Toward a Practical Theology of Sealing
This is the fourth essay in the “Covenant Life” series, where we are exploring together why covenants matter and just what they mean and do. Please see previous essays: Rising Together, My Side-by-Side God, and Uphill on the Yellow Brick Road.
“For Keeps,” by Joy Harjo
Sun makes the day new. Tiny green plants emerge from earth. Birds are singing the sky into place. There is nowhere else I want to be but here. I lean into the rhythm of your heart to see where it will take us. We gallop into a warm, southern wind. I link my legs to yours and we ride together, Toward the ancient encampment of our relatives. Where have you been? they ask. And what has taken you so long? That night after eating, singing, and dancing We lay together under the stars. We know ourselves to be part of mystery. It is unspeakable. It is everlasting. It is for keeps.
My great-great-grandmother Alsina was a remarkable, tenacious woman. I am confident in this description, though I never knew her. Alsina lost more than one child before adulthood, one in a tragic accident in which the child’s recovery was uncertain for several days. Before Jean’s death, Alsina was canning tomatoes. A younger baby, Elaine, wanted to be held and Alsina had to set her down to attend to her work. Alsina remembered that Jean said, “Mama . . . Won't you do for me what you wouldn't do for Elaine?” Alsina remembered that “Something in her face caused me to say, ‘Turn off the gas.’” I sat down on the porch and rocked her. How I did hate to lay her down. Something told me that perhaps I would never hold her again.”1 Jean died that night.
Alsina was a devout Latter-day Saint. I know that she believed in the doctrine of sealings and imagined seeing her child again. Yet as I tuck my own children into bed with the words of her history swimming through my mind, the hope of seeing Jean again feels to me a weak comforter before the visceral agony of her loss.
The Latter-day Saint doctrine of sealing was developed, as Devan Jensen, Michael A. Goodman, and Barbara Morgan Gardener wrote, “line upon line” in a process over many years and various moments of understanding. What exactly Latter-day Saint sealing is, however, remains a question of theological and philosophical discussion. Was Joseph’s theology a quest for a binding of the whole human family, a sort of web of connectedness that sutures beloved relationships across the ruptures of time and accident?Was it ultimately about kinship? Salvation?2 Becoming like God?3 These theological ideas are interconnected, with various threads pulling each other in conversation.
As a missionary, I had the idea that the doctrine of sealing (which I associated with the saying “families can be together forever”) was a contrast idea: an alternative to what I saw as the harsh, punitive teaching that death separates earthly bonds. This idea, which I think is not terribly uncommon, has its roots in Joseph Smith’s own formative experiences, including his family’s grief at his brother Alvin’s death. The minister at Alvin’s funeral insinuated that the child would go to hell because he was unbaptized, reflecting the predominant (though not universal) Christian understanding of the time.4 But when I presented the triumphalist conclusion of contrast as a young missionary, I did not receive the joyful exclamations I was expecting. As far as I can recall, everyone I talked to believed that they would be with their loved ones after they died.
The theological, political, and cultural history of Christianity leading to the different contexts of belief and meaning have lengthy exposition in many other places beyond the scope of this personal exploration, and the systematic history of transition is not my point or my project. Rather, I am interested in the consequences of sealing understood as a doctrine of repair or remedy to a rupture in which the remedy is eschatological (post-death) and in the possibility of an understanding which instead encompasses rupture and healing into its earthly-oriented praxis.
Experiences of devastating loss are debilitatingly familiar; my grandmother’s story is not isolated. Alsina’s story exists with another mother from another place, breasts full to bursting without relief from her nursing child who was killed by soldiers.5 Her story exists with mothers searching fruitlessly for children who were scooped up and carted away in the light of the sun rising over Turtle Island, part of a genocide of indigenous identity in Canadian residential schools.6 It exists with the children who were separated from name and love and dignity by systems of enslavement, and those who are today removed from their parents at borders by government agencies. It exists alongside pregnancy loss, miscarriage, and infertility, and with the inevitable experience of death which touches every one of us. I rehearse these painful realities because they are true stories to which the story of sealing must speak. And how it speaks, I think, matters terribly.
A theory of sealing which paradigmatically repairs has the tendency to act as a bandage for the injustices and cruelties of life. This ‘repair’ understanding connects earth to heaven, resolving the unexplainable in the aftermath and leaving the mess in the wake of its triumphal departure. It is easy, as I have done, to elaborate on images of tragic motherhood. As Julia Kristeva writes, the tears and the breast milk are the venerated images of the Virgin Mary, the most celebrated mother in Christian history whose tragic pietà is the romantic vision of motherhood with which some versions of feminism contend.7 And yet, at the feet of feminist theories, the image of the pietà holds profound meaning for devotees to this day. Sally Cunneen writes about a mother who had endured the death of her son. “She would sit in her armchair and nod her head over and over, saying, ‘Madonna capisce, Madonna capisce’—only the Madonna understands.” There is an agonizing empathy in this image of shared grief, this image far from triumph.
