Of Souls, Symbols, and Sacraments
by Jeffrey R. Holland
Jeffrey R. Holland was president of Brigham Young University when this devotional
address was delivered on 12 January 1988 in the Marriott Center.
©1989 by Brigham Young University.
All rights reserved.
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This responsibility to speak to you never gets any easier for me. I think
it gets more difficult as the years go by. I grow a little older, the world
and its litany of problems get a little more complex, and your hopes and
dreams become evermore important to me the longer I am at BYU. Indeed, your
growth and happiness and development in the life you are now living and
in the life you will be living in the days and decades ahead are the central
and most compelling motivation in my daily professional life. I care very
much about you now and forever. Everything I know to do at BYU is being
done with an eye toward who and what you are, and who and what you can become.
The future of this world's history will be quite fully in your hands very
soon--at least your portion of it will be--and an education at an institution
sponsored and guided by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
is the greatest academic advantage I can imagine in preparation for such
a serious and significant responsibility.
But that future, at least any qualitative aspect of it, must be vigorously
fought for. It won't "just happen" to your advantage. Someone
said once that the future is waiting to be seized, and if we do not grasp
it firmly, then other hands, more determined and bloody than our own, will
wrench it from us and follow a different course.
It is with an eye to that future--your future--and an awareness of this
immense sense of responsibility I feel for you, that I approach this annual
midyear devotional message. I always need the help and sustaining Spirit
of the Lord to succeed at such times, but I especially feel the need for
that spiritual help today.
Human Intimacy
My topic is that of human intimacy, a topic as sacred as any I know and
more sacred than anything I have ever addressed from this podium. If I am
not careful and you are not supportive, this subject can slide quickly from
the sacred into the merely sensational, and I would be devastated if that
happened. It would be better not to address the topic at all than to damage
it with casualness or carelessness. Indeed, it is against such casualness
and carelessness that I wish to speak. So I ask for your faith and your
prayers and your respect.
You may feel this is a topic you hear addressed too frequently at this time
in your life, but given the world in which we live, you may not be hearing
it enough. All of the prophets, past and present, have spoken on it, and
President Benson himself addressed this very subject in his annual message
to this student body last fall.
I am thrilled that most of you are doing wonderfully well in the matter
of personal purity. There isn't as worthy and faithful a group of university
students anywhere else on the face of the earth. You are an inspiration
to me. I acknowledge your devotion to the gospel and applaud it. Like Jacob
of old, I would prefer for the sake of the innocent not to need to discuss
such topics. But a few of you are not doing so well, and much of the world
around us is not doing well at all.
The national press recently noted,
In America 3,000 adolescents become pregnant each day. A million a year.
Four out of five are unmarried. More than half get abortions. "Babies
having babies."[Babies] killing [babies]. ["What's
Gone Wrong with Teen Sex," People,13 April 1987, p. 111]
That same national poll indicated nearly 60 percent of high school students
in "mainstream" America had lost their virginity, and 80 percent
of college students had. The Wall Street Journal (hardly in a class
with the National Enquirer) recently wrote,
AIDS [appears to be reaching] plague[like] proportions. Even now
it is claiming innocent victims: newborn babies and recipients of blood
transfusions. It is only a matter of time before it becomes widespread among
heterosexuals. . . .
AIDS should remind us that ours is a hostile world. . . . The more we pass
ourselves around, the larger the likelihood of our picking something up.
. . .
Whether on clinical or moral grounds, it seems clear that promiscuity has
its price. [Wall Street Journal, 21 May 1987, p. 28]
Of course, more widespread in our society than the indulgence of personal
sexual activity are the printed and photographed descriptions of those who
do. Of that lustful environment a contemporary observer says,
We live in an age in which voyeurism is no longer the side line of the solitary
deviate, but rather a national pastime, fully institutionalized and [circularized]
in the mass media. [William F. May, quoted by Henry Fairlie, The
Seven Deadly Sins Today (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,
1978), p. 178]
In fact, the rise of civilization seems, ironically enough, to have made
actual or fantasized promiscuity a greater, not a lesser, problem. Edward
Gibbon, the distinguished British historian of the eighteenth century who
wrote one of the most intimidating works of history in our language (The
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire), said simply,
Although the progress of civilisation has undoubtedly contributed to
assuage the fiercer passions of human nature, it seems to have been less
favourable to the virtue of chastity. . . . The refinements of life
[seem to] corrupt, [even as] they polish the [relationship]
of the sexes. [Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire, vol. 40 of Great Books of the Western World, 1952, p.
