I was in family history class this week, and got a question that stumped all of us. A sister in our ward said her grandparents never married, and never lived together. She only met her grandfather once, and her grandmother said he wasn’t a nice man. Neither one of them ever married. I believe they have both passed away. The question is this: should she try to seal them together to tie the generations together? And if not, doesn’t this break the chain of sealing parents to children?
I mentioned that in 100 years, nobody will know what the relationship is, wonder why there isn’t a marriage certificate, and seal them together. But it seems pretty apparent that the grandmother wants no part of a sealing to the grandfather. Someone said they could add that to the notes of the FamilySearch record in order to try to prevent a sealing. (On that note, is there a way to mark on the record that the parents never married?)
But the thought occurred to me that prior to say 1990, there was no way to add a notation to a record, and we’ve probably sealed countless spouses together who simply didn’t want to be sealed. One researcher said this is a common problem in 1800s England–women gave birth to children with no intention of marrying the father, and we’ve probably sealed them anyway if we knew who the father was.
We speculated how to handle the situation, but it came down to basically this: ask FamilySearch. They’ll probably tell you to talk to your bishop. He won’t know the answer, and they’ll escalate it somewhere. Then come back and let us know what the answer is.
So I bring this to you. If you were in charge, how would you answer? What do you think is the best response? And can her mother be sealed to her biological parents and not have the parents sealed to each other?
Wheat & Tares 
What I know from working on my own family tree and temple work:
One of my ancestors was the son of an unwed mother. His parents never married, though he knew (and we know) who his biological father was. He, while still living, chose to be sealed to his deceased mother and step-father who he loved.
My ancestor and his wife later raised the daughter of his unwed sister-in-law and that little girl was sealed to him and his wife. The sister-in-law, much later, married another man and raised several children with him. In Family Search the sister-in-law is listed with two families, one including her first daughter and one including her second husband and their children. Beneath the listing of husband and wife in each of those families there is a box that you can check which is labeled “preferred”. The father of her first child was someone she wanted nothing to do with . The other family has the “preferred” box checked.
Someone may, years from now, seal either my ancestor to his biological parents or his adopted daughter to hers, but maybe not. You can put, in the “discussions” section of Family Search, notes about the married or not status of a set of your ancestor’s parents if you wish to include it for future generations.
If someone submits their names for sealings down the road, or has done so for people who distrust each other, I don’t worry about it. No one gets forced to be in a relationship in the celestial kingdom. From everything I’ve read in the scriptures the celestial kingdom is really big on agency and honesty and truth and dealing with reality. And also, sealings, if you listen to them in the temple, are not sealings of husband and wife to be together forever. There is a pronouncement of being “husband and wife” and then having blessings conditionally sealed upon them. People aren’t sealed to spouses, they are pronounced husband and wife. A pronouncement is just a pronouncement. The only things that are sealed in a temple marriage are blessings which are sealed upon the two individuals involved . And not only that, the blessings (and the continuation of the pronouncement of marriage beyond this life) are conditional upon their being, ultimately, celestial material (judged so by the Lord way down the road, not determined by the words of a sealer in the temple). I won’t cite the scripture references, but if you want them, I will.
My friend whose parents never married is not sealed to them. (Children, as opposed to spouses, *are* sealed to parents–it is a sweet blessing to loving parents who lose children to death and long to be with them and raise them as children in the future) In my friend’s case neither parent is interested in even living in the same city, let alone legally creating a family. And, in answer to your other question: in temples right now it is not currently possible for a person to be sealed to just one parent. My friend doesn’t sweat it. She figures she has a thousand years at least for the solution to appear. In the meantime, she does family history work to keep stories alive about her mom and dad (a terrific way to turn hearts of children and grandchildren and great grandchildren to fathers, or at least help them learn helpful lessons from their lives) and temple work for other ancestors.
Your friend’s stories of her grandmother, added to the Memories section in her grandmother’s page in Family Search will be a blessing to family members who seek to know her and come to love her in the future. and have questions about her life and relationships.
To be honest, questions like this make the whole idea of dealings crumble in my mind. The rationalizations only weaken the value of sealings.
It almost comes to the equivalant in my mind of, “shoot them all and let God sort ‘me out” (of course using “seal” instead of “shoot”).
