Yesterday would have been my great-grandmother’s 119th birthday. She was 97 years old when she died, and she was an amazing woman. I was born on her birthday, and it is the source of my love for my birthday despite my ever-increasing age. I am thankful every day that she hung around this mortal coil not only long enough for me to know her, but long enough for me to love her and remember her.
My great-grandmother, like generations in my family before her, was Catholic. So, on February 24, 1996 I stood in as proxy for her baptism at the Washington DC Temple. Without going in to too much detail, it is to this day one of the most spiritual experiences I have ever had. By that time, she had been dead for almost 5 years, but it felt like she was right there with me. I felt like I was back beside her chair again and could look in her face again and hear her voice. In some of my darkest hours this experience helped anchor me to God, and to the Gospel. It also helped to anchor me to my family. Instead of a random assortment of individuals that I share DNA with I started to more fully embrace that we were really all in this together.
I have a strong testimony of proxy work when done properly with the proper motivation. I believe this work is for the benefit of the living proxy as well as the dead. It gets us in tune with our departed kin, and turns the hearts of the father to the children and the children to the father in a way that cannot be accomplished in mortality. We can stretch our hands across generations, and touch beyond this veil of tears to where these loved ones reside.
I’m not foolish; I know that even if we worked in The Temple night and day for the rest of our lives we could never get all of the Temple work done. In that respect, I do believe that our Heavenly Parents will work it all out in the end. Every head of our hairs is numbered and none will be forgotten. As with all things, ours is to do the best that we can to honor these ties that bind us together by performing work that the dead cannot accomplish for themselves. We need our history, and our history needs us.
What are your thoughts on ordinances by proxy?
EOR
EOR is a convert and a divorcee. She is the 2013 Wheaties award winning author in the category: "Funniest Thread", and has a B.S. in Business Management and Economics. In addition to being a permablogger at Rational Faiths, she also is a permablogger at Expert Textperts. She lives in NY, has 2 cats, and enjoys brevity, deli sandwiches, and laughing.
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I love this post. And it is not just that I have similar views on proxy work and its importance (when done properly with the proper motivation – an excellent disclaimer)but because I also have similar experiences doing temple work. When I was in the thick of my faith crisis, it is those experiences that kept me tethered to the gospel. I’ve wondered if that has something to do with my heart being turned to my fathers and theirs to me. Perhaps that connection kept my faith in tact when it otherwise would have been torn apart? That is obviously not going to be the case for everyone, but it means something special to me.
Thanks for sharing this.
Thanks for sharing your experiences Leah. I do honestly think proxy work is mostly for our own benefit.
This is good. Salvation for us Mormons is a communal experience – communal, not individual.
Absolutely, Michael! I think that is one definite thing that has been lost from Mormon History. The concept of Zion is barely given lip-service at this point. No one gets left behind. We are all in this together, and we shouldn’t even want to leave each other behind.
This is so perfectly put. Thank you for expressing some of my own thoughts. And, personally, I’ve had too many profound, bonding and binding experiences to deny or doubt the truth of generational as well as communal bonds. We are one body. We need each other.
One experience in particular– when I served as the “escort” for my little sister who performed the proxy work for our paternal grandmother – the mother of the man who violated his own daughters in every possible way. It is difficult to describe the feeling of sisterhood I felt, not only with my sister, but with our grandmother. It was healing work. Women’s work. The woman through whom came the source of our greatest heartache, also became the woman who helped us heal. And we healed her of her motherly sorrow. We made peace with this family line. We performed a “welding link” – all three of us, together, that day.
Sometimes binding the hearts of mothers and fathers to the children involves repairing broken links in the chain. We did that when we met Grandma metaphorically at the temple that day.
Melody, I have the very poor habit of abandoning my posts after about a day, so I am just now reading your comment. I wanted you to know that it moved me in such a way that I am actually finding it indescribable. That such healing is possible, testifies to me of the great and awesome power of the Atonement of Jesus Christ. I am so grateful (by proxy!) that you and your sister and even Grandma were able to experience such a healing moment in time.