I dream of restorative justice instead of eternal increase
During my childhood, it became clear to me that the afterlife for Mormon women was all about procreation. I remember seeing my first visual depiction of Heavenly Mother at an art exhibit in SLC when I was about ten years old. She reminded me of some Mormon women I knew in the sense she was breastfeeding a baby while surrounded by many children. I dreaded an afterlife of endless reproduction, much as I did want to become a mother during my life.
Spiritually-motivated procreation and eternal seeds are crowning blessings in the temple, but one of the problems with focusing on this as the thing we look forward to is that it does not provide hope that our broken and suffering world will find healing. Instead, it is focused on worlds and souls yet to come.
As an adult, it is even clearer to me that I’m not inspired or benefitted by the blessing of “eternal increase,” or infinite posterity in the heavens. Even if this is true, it is not very relevant or helpful to me now.
Why is our tradition so caught up arranging our personal afterlife procreation plans? Why does the temple invite us to seek blessings for afterlife offspring rather than the people around us now?
During Joseph Smith’s time, the frequent, untimely deaths of babies, children, and younger people were cause for ongoing grief, perplexity, and tough theological questions. Joseph envisioned a next world that was abundant in family relationships restored and expanded, and he injected this into temples rituals. Much in this vision is inspiring, and it certainly spoke to the sentiments of his time.
Marriage, reproduction, and parenthood are all vital to human life and contribute so much to our personal lives and to society. But are they really the central, healing, and saving work of God?
Today, spiritual contexts and needs have shifted. We are increasingly globally connected and impacted by the various tensions, conflicts, and inequalities that plague our world. Our earth itself is in crisis, causing many of our us to struggle to find hope in the future.
Promises of expanding our families after death are not sufficient to remedy the dumpster fires wrecking havoc on our mental health and spiritual well-being. Hope that the worlds’ dead will accept proxy ordinances doesn’t cut it for many of us anymore either, much as there is beauty in how these rituals acknowledge the worth of every human soul, and doing them can benefit us and provide some sense of hope for the world. Because it is exclusive, the temple sometimes divides our families and causes heartache rather than help.
The blessing I long for is for all the people who have already been born on earth to receive what they need to heal and thrive. What I really want is restorative justice for the earth and all that has lived on it. I have no interest in plans to populate the heavens when we already have innumerable years of healing and rehabilitative work cut out for us with all the people who’ve already been born on this earth.
The hope I want to lean into is that Jesus Christ is coming to relieve the world of its inequities, suffering, grief, and despair. I hope that divine love, healing, cleansing, and peace will rain down upon humanity. That our wounds will be bound up, our tears wiped away. That there will be a new heaven and a new earth. This is the vision and promise that engages my imagination, inspires much of my writing, and turns me most toward God.
In the Millennium, and in the next life, train me to do the work of a physician, a social worker, a therapist, a teacher, an ecologist, whatever is needed. I’m not sure exactly what will be needed or what that world will be like, but I’ll make my contributions. I’m interested in many things and am willing to do what it takes to set the world right. But I’m not going to stay home focused my own progeny, and I don’t think the earth could be healed if this is what women did.
What would the point of life be if humans’ central purpose were to procreate? God created us to live, experience joy, and fully experience what it means to be human. This certainly includes having children, but there are so many other meaningful parts of life. In my mind, the greatest blessing of an afterlife is everyone having the time and means to experience and explore all the things we don’t have access to during brief, inequitable lives. A world awash in creativity, generativity, and connection. The afterlife is an exquisite possibility precisely because it makes the full expression of human dignity and potential possible for God’s children, both individually and collectively.
Do you have dreams you won’t have time or opportunity to do during this life? Skills or experiences you wish you had time and means to access, people you wish you connect with? What’s wonderful about life continuing is how this grants time and means to fulfill what we understandably hunger to experience. For those whose lives are cut short or who lack access to education or means to explore and develop themselves or their relationships, the afterlife is especially pertinent. The hope is that our collective thirst for life and love can finally be satisfied: “whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:13). Eternal life means being filled with satisfaction and joy in being alive and having freedom to pursue all that is good.
