As He Cleaveth Unto You

How Covenants Can Sanctify Our Communities and Relationships

Our covenant theology contains an interesting paradox. If we’re not careful, promises made with God to bind us to him can become an internal cultural status symbol—a way of organizing ourselves into implicit hierarchies of spiritual worth and deservingness. At the same time, our covenants have the potential to free us from all external human expectations by helping us live and walk as Jesus did. In this way, covenants give us the freedom to fully embrace our divine selves, each other, and God—but only if we understand what they are, and what they are not. My experience on a rollercoaster will help explain what I mean.

I used to be scared of heights. When I was a kid I couldn’t stand on a balcony or at a railing without my brain wondering what would happen if I fell. I remember hiking once along a narrow trail with my family and being so anxious that my feet froze in place. But these experiences were nothing compared with the time my friends convinced me to get on a rollercoaster. We waited in line for an hour—they, with mild anticipation and I, with the comforting delusion that maybe I’d enjoy it after all. As we finally lifted off from the ground—backwards and soon upside down—I realized my mistake. My body jerked against the straps, trying desperately to escape from the sickening drops and the centripetal force. Somewhere in the distance I heard shrill, inhuman screeching that I later learned was my own. While entirely genuine, my reaction was immensely silly. If the ride somehow broke down, no amount of desperate clinging would prevent me from being launched into the air. That I held on anyway illustrates how irrationally we fight for control over our lives when the world around us has other plans.

Those of us who cling grimly to rollercoasters—both real and metaphorical—do so because we’re afraid. Sometimes this fear comes from being thrown into unfamiliar circumstances, but it can also arise quite naturally from our desire to be admired and respected. I know some people who measure their success mostly by the degree to which they gain others’ approval. When substituted for inner conviction, seeking validation from others like this can make us shallow and fragile. It gives us the illusion that we are masters of our own destiny while reducing our capacity to respond to life’s rollercoasters with acceptance and courage.

When things turn difficult, a sense of self built on the opinions of others can leave us in a state where any disappointments we suffer threaten not just our material achievements but our inner sense of ourselves. While this can be bad for us as individuals, it’s even worse for our communities. Behind some of our most toxic cultural instincts, after all, lies the fear that others’ esteem might be withdrawn. We belittle some people because those we admire hold them in low regard; we judge others harshly to uphold social conventions that secure our own influence or belonging; we heap praise on the wealthy, powerful and good-looking for no other reason than to bask in their afterglow. Fearing we might lose others’ esteem, we neglect those who most need our help while becoming obsequious toward those who are already ensconced in their power. Human attention naturally tends to flow uphill toward those who need it least.

Sadly, the behavior I’ve described is not just a worldly phenomenon—for some it is also their experience of life in the Church. To the extent that our Church communities are also subtly influenced by status-seeking and social hierarchies, we must uproot these tendencies before we can fully understand and accept Jesus’s grace. Thankfully, God gives us tools to help us overcome these instincts. He commands us to build a community where no one is unwelcome or excluded. One such tool—and a particularly powerful one—is found in the covenants he invites us to make with him.

For most of my life, I’ve tended to think of my covenants as being “super-commandments” with harsher penalties and more protocol. This has caused me a lot of pain, particularly at times when I feel exhausted by my inadequacy or question the validity of the promises I’ve made. As I’ve tried to understand and grow through this feeling, however, I have learned more about how a covenant relationship with God can enrich and sanctify all of the relationships in our lives—while protecting us from the status anxiety I describe above.

One of the verses that for me really gets at the heart of our covenant theology is Jacob 6:5. After finishing a long sermon about God’s efforts to restore and uphold the house of Israel, Jacob invites his readers to recognize and act on divine love. He writes, “Wherefore, my beloved brethren, I beseech of you in words of soberness that ye would repent, and come with full purpose of heart, and cleave unto God as he cleaveth unto you.” That last line—“cleave unto God as he cleaveth unto you”—has always stood out to me. It reminds me of marriage (“Therefore shall a man . . . cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh”), but it’s also an urgent invitation. When I was a kid, my friends and I would sometimes amuse ourselves by asking each other to help us get up off the ground but then going completely limp when one of us grabbed the other’s hand. It’s very hard to pick someone up when they’re not pulling against you. For me this is the substance of God’s invitation: His arm may be extended and his hand stretched out still, but we need to take it and hold on intentionally if we want to make it onto our feet.

Holding onto God in the same way he holds us requires a good idea of what his hold is like. The first time I read this verse, my mind emphasized its seriousness and fervency. I imagined God’s iron grip as a towline, dragging a nearly-capsized boat over stormy seas. If the line snapped or I let go for any reason I would drown. As with my roller coaster experience, this reflected my fear. In reality the line will never snap, and God won’t let me drown.

Eventually, I realized that perhaps waterskiing is a better metaphor: when someone hits a wave wrong and lands in the lake, they naturally let go of the tow line to avoid a lungful of water. The captain of the boat simply circles around to let the skier grab the line again. As I thought through the implications of this more voluntary, cooperative model of “cleaving,” I remembered the times when I’d wanted to give up on myself or the Church and some quiet, miraculous force kept me from falling. I came to feel that it wasn’t so much my determination to hold on that God needed as much as my continued humility, introspection, and honesty.