Since I taught with such energy as a young missionary, I have long thought, is this the place to begin a theology of sealing? It is these ruptures to which sealing speaks, these multiple tragedies of time and circumstance and fate. Surely the answer is yes, and profoundly so. Surely we must believe that there is life beyond the pietà, hope after tragedy, meaning beyond brokenness. But I wonder if the impulse to a life beyond stunts an ability to behold the present. I wonder if sealing is as much about the present as it is about future reality. I wonder, in fact, if reversing the order of emphasis changes the way it is experienced as meaningful. In this sense, I am proposing a shift from approaching sealing as theory to approaching sealing as practice.
In recent years, I have been lost in theory even as I have been deeply devoted to it. I have ached, for example, at the limits of theory (theological or otherwise) for explaining or even addressing the profound pain of women’s experiences with doctrines of sealing, including the complexities of polygamy and the myriad unanswered questions, uncertainties, and unspoken implications within its practice and legacy. I have longed to figure out what is going on, what is “true” beneath layers of time. As the spiraling rope unspools, I have come to the limit of my ability to comprehend a true story with the harshly pristine tools of theories and facts. Telling a true story will always be a question of perspective. Telling my grandmother’s story must honor what was true for her, which I may never fully know as I live and breathe in my time and place. Telling a true story about polygamy requires, also, the perspectives of those who would tell truth differently than I would. Telling a true story about sealing is not, then, about finding the right language to express a correct doctrinal idea. It is perhaps not about uncovering the discursively pristine exposition I once longed for, the exact framework that would give it sense, meaning, redemption.
Today, many of us approach sealing as an intact doctrine with a good deal of historical baggage. Before, it was built line upon line. Perhaps living into a doctrine of sealing is less about pursuing intact theory and more about binding the mundane toward meaning. This living sealing is not a rejection of the theoretical or the work of attending to theory; I think we need people to pay attention to the process of building, to the theoretical intactness, and to the time in-between. But we also need people to pay attention to the diverse shape of practice and to what informs its different varieties in ways related to and distinct from its historical exposition. What I am proposing is a bridge rather than a dichotomy between theory and practice, a deeper sense of how ideas and doctrines come to life, take on flesh, render meaning-maker power as they accompany the living through the vicissitudes of mortality. If sealing is understood as a static temple ordinance with a before/after distinction, it may not possess the musculature to genuinely bind and suture the full-bodied wounds of life.
What, for example, did it mean for Alsina to practice a theology of sealing after her little Jean died so suddenly? What does it mean for mothers and parents and kin to practice a theology of sealing in the wake of the unimaginable and in the midst of the mundane and everyday? What we believe is not wholly distinct from how we believe, but they are not identical. Put differently, what we believe about sealing informs how we believe, but do we pay attention to how our practices have always shaped what we believe? The early idea of sealing emerged out of rupture and personal tragedy. It spoke to a particular context and had its own theological imagination. It never was a pristine theory disconnected from the context, historicity, and theological background of its environment, and it is not so today.
I am suggesting then that a practice of sealing means more than one thing. It means of course the practice of performing sealings as a ritual in the temple. This is a practice, a bodily performance of theological meaning. But it also means the way that ritual and ceremony and belief leech their way into what daily life looks and feels like. Might sealing extend to the daily, mundane practices of family and kinship relations? If sealing is ordinance only it may be seen as a static thing, perhaps higher than our daily lives. But if sealing is ordinance and incorporation, theological attention widens. It necessarily includes attention to the presence of domestic abuse, questions of gender equity, and the demands and values of caregiving, among others. Sealing as practice encompasses temple ordinance as well as everyday ritual and survival, suggesting questions about how contextual realities shape how a person might understand and approach a supposedly universal idea.
How, I mean, did the ritual and ceremony and belief of sealing affect how Alsina lived through her grief? It is at this point that the theory melts away, insufficient if theoretically comforting to the profundity of loss. Sealing as a post-mortal repair for tragedy and injustice, or even as a web of connectedness for an uncertain eternity, both transcend mortal realities. Their connection point is beyond. I see and feel the importance of such frames and I am not dismissing them. Instead, I want to press them open. Might practicing a theology of sealing mean, among other things, inhabiting and nurturing relationships that bind across the vicissitudes of circumstance? Jane Hirshfield writes about this in her poem “For What Binds Us.”
And see how the flesh grows back across a wound, with a great vehemence more strong than the simple, untested surface before . . . And when two people have loved each other See how it is like a scar between their bodies, stronger, darker, and proud; how the black cord makes of them a single fabric that nothing can tear or mend.