92]
I do not wish us to spend this hour documenting social problems nor wringing
our hands over the dangers that such outside influences may hold for us.
As serious as such contemporary realities are, I wish to discuss this topic
in quite a different way, discuss it specifically for Latter-day Saints--primarily
young, unmarried Latter-day Saints, even those attending Brigham Young University.
So I conspicuously set aside the horrors of AIDS and national statistics
on illegitimate pregnancies and speak rather to a gospel-based view of personal
purity.
Indeed, I wish to do something even a bit more difficult than listing the
do's and don'ts of personal purity. I wish to speak, to the best of my ability,
on why we should be clean, on why moral discipline is such
a significant matter in God's eyes. I know that may sound presumptuous,
but a philosopher once said, tell me sufficiently why a thing should be
done, and I will move heaven and earth to do it. Hoping you will feel the
same way as he and fully recognizing my limitations, I wish to try to give
at least a partial answer to "Why be morally clean?" I will need
first to pose briefly what I see as the doctrinal seriousness of the matter
before then offering just three reasons for such seriousness.
The Significance and Sanctity
May I begin with half of a nine-line poem by Robert Frost. (The other half
is worth a sermon also, but it will have to wait for another day.) Here
are the first four lines of Frost's "Fire and Ice."
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
A second, less poetic but more specific opinion is offered by the writer
of Proverbs:
Can a man take fire in his bosom, and his clothes not be burned?
Can one go upon hot coals, and his feet not be burned? . . .
But whoso committeth adultery with a woman lacketh understanding: he that
doeth it destroyeth his own soul.
A wound and dishonour shall he get; and his reproach shall not be wiped
away. [Proverbs 6:27-33]
In getting at the doctrinal seriousness, why is this matter of sexual relationships
so severe that fire is almost always the metaphor, with passion pictured
vividly in flames? What is there in the potentially hurtful heat of this
that leaves one's soul--or perhaps the whole world, according to Frost--destroyed,
if that flame is left unchecked and those passions unrestrained? What is
there in all of this that prompts Alma to warn his son Corianton that sexual
transgression is "an abomination in the sight of the Lord; yea, most
abominable above all sins save it be the shedding of innocent blood
or denying the Holy Ghost" (Alma 39:5; emphasis added)?
Setting aside sins against the Holy Ghost for a moment as a special category
unto themselves, it is LDS doctrine that sexual transgression is second
only to murder in the Lord's list of life's most serious sins. By assigning
such rank to a physical appetite so conspicuously evident in all of us,
what is God trying to tell us about its place in his plan for all men and
women in mortality? I submit to you he is doing precisely that--commenting
about the very plan of life itself. Clearly God's greatest concerns regarding
mortality are how one gets into this world and how one gets out of it. These
two most important issues in our very personal and carefully supervised
progress are the two issues that he as our Creator and Father and Guide
wishes most to reserve to himself. These are the two matters that he has
repeatedly told us he wants us never to take illegally, illicitly, unfaithfully,
without sanction.
As for the taking of life, we are generally quite responsible. Most
people, it seems to me, readily sense the sanctity of life and as a rule
do not run up to friends, put a loaded revolver to their heads, and cavalierly
pull the trigger. Furthermore, when there is a click of the hammer rather
than an explosion of lead, and a possible tragedy seems to have been averted,
no one in such a circumstance would be so stupid as to sigh, "Oh, good.
I didn't go all the way."
No, "all the way" or not, the insanity of such action with fatal
powder and steel is obvious on the face of it. Such a person running about
this campus with an arsenal of loaded handguns or military weaponry aimed
at fellow students would be apprehended, prosecuted, and institutionalized
if in fact such a lunatic would not himself have been killed in all the
pandemonium. After such a fictitious moment of horror on this campus (and
you are too young to remember my college years when the sniper wasn't
fictitious, killing twelve of his fellow students at the University of Texas),
we would undoubtedly sit in our dorms or classrooms with terror on our minds
for many months to come, wondering how such a thing could possibly happen--especially
here at BYU.