Depending on your circumstances, this kind of open, evolutionary covenant relationship with God might feel far away. One of the downsides of participating in a religious community is the relative ease with which social or cultural expectations are substituted for spiritual ones. I mean this in two ways: first, that in the Church, social and cultural expectations about our behavior are often casually passed off as being handed down from God; and second, that these social and cultural preferences further take on the veneer of divine approval when they become the basis for our acceptance in the community. This is not necessarily a bad thing! Communal moral pressure can positively reinforce good behaviors in that interval between trying out a new practice and experiencing its fruits for ourselves. But this false substitution can also drown genuine spiritual exploration. Sunday School Mormonism can make us default to long-held internal narratives about our relationship with God instead of going out and discovering his nature for ourselves.

Perhaps some of us are familiar with the scene in I Love Lucy where Lucy and Ethel go to work in a chocolate factory. They’re put to work on an assembly line wrapping chocolates. If even one chocolate goes down the line unwrapped they’ll both be fired. While at first the task seems easy, the assembly line speeds up until they’re frantically stuffing chocolates in their hats, into their mouths, and down their shirts in a vain bid to keep their jobs. After about thirty seconds Lucy turns to Ethel and yells, “I think we’re fighting a losing game!”

When I was eight and about to get baptized I felt a similar anxiety. I mentally catalogued all the sins an almost-eight-year-old could commit and solemnly resolved that as soon as I was baptized I would never do any of them again. I would be perfectly clean and good so that I could keep my promise with God. You can imagine my surprise when I discovered that I was more or less the same person after being baptized that I’d been before. Some kind adult (likely my mom) explained that this was why we took the sacrament. Satisfied with this answer, I began to view the sacrament as a special talisman, a sort of weekly get-out-of-jail-free card. Instead of constantly worrying about whether I was meeting God’s expectations, I could simply go to church every week and chew a piece of Wonder Bread.

What my eight-year-old (and later my teenage) self didn’t realize was that with either mindset I was fighting a losing game. If I lived in perpetual fear of making mistakes, the pressure to be perfect would make it harder to feel God’s love. If, on the other hand, I thought simply showing up for the sacrament every week and never doing anything that landed me in the bishop’s office magically erased my need to take the Atonement seriously, I’d never grow into the person God wanted me to become. While these two statements might seem obvious when presented this way, I suspect that many of us probably fall closer to one or the other. In either case we find ourselves somewhere on the scrupulosity-to-carelessness spectrum, where our success or failure is defined by our ability to avoid feeling like we’ve screwed up.

I said we avoid feeling like we’ve screwed up; in reality this kind of spiritual fudging has profound social consequences. Those who are comfortable with their position in the ward social hierarchy can sometimes hoard the divine mercy they ironically feel they’ve earned. They wonder why those who feel alienated can’t just pull themselves up by spiritual bootstraps—if only they would take responsibility and repent, they would be worthy of the same social acceptance the self-justified claim for themselves. They start treating other people as they falsely imagine God would: measuring them by their observable virtues, judiciously applying a few drops of grace here and there to wipe a smudged cheek or bandage a skinned knee. Because time and chance happen to us all, this posture can be particularly dangerous when circumstances change. We cannot predict when we—or those we love—might find ourselves unable to check all the outward gospel boxes to our liking.

Any serious attempt to live within a covenant theology needs to account for the fact that life is incredibly messy. There’s gangrene and cancer just as there are smudged cheeks and skinned knees. Even if two people manage to walk the covenant path all the way to a temple marriage, there’s no guarantee against divorce, wrenching personal faith crises, or children who leave the Church. There is a real difference between the sorts of trials that would be well-received in a testimony meeting and the sort that would make us want to run and hide from people who have a covenant obligation to bear our burdens. Our wards and branches can be immense sources of strength when the challenges we face fit neatly into our idea of God’s plan, but we too often recoil from the spiritual ugliness and woundedness where Christ’s mercy is most needed. I think we diminish ourselves when we permit fear of departing from a covenant script to obscure God’s capacity for eternal healing and rescue.

If you’ve been reading carefully perhaps the last sentence made you a little uneasy—should we not be afraid of breaking our covenants? Should we continue in sin that grace may abound? Are covenants then just piecrust promises, easily made and easily broken? In order to answer questions like these, we need to write down a better model of what covenants are for.

In Alma 33 in the Book of Mormon, Alma and Amulek are teaching a group of people who have rejected the Nephite church and set up a separate religion. When those who have made out poorly under the new regime come to ask how to strengthen their spiritual lives (their neighbors won’t let them into the meetinghouses), Alma launches into a long discourse about how we can get to know God. Mid-address he quotes a scripture that has become my favorite in the Book of Mormon: “Thou art angry, O Lord, with this people, because they will not understand thy mercies which thou hast bestowed upon them because of thy Son” (Alma 33:16). This verse stopped me cold the first time I really read it. It paints a picture of an abundant God, a kind God who makes space for every sort of sickness or infirmity but is furious with those who attempt to ration his generosity. Do we understand God’s mercies? Can we conceive of the strength and depth and breadth of such a thing? God’s presence can be easy to miss. It is a gift freely offered but all too rarely received.