Twenty years ago, I used to think I’d be content as long as I checked my assigned Mormon girl boxes and my own family was safe and well, whatever hot messes were going on in the world. But this simply isn’t the case. My family being provided for and okay doesn’t shield me from grief and deep dissatisfaction about the world’s injustices and suffering. Turns out it feels like the whole world is my family and that I genuinely want good things for everyone, not just my own kids. I am perpetually thirsting after and imagining a better world.
I realize that I don’t know for sure that Jesus is coming to make all things new, much as I have had spiritual experiences that nurture my hope. I also realize that his healing and peace-bringing work must start here and now in our lives, that we shouldn’t wait for Jesus to do everything himself. But even just the possibility that he really is waiting in the gates, intent on returning to the earth to set things right, that he actually is going to resurrect us all, heal us all, cleanse the world of its spiritual and physical pollutants, minister to us all and teach us how to make everything really, actually okay, is the most marvelous, exquisite thing I can imagine. As long as this is a possibility, I will hold to this hope. If it is possible and real, it changes everything. Martin Espada’s poem “Imagine the Angels of Bread” articulates the joy and relief I feel about the possibility of Jesus’s arrival to redeem the world from its suffering and tragedy:
This is the year that squatters evict landlords,
gazing like admirals from the rail
of the roofdeck
or levitating hands in praise
of steam in the shower;
this is the year
that shawled refugees deport judges,
who stare at the floor
and their swollen feet
as files are stamped
with their destination;
this is the year that police revolvers,
stove-hot, blister the fingers
of raging cops,
and nightsticks splinter
in their palms;
this is the year
that darkskinned men
lynched a century ago
return to sip coffee quietly
with the apologizing descendants
of their executioners.
This is the year that those
who swim the border’s undertow
and shiver in boxcars
are greeted with trumpets and drums
at the first railroad crossing
on the other side;
this is the year that the hands
pulling tomatoes from the vine
uproot the deed to the earth that sprouts the vine,
the hands canning tomatoes
are named in the will that owns
the bedlam of the cannery;
this is the year that the eyes
stinging from the poison that purifies toilets
awaken at last to the sight
of a rooster-loud hillside,
pilgrimage of immigrant birth;
this is the year that cockroaches
become extinct, that no doctor
finds a roach embedded
in the ear of an infant;
this is the year that the food stamps
of adolescent mothers
are auctioned like gold doubloons,
and no coin is given to buy machetes
for the next bouquet of severed heads
in coffee plantation country.
If the abolition of slave-manacles
began as a vision of hands without manacles,
then this is the year;
if the shutdown of extermination camps
began as imagination of a land
without barbed wire or the crematorium,
then this is the year;
if every rebellion begins with the idea
that conquerors on horseback
are not many-legged gods, that they too drown
if plunged in the river,
then this is the year.
So may every humiliated mouth,
teeth like desecrated headstones,
fill with the angels of bread.
The first now last, the last now first. Wealth consecrated and redispersed. Dignity, care and education for all. Humanity reconciled. Our bodies and hearts healed. Compassionate, wise, peaceful communities.
I realize that sometimes people view God as a product of the human mind used for comfort, a source of meaning, a way to motivate moral behavior, and other things. I understand this. My experience is that imagining God as a universal redeemer ministering to the earth is a profound way to foster love, compassion, and hope. I consider it mysterious and sacred that humans are capable of imagining such a being and such love whether God is literally there or not. Our capacities to love and our longings for a better world are remarkable.
I don’t think Jesus will be doing this work alone at all. I imagine the worlds’ women and men doing the works of Jesus in a multitude of ways, not just as parents, important as that is. I can see them helping to heal, restore, and rehabilitate the communities of the world. This is the grandest vision of a “relief society” I can imagine. I think this work will be complicated and messy and could take a really long time to complete. But I also think it is both possible and vital and it also starts now.
At church, we might not be pressuring today’s girls to envision the afterlife quite the way we did when I was younger, but the institution is increasingly focused on temples rather than other ways to serve. Rising generations will be more inspired by visions of and efforts toward restorative justice and a healed earth than the promise of eternal seeds. They long to make direct efforts to make the world a better place. It’s not enough to just hear about the church’s donations to non-profits from time to time. The early Saints didn’t live during a polycrisis, but we do, and this calls for a greater and expanded vision of the how we should use our love and time to help the world.
Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash.
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