No, fortunately, in the case of how life is taken, I think we seem to be
quite responsible. The seriousness of that does not often have to be spelled
out, and not many sermons need to be devoted to it.
But in the significance and sanctity of giving life, some of us are not
so responsible, and in the larger world swirling around us we find near
criminal irresponsibility. What would in the case of taking life bring absolute
horror and demand grim justice, in the case of giving life brings dirty
jokes and four-letter lyrics and crass carnality on the silver screen, home-owned
or downtown.
Is such moral turpitude so wrong? That question has always been asked, usually
by the guilty. "Such is the way of an adulterous woman; she eateth,
and wipeth her mouth, and saith, I have done no wickedness" (Proverbs
30:20). No murder here. Well, maybe not. But sexual transgression? "He
that doeth it destroyeth his own soul." Sounds near fatal to me.
So much for the doctrinal seriousness. Now, with a desire to prevent such
painful moments, to avoid what Alma called the "inexpressible horror"
of standing in the presence of God unworthily, and to permit the intimacy
it is your right and privilege and delight to enjoy in marriage to be untainted
by such crushing remorse and guilt--I wish to give those three reasons I
mentioned earlier as to why I believe this is an issue of such magnitude
and consequence.
The Doctrine of the Soul
First, we simply must understand the revealed, restored Latter-day Saint
doctrine of the soul, and the high and inextricable part the body plays
in that doctrine. One of the "plain and precious" truths restored
to this dispensation is that "the spirit and the body are the
soul of man" (D&C88:15; emphasis added) and that when the spirit
and body are separated, men and women "cannot receive a fulness of
joy" (D&C93:34). Certainly that suggests something of the reason
why obtaining a body is so fundamentally important to the plan of salvation
in the first place, why sin of any kind is such a serious matter (namely
because its automatic consequence is death, the separation of the spirit
from the body and the separation of the spirit and the body from God), and
why the resurrection of the body is so central to the great abiding and
eternal triumph of Christ's atonement. We do not have to be a herd of demonically
possessed swine charging down the Gadarene slopes toward the sea to understand
that a body is the great prize of mortal life, and that even a pig's
will do for those frenzied spirits that rebelled, and to this day remain
dispossessed, in their first, unembodied estate.
May I quote a 1913 sermon by Elder James E. Talmage on this doctrinal point:
We have been taught . . . to look upon these bodies of ours as gifts
from God. We Latter-day Saints do not regard the body as something to be
condemned, something to be abhorred. . . . We regard [the body] as the sign
of our royal birthright. . . . We recognize . . . that those who kept not
their first estate . . . were denied that inestimable blessing. . . . We
believe that these bodies . . . may be made, in very truth, the temple of
the Holy Ghost. . . .
It is peculiar to the theology of the Latter-day Saints that we regard the
body as an essential part of the soul. Read your dictionaries, the lexicons,
and encyclopedias, and you will find that nowhere [in Christianity], outside
of the Church of Jesus Christ, is the solemn and eternal truth taught that
the soul of man is the body and the spirit combined. [CR, October
1913, p. 117]
So partly in answer to why such seriousness, we answer that one toying
with the God-given--and satanically coveted--body of another, toys with
the very soul of that individual, toys with the central purpose and product
of life, "the very key" to life, as Elder Boyd K. Packer once
called it. In trivializing the soul of another (please include the word
body there), we trivialize the Atonement that saved that soul and
guaranteed its continued existence. And when one toys with the Son of Righteousness,
the Day Star himself, one toys with white heat and a flame hotter and holier
than the noonday sun. You cannot do so and not be burned. You cannot with
impunity "crucify Christ afresh" (see Hebrews 6:6). Exploitation
of the body (please include the word soul there) is, in the last
analysis, an exploitation of him who is the Light and the Life of the world.
