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Contract companions each give 50 percent; covenant companions each give 100 percent.... May we restore the concept of marriage as a covenant, even the new and everlasting covenant of marriage. And when the wolf comes, may we be as shepherds, not hirelings, willing to lay down our lives, a day at a time, for the sheep of our covenant.
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Three summers ago, I watched a new bride and groom, Tracy
and Tom, emerge from a sacred temple. They laughed and held hands as family and
friends gathered to take pictures. I saw happiness and promise in their faces
as they greeted their reception guests, who celebrated publicly the creation of
a new family. I wondered that night how long it would be until these two faced
the opposition that tests every marriage. Only then would they discover whether
their marriage was based on a contract or a covenant.
Another bride sighed blissfully on her wedding day, “Mom,
I’m at the end of all my troubles!” “Yes,” replied her mother, “but at which
end?” When troubles come, the parties to a contractual marriage seek happiness
by walking away. They marry to obtain benefits and will stay only as long as
they’re receiving what they bargained for. But when troubles come to a covenant
marriage, the husband and wife work them through. They marry to give and to
grow, bound by covenants to each other, to the community, and to God. Contract
companions each give 50 percent; covenant companions each give 100 percent. 1
Marriage is by nature a covenant, not just a private
contract one may cancel at will. Jesus taught about contractual attitudes when
he described the “hireling,” who performs his conditional promise of care only
when he receives something in return. When the hireling “seeth the wolf
coming,” he “leaveth the sheep, and fleeth … because he … careth not for the
sheep.” By contrast, the Savior said, “I am the good shepherd, … and I lay down
my life for the sheep.” 2 Many people today marry as hirelings. And when the
wolf comes, they flee. This idea is wrong. It curses the earth, turning
parents’ hearts away from their children and from each other. 3
Before their marriage, Tom and Tracy received an eternal
perspective on covenants and wolves. They learned through the story of Adam and
Eve about life’s purpose and how to return to God’s presence through obedience
and the Atonement. Christ’s life is the story of giving the Atonement. The life
of Adam and Eve is the story of receiving the Atonement, which empowered them
to overcome their separation from God and all opposition until they were
eternally “at one,” with the Lord, and with each other.
Without the Fall, Lehi taught, Adam and Eve would never have
known opposition. And “they would have had no children; wherefore they would
have remained in a state of innocence, having no joy, for they knew no misery.”
4 Astute parents will see a little connection here—no children, no misery! But
left in the garden, they could never know joy. So the Lord taught them they
would live and bear children in sorrow, sweat, and thorns.
Still, the ground was cursed for their sake: 5 their path of
affliction also led to the joy of both redemption and comprehension. 6 That is
why the husband and wife in a covenant marriage sustain and lift each other
when the wolf comes. If Tom and Tracy had understood all this, perhaps they
would have walked more slowly from the gardenlike temple grounds, like Adam and
Eve, arm in arm, into a harsh and lonely world.
And yet—marrying and raising children can yield the most
valuable religious experiences of their lives. Covenant marriage requires a
total leap of faith: they must keep their covenants without knowing what risks
that may require of them. They must surrender unconditionally, obeying God and
sacrificing for each other. Then they will discover what Alma called
“incomprehensible joy.” 7
Of course, some have no opportunity to marry. And some
divorces are unavoidable. But the Lord will ultimately compensate those
faithful ones who are denied mortal fulfillment.
Every marriage is tested repeatedly by three kinds of
wolves. The first wolf is natural adversity. After asking God for years to give
them a first child, David and Fran had a baby with a serious heart defect.
Following a three-week struggle, they buried their newborn son. Like Adam and
Eve before them, they mourned together, brokenhearted, in faith before the
Lord. 8
Second, the wolf of their own imperfections will test them.
One woman told me through her tears how her husband’s constant criticism
finally destroyed not only their marriage but her entire sense of self-worth.
He first complained about her cooking and housecleaning, and then about how she
used her time, how she talked, looked, and reasoned. Eventually she felt
utterly inept and dysfunctional. My heart ached for her, and for him.
Contrast her with a young woman who had little
self-confidence when she first married. Then her husband found so much to
praise in her that she gradually began to believe she was a good person and
that her opinions mattered. His belief in her rekindled her innate self-worth.
The third wolf is the excessive individualism that has
spawned today’s contractual attitudes. A seven-year-old girl came home from
school crying, “Mom, don’t I belong to you? Our teacher said today that nobody
belongs to anybody—children don’t belong to parents, husbands don’t belong to
wives. I am yours, aren’t I, Mom?” Her mother held her close and whispered, “Of
course you’re mine—and I’m yours, too.” Surely marriage partners must respect
one another’s individual identity, and family members are neither slaves nor
inanimate objects. But this teacher’s fear, shared today by many, is that the
bonds of kinship and marriage are not valuable ties that bind, but are,
instead, sheer bondage. Ours is the age of the waning of belonging.