These kinds of questions have come up a couple of times on this blog in recent months, and the answer seems to be similar to what Hubby said above… “let God sort them out”. Based on the artwork we see–like the photo at the top of this post–it seems people think the idea of an “eternal family” is that the parents will be sealed with their kids more or less frozen in time. The artwork, and I think peoples’ common understanding, is that we’ll have kids, mom and dad, grandpa and grandma, great grandpa & grandma, and so on living in the same celestial neighborhood in heaven as one big sealed-together chain of relatives running around in white clothes. But just a cursory examination of this model shows that it makes no sense whatsoever. My advice is not to think about it too much. Mormon cosmology is like cheap soup: best not to stir it and see what comes to the top.
It’s probably not much different than the situation of baptizing a person who really doesn’t want to be a follower of Christ. And while the “[seal] them all and let God sort them out” sounds glib, it’s probably not too far off. The work we do for the dead isn’t so much for their benefit—because there will be billions of people we just can’t get to, so I figure God’s going to have to do a lot of “sorting out” anyway—but ours. So I trust that we’re blessed for our efforts to bring our family together even if the exact details of how we’ve fitted the family pieces together is sub-optimal.
Like you said in the OP, someone will eventually seal those grandparents together if it is publicly known they had a child together. There’s no way I know of for a regular member to put a block on two records so they can’t get sealed – a common workaround is to reserve the work and just never do it (to ensure no-one else does it).
Yes, I have seen deceased individuals sealed to parents without having the parents sealed together. It’s a way you can do all the work for the child without having to touch any work for the parents (like if the child is the wife of your cousin, you can do her work, but you really aren’t supposed to be doing the work of her parents). The goal is to have relatives of those parents come in later and seal them as spouses whenever the individual proxy ordinances are done.
“She only met her grandfather once, and her grandmother said he wasn’t a nice man. Neither one of them ever married.” I just had a twinge on reading this. It sounds as though he raped her. Maybe not, but the fact is that it’s certainly a possible outcome since rape was often not punished (although victims were) historically. If a victim became pregnant, there were many who would say it was evidence that she was willing. Just reprehensible.
I think anon has it right about the cheap soup. Oy vey! I suppose we should let compassion be our rule of thumb, but most “compassion” we dole out is based on our own experience, not the experiences of other people. That’s why you have people posthumously baptizing holocaust victims, etc. They do so with the intent of love and kindness but with a fundamental misunderstanding of the experience of Jews.
You know, the millennium will last a thousand years. We know it will have a lot of temple work going on.
Obviously there will be a lot of cleaning up of the paperwork in that time. There would not be a thousand years worth of temple work to do if there wasn’t such a mess now.
@angela
I can’t claim the cheap soup metaphor as my own.
“Memories are like mulligatawny soup in a cheap restaurant. It is best not to stir them.”
~~P.G. Wodehouse, “Very Good, Jeeves”
Because I don’t really believe that temple sealings have any eternal consequence, my view is that the sealings should serve the interests of the living. The grandparents are dead and buried and won’t care one way or the other. But it could matter a great deal to your ward sister and her living family members. The temple sealing potentially changes how they think about and remember their grandmother and biological grandfather, and their own relationship to them. As such, I think their wishes should matter the most, not temple sealing policy. Because family members have different views, there has to be a lot of flexibility as well. Ideally, one person should be able to choose to be in a sealed relationship with their grandparents, while another chooses to be in a sealed relationship only with their grandmother.
I have served as a FS missionary and the couple should be sealed and the child sealed to them, if the child is also deceased. However, if the child is alive they can choose to be sealed to parent and step parent or they can ask for permission to be sealed to the next generation back, in this case the great grandparents. That request would go through FS. It is the sealing keys that are important and not to whom. As we have choice here while in mortality, then they will also have a choice as to whom they want to be with. Us mere mortals see eternity with a very narrow view, those who are already dead see things far more clearly than we do.
I see temple work as for the living — not the dead. If it was for the dead, we would worry more about the interpersonal relations of people who we were sealing together for eternity. Who knows how often a sexually abused child is sealed to the perpetrator? A rapist to the victim? An abused spouse to the abuser? We are so fast to do sealings without any thought of what the people would like done. And what about non-traditional families? Two sisters who raise children together? Do they get sealed?
Families relationships are messy. The sealings make everything look neat and tidy on paper, but that isn’t the reality of any family relationship. Ever.
Joel
Because I don’t really believe that temple sealings have any eternal consequence,
If something is true the act of not believing it doesn’t make it untrue
I would say if it seems like she didn’t want to be sealed to him, then don’t do it. I suppose you could put a note about it in FS, but I wouldnt be super confident it would prevent people 100 years from now from having it done.
If the sealing is done vicariously, I don’t believe for one second that it would be binding against their free will and agency.
Wow – a thousand years of paperwork. Really sounds motivating.