Mercy is a passive virtue: Its very existence in our lives is predicated on our willingness to invite it in. Not comprehending the extent to which we are guilty—or weak, or wounded—halts the healing progress of grace. This peculiar defect is one source of the cultural divide I described earlier! Those secure enough to flaunt their spiritual richness (read: social acceptance) withhold understanding and attention from those who are either less popular or more self-critical. The rich in spirit steal from the poor in spirit by refusing to extend the grace they flatter themselves to have received. The book of Revelation elegantly describes the problem: “Thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked” (Rev. 3:17). Failing to understand the mercies of God results in a particularly obnoxious form of self-sufficiency.

What does this have to do with covenants? Taken seriously, our covenant obligations would bankrupt the natural man or woman in any of us. Assuming we manage to avoid drinks ending in -ccino or the wrong websites, we have not even begun our reckoning with the need to bless those that curse us or sell all our goods—as it were—to give to the poor. We too easily exhaust ourselves paying our tithes of mint, anise, and cumin; if we’re not careful, we’ll have nothing left for quiet, deliberate kindness and genuine ministering. In offering us the opportunity to make covenants, it is as if Jesus frees us from our debt to sin only to saddle us immediately with an all-consuming celestial mortgage payment.

Of course there is another side to this analysis. Our covenants quickly help us to understand just how much God’s ways are not our ways. We begin to sense the gulf between where we are and where God wants with all his heart for us to be. We feel how little our shortsighted accumulation of social esteem really matters to him. This recognition should start to change us—to worry and unravel the stubborn knots of our lesser, human desires. Recognizing the numerous ways we fall short heaps cognitive dissonance on top of us until we can no longer bear it and hopefully start trying to understand God’s mercies instead. If or when we finally ask, our covenants provide the built infrastructure for God to send down grace in far greater proportion than we could otherwise receive. The psalmist wrote: “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God” (Ps. 42:1). Isaiah promises, as if in response, that “the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea” (Isa. 11:9).

Or at least this is one way that the process might work. Depending on your circumstances, you may find it easier to ask for and receive mercy in certain areas of your life than in others. You may be tired of feeling judged because your shortcomings are more visible than those of your neighbors. You may feel like life in the Church isn’t much more than a catalogue of stinging rules and regulations handed down by strangers who fundamentally misunderstand who you are, what you need, and what you hope for. You may also be entirely comfortable with your spiritual life; perhaps in that case, you’re feeling a bit confused about why I’ve written so many obvious things. Regardless of which group you most identify with, I’ll ask the question I’ve asked myself a hundred times: How well do you understand God’s mercies? It’s not a rhetorical question so much as an invitation to engage even more deeply with the people around you.

I said earlier that attention tends to flow uphill. It goes against engrained social instincts to give to those who we suspect cannot repay us, love those who will likely only respond with venom or misunderstanding, and care for those who have no intention whatever of returning the favor. But this is also precisely what our covenants are for! In our quest to fulfill our covenant commitments we will inevitably spend a lot of time learning how God’s grace works in our lives. We will realize how little we receive from him is due to our efforts. It is much easier to love others—even our enemies—when we deeply understand how much we ourselves are loved. Covenants really are, as Elder Robert Daines taught, “the shape of God’s embrace.”

When our covenants guide our love towards others, it is also much easier to love God. In learning to engage deeply with the people around us, we learn a little bit more about what God cares about and what he thinks about. We start to think of other people with the same care and concern that we would normally reserve for ourselves, and in the process everyone’s burdens are lightened. We get a better sense of what helps people grow, what makes them feel seen, and how to call forth the best in them. The rough-and-tumble of our daily lives slowly fades into the background as we are introduced to other eternal souls. The Atonement plays a crucial role, connecting our empathy and compassion to brothers and sisters for whom Christ died. As Jesus observed, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” (Matt. 25:40).

As I said earlier, our covenants contain a paradox. Although our covenants are meant to bind us to God, we too often use them to compare ourselves to others. Whether we think we are better or worse than those around us, this way of thinking is stifling. We are unique in many ways—a “peculiar people” with an expansive theological inheritance and a distinctive sense of what it takes to build sustainable communities. This said, all too often we live in social and spiritual prisons of our own making, not daring to believe that the God we worship is much wiser and better than we generally assume. It is one thing to keep commandments and receive what we consider our just rewards. It is another entirely to learn to live as God lives, think as he thinks, and love as he loves. This, for me, is what our covenants offer us: a chance to serve God not simply to please him or to go to heaven but rather to bring heaven into our earthly communities, extending mercy wherever it’s needed and building the sort of society where Jesus would not be ashamed to dwell.

Peter Mugemancuro lives and works in the Bay Area. He loves thinking about how restored Christian theology can help build vibrant, resilient and flourishing social systems. You can find more of his writing at his blog, Strangers & Pilgrims.

Art by Wayne Thiebaud (1920–2021).

Image from “Job Switching,” I Love Lucy (1952).