Perhaps here Paul's warning to the Corinthians takes on newer, higher meaning:
Now the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord; and the Lord for
the body. . . .
Know ye not that your bodies are the members of Christ? shall I then take
the members of Christ, and make them the members of an harlot? God forbid.
. . .
Flee fornication. . . . He that committeth fornication sinneth against his
own body. . . .
. . . Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is
in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?
For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body,
and in your spirit, which are God's. [1 Corinthians 6:13-20; emphasis
added]
Our soul is what's at stake here--our spirit and our body.
Paul understood that doctrine of the soul every bit as well as James E.
Talmage did, because it is gospel truth. The purchase price for our fullness
of joy--body and spirit eternally united--is the pure and innocent blood
of the Savior of this world. We cannot then say in ignorance or defiance,
"Well, it's my life," or worse yet, "It's my
body." It is not. "Ye are not your own," Paul said.
"Ye are bought with a price." So in answer to the question, "Why
does God care so much about sexual transgression?" it is partly because
of the precious gift offered by and through his Only Begotten Son to redeem
the souls--bodies and spirits--we too often share and abuse in cheap
and tawdry ways. Christ restored the very seeds of eternal lives (see D&C132:19,
24), and we desecrate them at our peril. The first key reason for personal
purity? Our very souls are involved and at stake.
A Symbol of Total Union
Second, may I suggest that human intimacy, that sacred, physical union ordained
of God for a married couple, deals with a symbol that demands special
sanctity. Such an act of love between a man and a woman is--or certainly
was ordained to be--a symbol of total union: union of their hearts, their
hopes, their lives, their love, their family, their future, their everything.
It is a symbol that we try to suggest in the temple with a word like seal.
The Prophet Joseph Smith once said we perhaps ought to render such a sacred
bond as "welding"--that those united in matrimony and eternal
families are "welded" together, inseparable if you will, to withstand
the temptations of the adversary and the afflictions of mortality. (See
D&C 128:18.)
But such a total, virtually unbreakable union, such an unyielding commitment
between a man and a woman, can only come with the proximity and permanence
afforded in a marriage covenant, with the union of all that they
possess--their very hearts and minds, all their days and all their dreams.
They work together, they cry together, they enjoy Brahms and Beethoven and
breakfast together, they sacrifice and save and live together for all the
abundance that such a totally intimate life provides such a couple. And
the external symbol of that union, the physical manifestation of what is
a far deeper spiritual and metaphysical bonding, is the physical blending
that is part of--indeed, a most beautiful and gratifying expression of--that
larger, more complete union of eternal purpose and promise.
As delicate as it is to mention in such a setting, I nevertheless trust
your maturity to understand that physiologically we are created as men and
women to fit together in such a union. In this ultimate physical expression
of one man and one woman they are as nearly and as literally "one"
as two separate physical bodies can ever be. It is in that act of ultimate
physical intimacy we most nearly fulfill the commandment of the Lord given
to Adam and Eve, living symbols for all married couples, when he invited
them to cleave unto one another only, and thus become "one flesh"
(Genesis 2:24).
Obviously, such a commandment to these two, the first husband and wife of
the human family, has unlimited implications--social, cultural, and religious
as well as physical--but that is exactly my point. As all couples
come to that moment of bonding in mortality, it is to be just such a complete
union. That commandment cannot be fulfilled, and that symbolism of "one
flesh" cannot be preserved, if we hastily and guiltily and surreptitiously
share intimacy in a darkened corner of a darkened hour, then just as hastily
and guiltily and surreptitiously retreat to our separate worlds--not to
eat or live or cry or laugh together, not to do the laundry and the dishes
and the homework, not to manage a budget and pay the bills and tend the
children and plan together for the future. No, we cannot do that until we
are truly one--united, bound, linked, tied, welded, sealed, married.
Can you see then the moral schizophrenia that comes from pretending we are
one, sharing the physical symbols and physical intimacy of
our union, but then fleeing, retreating, severing all such other aspects--and
symbols--of what was meant to be a total obligation, only to unite again
furtively some other night or, worse yet, furtively unite (and you can tell
how cynically I use that word) with some other partner who is no more bound
to us, no more one with us than the last was or than the one that will come
next week or next month or next year or anytime before the binding commitments
of marriage?