While I know most people believe that none of the sealings will be kept in place against the will of those involved, I have serious qualms about that based on what happened to Emma Smith and the contents of D&C 132. It’s a deep fear that I hope to conquer one day. But if it was me, I wouldn’t seal them. You can’t do much to prevent others from doing so, but at least you wouldn’t have to know that it was you who had done it.
Having seen sealings done for my relatives by individuals who never did get the proper permission to do them, if I didn’t want them to be sealed, I would NOT enter the information in FamilySearch. I don’t lose sleep over this, as I know someday, someone else will probably find the information and put it in and do the work–but at least I will not feel responsible for doing something that my relatives did not want.
All vicarious ordinances must be accepted by the parties and associated covenants kept. Whatever temple work you do on earth doesn’t mean it will be accepted by the parties. We think we know what relatives wanted in this life but we have no clue what they might want in the next. Do the work and let them exercise their agency to accept or reject. There is way too much angst over causing offense.
Just Do It, the early saints didn’t believe ancestors would accept the work and that’s why we had adoptive sealing ordinances. Your position is a much newer position. I talked about it in this post a few months ago: https://wheatandtares.org/2016/07/11/doctrinal-history-of-vicarious-ordinances/
Questions like this are like an itch to me. I want to answer them, or scratch them. But they only itch more.
“Regardless of the underlying cause, itch evokes the behavior of scratching which increases inflammation and stimulates nerve fibers, leading to more itching and scratching.”
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/488914_2
This is the so- called itch-scratch cycle and is the source of many a bad rash.
The best solution is to eliminate the underlying cause..
I think most religions believe that the righteous or blessed or whatever will be with those they love in the next life. The LDS eschatology takes things too far and in an effort to provide more comfort for us in the here and now we unintentionally create more problems. Just like the itch-scratch cycle.
Implicit in this discussion is that puny man can direct the Judgments of Almighty God with our rituals. A just God is not going to force people who despise each other to be together forever because their descendants enacted a ritual, whether true or believed.
Our critics suggest the LDS doctrine that we can become Gods or like the Gods causes us to bring God down to be more like us. The topic under discussion certainly provides more hot air to that wind storm. We can manipulate our bishop and Hoffman could trick our Prophet. But God is so far above us that this discussion is nonsense.
Contemplate the Awe and Power of God. This problem melts away.
Novel idea… what if sealing is something that is really covenant based, rather than a literal metaphysical joining of spirits? I.e., what if marriage up there is integrity-centric, just like it is down here, but those who stay married are those who are worthy (obedient and pure), so god knows that they wouldn’t step out of that covenant? Once you adandon the celestial sex rumors, The doctrine of sealing is really one of eternal associations with each other and gods glory.
Another thought… I personally believe that we seal much too early in the church. sealing should be a middle life ritual where a successful marriage makes sealing a rite of passage to prep for the second annointing at end of life. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Joe. That is a VERY interesting thought. Thinking for a minute I would agree. It would make people in marriages work harder on the issues that marriage brings up. I see too many members marry in the temple and to some extent they are “done” with the checkbox and now just have to “endure to the end” instead of doing the hard work of growing.
I suggest we seal everyone and let the Lord sort it out, besides who knows how grandma will feel about being in the eternities long enough. I’ve decided that in my case I will trust the Lord to make it right. My Bishop; told me that we will have our Hearts desire in the eternities. Good enough for me.
If we adopt a “Let God sort it out” approach…I think that means it doesn’t really matter one way or the other. Seal them, don’t seal them…either way…God sorts it out.
To me…that goes back to the idea others said that it is for the living not the dead. Stirring the soup makes it not really appetizing anymore. It doesn’t really make any sense to us in our day and age. And if it does matter… and we think God’s hands are tied and cannot do anything unless mortals do stuff in earthly temples (I don’t subscribe to such thought)…even then…there is the legend of a millennium to sort things out, so I can leave it up to the proper safety nets in our doctrines and don’t need to worry about it.
So…I’m back to thinking…it don’t rightly matter much. If it helps you feel good and helps you feel connected to ancestors…go for it. If it don’t make no sense…don’t fret about it and just have faith.
Personally…when it gets to the individual circumstances…it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. It is an idea or an ideal concept we are striving for…any way that we can fit our unique family circumstances into those hopes and dreams…that is the evidence of our faith…God will provide.
Literal belief in temple work is meaningless to me. And yet I find the church hangs its hat on the all important goal of every member to get to the temple under any and all circumstance. Shrug. Not sure why. God will work it out.