The adversary has long cultivated this overemphasis on
personal autonomy, and now he feverishly exploits it. Our deepest God-given
instinct is to run to the arms of those who need us and sustain us. But he
drives us away from each other today with wedges of distrust and suspicion. He
exaggerates the need for having space, getting out, and being left alone. Some
people believe him—and then they wonder why they feel left alone. And despite
admirable exceptions, children in America’s growing number of single-parent
families are clearly more at risk than children in two-parent families. 9
Further, the rates of divorce and births outside marriage are now so high that
we may be witnessing “the collapse of marriage.” 10
Many people even wonder these days what marriage is. Should
we prohibit same-sex marriage? Should we make divorce more difficult to obtain?
Some say these questions are not society’s business, because marriage is a
private contract. But as the modern prophets recently proclaimed, “marriage …
is ordained of God.” 11 Even secular marriage was historically a three-party
covenant among a man, a woman, and the state. Society has a huge interest in
the outcome and the offspring of every marriage. So the public nature of
marriage distinguishes it from all other relationships. Guests come to weddings
because, as Wendell Berry said, sweethearts “say their vows to the community as
much as to one another,” giving themselves not only to each other, but also to
the common good “as no contract could ever join them.” 12
When we observe the covenants we make at the altar of
sacrifice, we discover hidden reservoirs of strength. I once said in
exasperation to my wife, Marie, “The Lord placed Adam and Eve on the earth as
full-grown people. Why couldn’t he have done that with this boy of ours, the
one with the freckles and the unruly hair?” She replied, “The Lord gave us that
child to make Christians out of us.”
One night Marie exhausted herself for hours encouraging that
child to finish a school assignment to build his own diorama of a Native
American village on a cookie sheet. It was a test no hireling would have
endured. At first he fought her efforts, but by bedtime, I saw him lay “his”
diorama proudly on a counter. He started for his bed, then turned around, raced
back across the room, and hugged his mother, grinning with his fourth-grade
teeth. Later I asked Marie in complete awe, “How did you do it?” She said, “I
just made up my mind that I couldn’t leave him, no matter what.” Then she
added, “I didn’t know I had it in me.” She discovered deep, internal
wellsprings of compassion because the bonds of her covenants gave her strength
to lay down her life for her sheep, even an hour at a time.
Now I return to Tom and Tracy, who this year discovered
wellsprings of their own. Their second baby threatened to come too early to
live. They might have made a hireling’s convenient choice and gone on with
their lives, letting a miscarriage occur. But because they tried to observe
their covenants by sacrifice, 13 active, energetic Tracy lay almost motionless
at home for five weeks, then in a hospital bed for another five. Tom was with
her virtually every hour when he was not working or sleeping. They prayed their
child to earth. Then the baby required 11 more weeks in the hospital. But she
is here, and she is theirs.
One night as Tracy waited patiently upon the Lord in the
hospital, she sensed that perhaps her willingness to sacrifice herself for her
baby was in some small way like the Good Shepherd’s sacrifice for her. She
said, “I had expected that trying to give so much would be really difficult,
but somehow this felt more like a privilege.” As many other parents in Zion have
done, she and Tom gave their hearts to God by giving them to their child. In
the process, they learned that theirs is a covenant marriage, one that binds
them to each other and to the Lord.
May we restore the concept of marriage as a covenant, even the
new and everlasting covenant of marriage. 14 And when the wolf comes, may we be
as shepherds, not hirelings, willing to lay down our lives, a day at a time,
for the sheep of our covenant. Then, like Adam and Eve, we will have joy. 15 In
the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
References:
1. See Bruce C. and Marie K. Hafen, The Belonging Heart
(1994), 255–65; Pitirim Sorokin, Society, Culture and Personality, 2nd ed.
(1962), 99–107.
2. John 10:12–15.
3. See D&C 2.
4. 2 Ne. 2:23.
5. See Moses 4:23.
6. See Moses 5:11.
7. Alma 28:8.
8. See Moses 5:27.
9. See Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, “Dan Quayle Was Right,”
Atlantic Monthly, Apr. 1993, 47.
10. Maggie Gallagher, The Abolition of Marriage (1996), 4–5.
11. The First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles,
“The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” Ensign, Nov. 1995, 102.
12. See Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community
(1993), 137–39; emphasis added.
13. See D&C 97:8.
14. See D&C 131:2.
15. See 2 Ne. 2:25.
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