Sabbath Devotional :: An Unbreakable and Everlasting Plexus of Love and Kinship

This past Thursday night, I sat in the Provo City Center Temple surrounded by loved ones as one of our son’s converts from his mission received his endowment. Devin, our son, served in the Leeds England Mission. As a Mandarin-speaking missionary he taught Chinese students almost exclusively. He had been in Newcastle-upon-Tyne for only one day when he and his companion approached a group of friends on the street. None of them seemed very interested in talking with the two Mormon missionaries, but my son managed to strike up a conversation with one young man named Lui Fangbo. Lui was a doctoral student in electrical engineering who happened to have a passion for American TV shows. So that’s what he and my son talked about. Before they parted, Devin got his contact information, and three months later, Lui was baptized.

In his emails home, Devin always described Lui as “my brother.” Lui was a fully committed convert and within a year was called to serve as Elder’s Quorum president in his ward in Newcastle. My son’s dearest hope was that he would be able to go through the temple with Lui before the end of his mission. Lui wasn’t quite ready to take that step though before Devin finished and returned home this past July. When Lui announced that he was coming to spend Christmas with us, we were all thrilled. Two weeks before his arrival, he contacted Devin with the news that he would be going through the temple while he was here and asked if Devin would be his escort.

And so there we all were on Thursday evening — Lui, Devin, Lui’s other missionary, Alex, our family, and Alex’s family. Another of Devin’s converts, a young woman named Zhou Jiamin who hasn’t been a member a full year yet, but who plans to come back next summer to receive her own endowment, was downstairs doing baptisms with a family friend.

It was a perfect evening. Soft snow was falling outside and inside all felt cozy and right. I looked across the room at one point and watched as Devin — tall, lanky, earnest, and attentive — helped Lui with the unfamiliar ceremonial clothing. In almost every way, the two are as dissimilar as they could possibly be, and yet they are, in very truth, brothers.

I’ve been reading Fiona and Terryl Givens’s book, The Christ Who Heals, and was struck by this passage:

“Christ presented himself as the costly offering through which the entire human family could thus be united in an immortal and eternal life with our Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother. Recognizing that a permanent binding together of the human family could occur, our Heavenly Parents clarified precepts and instituted ordinances, along with a mortal educative process, for the purpose of establishing and eternalizing an endless web of familial relationships.”

An endless web of familial relationships.

Through which the entire human family could be united.

And I realized with sudden clarity that The Plan, The New and Everlasting Covenant, all the saving ordinances, especially the crowning ordinance of sealing, aren’t just about binding together individual families, but the entire human family — all who are born into this world.

We see this everywhere in the temple — the symbolism of binding, of knitting, of interconnection. As Melissa Dalton-Bradford wrote so movingly in a previous Sabbath Devotional, even the crocheted cloths that lie across the altars of the temple speak of this: “I see [in these coverings] that our Christian covenant . . . is one of connectivity, companionship, co-mourning, and compassion. It is about being stitched together in love.”

This is what the temple is all about — sealing us all to each other and to God.

Which is somehow essential. We cannot be exalted without each other, living and dead.

It’s interesting to note that all the saving ordinances involve touch — baptism, receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost, ordination, all the temple ordinances. We apparently have to be physically connected in order for the divine alchemy of adoption into the divine family to occur.

I’m fascinated by the notion of “quantum entanglement” — a phenomenon that occurs when a pair of particles (photons, for example) interact physically. These particles then remain connected to the extent that actions performed on one affect the other, even when they are separated by great distances — lightyears, even.

“We are all connected,” writes Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson. “To each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe, atomically.”

The poetic beauty of this stirs me deeply — the image of the cosmic interconnectedness of all creation. It’s not just a pretty thought to say that we are all sisters and brothers. We really, truly are. And we are responsible for each other. Our goal, as lofty and impossible as it may seem, is to bind ourselves to each other and to God in an unbreakable and everlasting plexus of love and kinship.

“For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body. For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free. . . . That there should be no schism in the body; but that the members should have the same care one for another. And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it.” (1 Corinthians 12)

Devin and Lui, brothers. All of us, sisters, brothers — one eternal family, linked and sealed together through everlasting covenants and divine ordinances, all made possible through Jesus Christ, our Savior. Praise be to Him forever and ever.