You must wait--you must wait until you can give everything, and you cannot
give everything until you are at least legally and, for Latter-day Saint
purposes, eternally pronounced as one. To give illicitly that which is not
yours to give (remember--"you are not your own") and to give only
part of that which cannot be followed with the gift of your whole heart
and your whole life and your whole self is its own form of emotional Russian
roulette. If you persist in sharing part without the whole, in pursuing
satisfaction devoid of symbolism, in giving parts and pieces and inflamed
fragments only, you run the terrible risk of such spiritual, psychic damage
that you may undermine both your physical intimacy and your wholehearted
devotion to a truer, later love. You may come to that moment of real
love, of total union, only to discover to your horror that what you
should have saved has been spent, and--mark my words--only God's grace can
recover that piecemeal dissipation of your virtue.
A good Latter-day Saint friend, Dr. Victor L. Brown, Jr., has written of
this issue:
Fragmentation enables its users to counterfeit intimacy. . . .
If we relate to each other in fragments, at best we miss full relationships.
At worst, we manipulate and exploit others for our gratification. Sexual
fragmentation can be particularly harmful because it gives powerful physiological
rewards which, though illusory, can temporarily persuade us to overlook
the serious deficits in the overall relationship. Two people may marry for
physical gratification and then discover that the illusion of union collapses
under the weight of intellectual, social, and spiritual incompatibilities.
. . .
Sexual fragmentation is particularly harmful because it is particularly
deceptive. The intense human intimacy that should be enjoyed in and symbolized
by sexual union is counterfeited by sensual episodes which suggest--but
cannot deliver--acceptance, understanding, and love. Such encounters mistake
the end for the means as lonely, desperate people seek a common denominator
which will permit the easiest, quickest gratification. [Victor L. Brown,
Jr., Human Intimacy: Illusion and Reality (Salt Lake City, Utah:
Parliament Publishers, 1981), pp. 5-6]
Listen to a far more biting observation by a non-Latter-day Saint regarding
such acts devoid of both the soul and symbolism we have been discussing.
He writes:
Our sexuality has been animalized, stripped of the intricacy of feeling
with which human beings have endowed it, leaving us to contemplate only
the act, and to fear our impotence in it. It is this animalization from
which the sexual manuals cannot escape, even when they try to do so, because
they are reflections of it. They might [as well] be textbooks for
veterinarians. [Fairlie, Seven Deadly Sins, p. 182]
In this matter of counterfeit intimacy and deceptive gratification, I express
particular caution to the men who hear this message. I have heard all my
life that it is the young woman who has to assume the responsibility for
controlling the limits of intimacy in courtship because a young man cannot.
What an unacceptable response to such a serious issue! What kind of man
is he, what priesthood or power or strength or self-control does this man
have that lets him develop in society, grow to the age of mature accountability,
perhaps even pursue a university education and prepare to affect the future
of colleagues and kingdoms and the course of the world, but yet does not
have the mental capacity or the moral will to say, "I will not do that
thing"? No, this sorry drugstore psychology would have us say, "He
just can't help himself. His glands have complete control over his life--his
mind, his will, his entire future."
To say that a young woman in such a relationship has to bear her responsibility
and that of the young man's too is the least fair assertion I can imagine.
In most instances if there is sexual transgression, I lay the burden squarely
on the shoulders of the young man--for our purposes probably a priesthood
bearer--and that's where I believe God intended responsibility to be. In
saying that I do not excuse young women who exercise no restraint and have
not the character or conviction to demand intimacy only in its rightful
role. I have had enough experience in Church callings to know that women
as well as men can be predatory. But I refuse to buy some young man's feigned
innocence who wants to sin and call it psychology.
Indeed, most tragically, it is the young woman who is most often the victim,
it is the young woman who most often suffers the greater pain, it is the
young woman who most often feels used and abused and terribly unclean. And
for that imposed uncleanliness a man will pay, as surely as the sun sets
and rivers run to the sea.
