Sabbath Devotional :: “More Love”
There is a lot of talk lately about polarization and tribalism. The danger of fracture and schism feels immediate and frightening. Yeats’ oft-cited lines ricochet in my head almost daily. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” But it turns out that Yeats’ poem, published in 1920, was voicing a timeless sentiment. Another of my favorite poems, John Donne’s Anatomy of the World voiced a similar lament in 1619:
And new philosophy calls all in doubt,
The element of fire is quite put out,
The sun is lost, and th’earth, and no man’s wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.
And freely men confess that this world’s spent,
When in the planets and the firmament
They seek so many new; they see that this
Is crumbled out again to his atomies.
‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,
All just supply, and all relation;
Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot,
For every man alone thinks he hath got
To be a phoenix, and that then can be
None of that kind, of which he is, but he.
Fracture and schism have always threatened human societies. If you have siblings or children or a spouse or parents or friends, you know how often human nature drives us apart, even as our deepest longings urge us toward reconciliation and belonging. Or, in the terms my physicist father would use, you can look around the world and see the way that *both* centrifugal and centripetal forces are acting on objects all the time — equilibrium is its own kind of miracle.
Human beings have tried to manage these forces in many ways — governments help us to live with each other in spite of the impulses that draw us apart and encourage our prosocial desires to care and to belong. In the West, the fundamental principle of governance is the establishment of a social contract — Hobbes and Locke, from whom most of American political theory is drawn, posited that people would be willing to give up part of their God-given right to self-determination to a central power in exchange for a promise of safety and the protection of property rights. Along with the social contract, we use market contracts to establish and regulate our economy.
Nowadays, lawyers generally speak of covenants and contracts more or less interchangeably, but there used to be a significant distinction between covenants and contracts. The earliest covenants we know about were diplomatic treaties establishing relationships between kings — usually between a greater king, called a suzerain, and a lesser king, or vassal. These covenants, like many legal documents today, followed a specific form: They open with a preamble, declaring the suzerain’s name and the elements of his greatness. Next, they describe the historical relationship between the suzerain and the vassal king, emphasizing the things the greater king has done to benefit the lesser one, and then they lay out the terms of the covenant, what each party will do for the other. Somewhat surprisingly, the parties are frequently enjoined to “love” each other — for instance, an Assyrian treaty from the 7th century BC says to the vassals, “You will love as yourselves Assurbanipal.”
There are several examples of such treaties, or elements of them, in the Old Testament. One especially good example is in Joshua 24, but once you start looking, you see the patterns in the books of Deuteronomy and Leviticus especially. A latter-day example is in Doctrine & Covenants Section 84, often called “the oath and covenant of the priesthood.”
For whoso is faithful unto the obtaining these two priesthoods of which I have spoken, and the magnifying their calling, are sanctified by the Spirit unto the renewing of their bodies.
They become the sons of Moses and of Aaron and the seed of Abraham, and the church and kingdom, and the elect of God.
. . . therefore all that my Father hath shall be given unto him.
Notice that this is the language of kinship, of loyalty and protection and inheritance, not simply a list of duties or mutual obligations.
When we talk about covenants like baptism, for instance, we tend to talk about them as though they are contracts, with each party promising to do certain things — we know the list from Primary and Sunday School. Everything about our post-Enlightenment experience as virtuous and self-reliant individualists trains us to read the familiar verses in Mosiah, in which Alma bids his followers to come into the fold of God, and to be called his people, to bear one another’s burdens and mourn together and give comfort to one another, as a contract — as though we could check off “mourn with those that mourn” on Monday, “comfort those that stand in need of comfort” on Tuesday, and put “stand as witness of God” at the top of our lists every day, and somehow fulfill our obligations. But of course we can’t. Those obligations are open-ended and infinite; the nature of the world is such that there will always be mourning and comforting to do, and our witness of God’s love will always be incomplete.
The older covenants tell us something important that it’s easy to miss if we think of covenants as contracts. Covenants don’t just prescribe actions, they describe a change in status — when a vassal swore allegiance to a suzerain, or a knight pledged fealty to his liege, they changed not just what they did, but who they were — they were now bound to the sovereign — they belonged to him.
I think it matters whether we think in terms of covenants or contracts because contracts define a particular kind of economy, a way of relating to each other and to the bounties of the earth, and covenants belong to a different kind of economy.
Here’s how Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi of Great Britain, put it:
In a contract, two or more people come together, each pursuing their self-interest, to make a mutually advantageous exchange. In a covenant, two or more people, each respecting the dignity and integrity of the other, come together in a bond of loyalty and trust to do together what neither can achieve alone. It isn’t an exchange; it’s a moral commitment. It is more like a marriage than a commercial transaction. Contracts are about interests; covenants are about identity. Contracts benefit; covenants transform. Contracts are about “Me” and “You”; covenants are about “Us.”
(https://rabbisacks.org/bond-loyalty-love-yitro-5778/, see also https://rabbisacks.org/promise-american-renewal/ for Rabbi Sacks’ application of this idea to American politics.)
Latter-day Saint theology is different from other Christian theologies in its seriousness about establishing the Saints as a covenant people — we emphasize our adoption into the house of Israel because we understand that God saves us collectively and not individually. God’s economy is not a collection of individuals making calculations about risk and benefit and entering agreements that will oblige God to parcel out blessings to them. God invites us into a different kind of community, into a world of abundance, where there is enough and to spare and love is infinite and free.
We choose to create this world when we enter and nurture covenantal relationships — not transactionally, not because of our similarity and comfort with one another, but because we all have entered a covenant of belonging. We are saved by the covenants that bind us to God and to each other as family — as kin — because it is only in a community of abundance — where we give all that we can and are free to ask without shame for all that we need — that we begin to understand the limitlessness of God’s love, what it means for grace to abound.
Kristine Haglund is the director of the faithful root for Mormon Women for Ethical Government.
