Holland - Of Souls, Symbols, and Sacraments

http://emp.byui.edu/WARDD/honors221/articles/souls.htm


Of Souls, Symbols, and Sacraments
ELDER JEFFREY R. HOLLAND

Jeffrey R. Holland was president of BYU when this devotional address was delivered on 12
January 8 in the Marriott Center.

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 littler 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 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 the 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—and 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.
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]."1
That same national poll indicated that 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. ,,2
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."3
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."4
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 Latterday
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 6:27-28, 32-33.)
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, italics 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 illicit indulgence in 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 the BYU 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 I remember my
college years when the sniper wasn't fictitious, killing twelve of his fellow students at the
University of Texas), students would undoubtedly sit in dorms or classrooms with terror on their
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." That 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-with all this in mind 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 inseparable part the body plays in that doctrine. One of the "plain and precious"
troths restored to this dispensation is that "the spirit and the body are the soul of man" (D&C
88:15, italics added) and that when the spirit and body are separated, men and women "cannot
receive a fulness of joy" (D&C 93:34). 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, unless properly repented of, its automatic
consequence is spiritual death, the separation of the soul-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 included in 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, in their first,
unembodied estate, and to this day remain bodiless.
May I quote from a 3 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.5
So partly in answer to why such seriousness, we answer that one toying with the God-givenand
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 Eider 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, 15, 18-20, italics added.)
Our soul is what's at stake here-the spirit and the 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'smy 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-people too often share and abuse in cheap and tawdry ways. Christ restored the
very seeds of eternal lives (see D&C 132:19, 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 o[ 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 a[forded 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 mar-tied 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
exactlymy point. As all couples come to that moment of bonding in mortality, it is intended 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.6
Listen to a far more biting observation by a non-Latter-day Saint regarding such acts that are
devoid of both the soul and the 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."7
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 reigned 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 aman 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,
italics 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 ;upper. This latter ordinance is the one we in the Church have come o
associate most traditionally with the word sacrament, though it is technically only one of many
such moments when we formally take he hand of God and feel His d/vine power.
These are moments when we quite literally unite our will with God's will, our spirit with His
spirit, where communion through the 'ell becomes very close. At such moments we not only
acknowledge His divinity but we also 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, as my third of three reasons to be clean, that sexual union is also, in its
own profound way, a genuine sacrament of the highest order, a union not only of a man and a
woman but also 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 our lives when the other, more formal
ordinances of the gospel the sacraments, if you will-allow us to feel the grace and grandeur of
God's power. Many are one-time experiences (such as our own confirmation or our own
marriage ceremony), 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 thereaftercarrying
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 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 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 watch-wordespecially
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 a 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.
Consider the following passages 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.8
Or, in the more ecclesiastical words of Elder 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.9
-
I love you for wanting to be on the right side of the gospel of Jesus Christ. 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. He loves us, and the principles and ordinances of the restored gospel make
that love available to us with all their cleansing and healing power. The power of these principles
and ordinances, including complete and redeeming repentance, are fully realized only in this true
and living church of the true and living God. May we "come unto Christ" for the fullness of soul
and symbol and sacrament He offers us. tance, are fully realized only in this true and living
church of the true and living God. May we "come unto Christ" for the fullness of soul and
symbol and sacrament He offers us.
1., "What's Gone Wrong with Teen Sex?" People, 13 April 7, p. 111. ~
2., Wall Street Journal, 21 May 7, p. 28. ~
3., William F. May, quoted by Henry Fairlie, The Seven Deadly Sins Today (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 8), p. 178. ~
4., Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 40 of Great Books of
the Western World, 2, p. 92. ~
5., James E. Talmage, Conference Report, October 3, p. 117. ~
6., Victor L. Brown, Jr., Human Intimacy: Illusion and Reality (Salt Lake City: Parliament
Publishers, 1), pp. 5-6. ~
7., Henry Fairlie, The Seven Deadly Sins Today (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame
Press, 8), p. . ~
8., Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 8), pp.
35-36. ~
9., James E. Talmage, Conference Report, October 3, p. 117. ~