Note the prophet Jacob's straightforward language on this account in the
Book of Mormon. After a bold confrontation on the subject of sexual transgression
among the Nephites, he quotes Jehovah:
For behold, I, the Lord, have seen the sorrow, and heard the mourning
of the daughters of my people in the land. . . .
And I will not suffer, saith the Lord of Hosts, that the cries of the fair
daughters of this people . . . shall come up unto me against the
men of my people, saith the Lord of Hosts.
For they shall not lead away captive the daughters of my people because
of their tenderness, save I shall visit them with a sore curse, even unto
destruction. [Jacob 2:31-33; emphasis added]
Don't be deceived and don't be destroyed. Unless such fire is controlled,
your clothes and your future will be burned. And your world, short of painful
and perfect repentance, will go up in flames. I give that to you on good
word--I give it to you on God's word.
A HOLY SACRAMENT
That leads me to my last reason, a third effort to say why. After
soul and symbol, the word is sacrament, a term closely
related to the other two. Sexual intimacy is not only a symbolic union between
a man and a woman--the uniting of their very souls--but it is also symbolic
of a union between mortals and deity, between otherwise ordinary and fallible
humans uniting for a rare and special moment with God himself and all the
powers by which he gives life in this wide universe of ours.
In this latter sense, human intimacy is a sacrament, a very special kind
of symbol. For our purpose here today, a sacrament could be any one of a
number of gestures or acts or ordinances that unite us with God and his
limitless powers. We are imperfect and mortal; he is perfect and immortal.
But from time to time--indeed, as often as is possible and appropriate--we
find ways and go to places and create circumstances where we can unite symbolically
with him, and in so doing gain access to his power. Those special moments
of union with God are sacramental moments--such as kneeling at a marriage
altar, or blessing a newborn baby, or partaking of the emblems of the Lord's
supper. This latter ordinance is the one we in the Church have come to associate
most traditionally with the word sacrament, though it is technically
only one of many such moments when we formally take the hand of God and
feel his divine power.
These are moments when we quite literally unite our will with God's will,
our spirit with his spirit, where communion through the veil becomes very
real. At such moments we not only acknowledge his divinity, but we quite
literally take something of that divinity to ourselves. Such are the holy
sacraments.
Now, once again, I know of no one who would, for example, rush into the
middle of a sacramental service, grab the linen from the tables, throw the
bread the full length of the room, tip the water trays onto the floor, and
laughingly retreat from the building to await an opportunity to do the same
thing at another worship service the next Sunday. No one within the sound
of my voice would do that during one of the truly sacred moments of our
religious worship. Nor would anyone here violate any of the other sacramental
moments in our lives, those times when we consciously claim God's power
and by invitation stand with him in privilege and principality.
But I wish to stress with you this morning, as my third of three reasons
to be clean, that sexual union is also, in its own profound way, a very
real sacrament of the highest order, a union not only of a man and a woman
but very much the union of that man and woman with God. Indeed, if our definition
of sacrament is that act of claiming and sharing and exercising God's own
inestimable power, then I know of virtually no other divine privilege
so routinely given to us all--women or men, ordained or unordained, Latter-day
Saint or non-Latter-day Saint--than the miraculous and majestic power of
transmitting life, the unspeakable, unfathomable, unbroken power of procreation.
There are those special moments in your lives when the other, more formal
ordinances of the gospel--the sacraments, if you will--allow you to feel
the grace and grandeur of God's power. Many are one-time experiences (such
as our own confirmation or our own marriage), and some are repeatable (such
as administering to the sick or doing ordinance work for others in the temple).
But I know of nothing so earth-shatteringly powerful and yet so universally
and unstintingly given to us as the God-given power available in every one
of us from our early teen years on to create a human body, that wonder of
all wonders, a genetically and spiritually unique being never seen before
in the history of the world and never to be duplicated again in all the
ages of eternity--a child, your child--with eyes and ears and fingers and
toes and a future of unspeakable grandeur.
Imagine that, if you will. Veritable teenagers--and all of us for many decades
thereafter--carrying daily, hourly, minute-to-minute, virtually every waking
and sleeping moment of our lives, the power and the chemistry and the eternally
transmitted seeds of life to grant someone else her second estate, someone
else his next level of development in the divine plan of salvation. I submit
to you that no power, priesthood or otherwise, is given by God so universally
to so many with virtually no control over its use except self-control.