Could we think about sealing as what binds us both in and out of mortality, what we weave together with the divine through our failings and efforts and work to make our relationships deep and lasting and joyful? This is real work, requiring the almost impossibly daunting task of genuinely confronting one another, of reconciliation and repair, of reparations and transformation. To employ another metaphor, this is the movement from rhapsodizing about the beauty of flowers to getting on your knees in a garden. Figuring out what binds us on earth in addition to what draws us to heaven, this is life work. It includes what happens in temples, but it does not end or even begin there—an ordinance does not provide a guarantee for safety and happiness now matter how holy the authority. What draws hearts together, what salves wounds?
I am a student of these questions, bumbling along. But I think there is pull from more than one direction. What binds us may indeed be divine cords exercised through priesthood office. But may it not also be cords of loyalty, forgiveness, justice, harmony, and healing? Do our distinctions between these things finally lose all meaning before the expanse of God’s endless, ever-thirsting divine love?8 Joseph Smith thought that the word turn in Malachi 4 should be rendered bind or seal. God will bind the hearts of the parents to their children, and the hearts of the children to their parents. Malachi is a stark text of judgement, wrath, and punishment—not much of a wedding liturgy. It is an interesting place from which to undergird an institutional system.9 Yet this one word: bind. Seal. “Set me as a seal,” the author of The Song of Solomon writes, “upon your heart, like a seal on your arm; for love is as strong as death” (Song of Solomon 8:6, NIV).
Is love as strong as death? I write to Alsina, my ancestor who I did not know. I love her. I write across time, from different contexts, and I feel the seal upon my heart, upon my arm. She is still in the garden, I think, practicing with me. There is not an infinite expanse between us, but there are wounds and loves which bind us. Come back to the garden, I dream Alsina saying. Come back to life. The binding is not somewhere out there, not just a bridge from earth to heaven. It is not limited to words and phrases and symbols. It is an earthy thing, rooted in the soil we turn over with our hands. It is in the infants we nurse at our breasts. It is the pain and loss and beauty and injustice we break and weave through, strong and stumbling and uncertain but never alone. It is the work of building just and equitable and loving relationships, which witness with their flesh a bond that nothing can tear or mend—strong enough to weather storms and cross mountains and build sturdy tables. It is the work of connection which is not inevitable, even by blood. Suturing. Binding. Weaving. Connecting. Sealing.
Kristen Blair works with practical theology and lives in Toronto, Ontario.
Art by Bryan Mark Taylor.
From an account of Alsina’s life written by my great aunt Mary-Jane Fritzen and recorded in Family Search.
Jonathan Stapley argues that “Joseph Smith introduced an expanded temple liturgy and cosmology in Nauvoo. He revealed sealing rituals that materialized heaven on earth and transformed men and women into kings and queens, priests and priestesses. Where there were no sealed relationships, there was no heaven.” See Jonathan Stapley, The Power of Godliness: Mormon Liturgy and Cosmology (Oxford University Press, 2018). https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190844431.001.0001.
Also referred to in theology as theosis. For a robust exploration of doctrine and practice, see Rosalynde Welch, “Theology of the Family,” in The Routledge Handbook of Mormonism and Gender, ed. Rosalynde Welch, Taylor Petrey, and Amy Hoyt (Routledge, 2020), 1:495–508. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351181600-39.
There were Catholic and Protestant universalist theologies—those which proposed that all would be saved—at the time that differ from the theology Joseph Smith developed, but they were not mainstream. Ann Lee Bressler details an interesting history of universalism in America in her book The Universalist Movement in America, 1770–1880 (Oxford University Press, 2001).
Elizabeth O’Donnell Gandalfo tells the story of Rufina Amaya, “the sole eyewitness survivor of the Massacre at El Mozote . . . her youngest child, an eight-month-old daughter, was literally ripped from her breast by soldiers to be killed with the rest of the town’s children in the parish rectory.” Amaya says: “You never stop feeling sorrow for your children. . . . The one that was most painful was my eight-month-old girl who was still nursing. I felt my breasts full of milk, and I wept bitterly. . . . Today I can tell the story, but in that moment I was not able to. I had such a knot and a pain in my heart that I couldn’t even speak. All I could do was bend over and cry.” In Elizabeth O’Donnell Gandalfo’s The Power and Vulnerability of Love: A Theological Anthropology (Fortress Press, 2015).
For one example, see Antoine Mountain, From Bear Rock Mountain: The Life and Times of a Dene Residential School Survivor (Brindle & Glass, 2019).
Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” in Tales of Love (Columbia University Press, 2025), 219–46.
Drawing her from Wendy Farley, The Thirst of God: Contemplating God’s Love with Three Women Mystics (Westminster John Knox Press, 2015).
The text of Malichi has clear apocalyptic influence, though it its end-of-times is much more imminent than other more standard apocalyptic texts; the writer is concerned with the immediate situation facing the Israelites at the time of its writing. In the scholarly literature it is known as an incipient apocalyptic.
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