should be honored. Once married, the highest level of spiritual growth simply cannot be obtained outside the walls of the home.
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