And I submit to you that you will never be more like God at any other
time in this life than when you are expressing that particular power.
Of all the titles he has chosen for himself, Father is the one he declares,
and Creation is his watchword--especially human creation, creation in his
image. His glory isn't a mountain, as stunning as mountains are. It isn't
in sea or sky or snow or sunrise, as beautiful as they all are. It isn't
in art or technology, be that a concerto or computer. No, his glory--and
his grief--is in his children. You and I, we are his prized possessions,
and we are the earthly evidence, however inadequate, of what he truly is.
Human life--that is the greatest of God's powers, the most mysterious and
magnificent chemistry of it all--and you and I have been given it, but under
the most serious and sacred of restrictions. You and I who can make neither
mountain nor moonlight, not one raindrop nor a single rose--yet we have
this greater gift in an absolutely unlimited way. And the only control placed
on us is self-control--self-control born of respect for the divine sacramental
power it is.
Surely God's trust in us to respect this future-forming gift is awesomely
staggering. We who may not be able to repair a bicycle nor assemble an average
jigsaw puzzle--yet with all our weaknesses and imperfections, we carry this
procreative power that makes us very much like God in at least one grand
and majestic way.
A SERIOUS MATTER
Souls. Symbols. Sacraments. Does any of this help you understand why human
intimacy is such a serious matter? Why it is so right and rewarding and
stunningly beautiful when it is within marriage and approved of God (not
just "good" but "very good," he declared to Adam
and Eve), and so blasphemously wrong--like unto murder--when it is outside
such a covenant? It is my understanding that we park and pet and sleep over
and sleep with at the peril of our very lives. Our penalty may not come
on the precise day of our transgression, but it comes surely and certainly
enough, and were it not for a merciful God and the treasured privilege of
personal repentance, far too many would even now be feeling that hellish
pain, which (like the passion we have been discussing) is also always
described in the metaphor of fire. Someday, somewhere, sometime the morally
unclean will, until they repent, pray like the rich man, wishing Lazarus
to "dip . . . his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented
in this flame" (Luke 16:24).
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
In closing, consider this from two students of civilization's long, instructive
story:
No one man [or woman], however brilliant or well-informed, can
come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge
and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the
wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of
history. A youth boiling with hormones will wonder why he should not give
full freedom to his sexual desires; and if he is unchecked by custom, morals,
or laws, he may ruin his life [or hers] before he matures sufficiently
to understand that sex is a river of fire that must be banked and cooled
by a hundred restraints if it is not to consume in chaos both the individual
and the group. [Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), pp. 35-36]
Or, in the more ecclesiastical words of James E. Talmage:
It has been declared in the solemn word of revelation, that the spirit
and the body constitute the soul of man; and, therefore, we should look
upon this body as something that shall endure in the resurrected state,
beyond the grave, something to be kept pure and holy. Be not afraid of soiling
its hands; be not afraid of scars that may come to it if won in earnest
effort, or [won] in honest fight, but beware of scars that disfigure,
that have come to you in places where you ought not have gone, that have
befallen you in unworthy undertakings [pursued where you ought not have
been]; beware of the wounds of battles in which you have been fighting
on the wrong side. [Talmage, CR, October 1913, p. 117]
I love you for wanting to be on the right side of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
I express my pride in and appreciation for your faithfulness. As I said
earlier, you are an absolute inspiration to me. I consider it the greatest
of all professional privileges to be associated with you at this university
at a time in your lives when you are finalizing what you believe and forging
what your future will be.
If some few of you are feeling the "scars . . . that have come to you
in places where you ought not have gone," I wish to extend to you the
special peace and promise available through the atoning sacrifice of the
Lord Jesus Christ. I testify of his love and of the restored gospel principles
and ordinances which make that love available to us with all their cleansing
and healing power. I testify of the power of these principles and ordinances,
including complete and redeeming repentance, which are only fully realized
in this the true and living church of the true and living God. That we may
"come unto Christ" for the fullness of soul and symbol and sacrament
he offers us, I pray in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.