Introduction
“Grief,” says the official website of the LDS Church, “is a common part of mortality.” Then it adds,
“Because Jesus Christ has suffered the pains and afflictions of
all mankind, we can be comforted and healed.”
This is the two-sided coin of mortal experience with which the Latter-day Saints have learned to live. It consists of two incontrovertible facts:
1. We will all suffer grief at some point or points in our lives;
and
2. Notwithstanding our suffering, there is hope and healing
through the atonement of Jesus Christ.
Note, that the second fact does not negate the first. We must experience grief. We simply believe that such grief is not the end of the story.
I will share my view of the "Mormon" perspective on grief under the following headings:
- Grief is a Fact of Life
- Grief is a Facet of Joy
- Grief is a Source of Sacred Experience
- Grief is an Opportunity to Grow
- Grief is an Opportunity to Serve
First, though, I will provide a simple outline of what Latter-day Saints call the Plan of Salvation, or Plan of Happiness. This is the pattern of the story of every person’s life and is one of the keys to understanding "Mormon" perspectives on life and death.
The Plan of Salvation
this mortal life is simply a small part of a
continuing, eternal story.
Though it seems all-consuming now, it is just a moment in our personal histories, one into which we willingly came, and from which we will gladly go, putting all of its sorrows and struggles behind us.
Before mortality is what we call the Pre-Mortal Life, when the basic substance of your being – what we call an Intelligence – was united with a spirit body by our Heavenly Father, thereby becoming a child of God. We believe each person is literally a spirit child of God – that He is the Father of our spirits – with the potential to become like Him, and that we lived with Him before coming to this earth.
Each of us chose the opportunity to be born into and experience mortal life. Why?
Latter-day Saints believe that our Heavenly Father possesses all perfections – intellectual, moral, emotional, spiritual, physical and so forth. This includes that He has a perfect and immortal body of flesh and bone, and that in order for us to grow and become like Him, we need one too. We are born into this life to obtain those bodies that will become our immortal bodies, but now are susceptible to sickness and death and other weaknesses so that we can learn what it means to live by faith and righteousness in a material realm.
Ultimately we die and our spirits leave our bodies: the dust returns to the earth, and the spirit returns to that God who gave it life. There, in what we call the Spirit World, the ghosts of all people wait for the day of resurrection.
At that future date, which is unknown to any of us, the spirits of all people, righteous and wicked alike, will be restored to their bodies. Those bodies will be transformed by the grace and power of Jesus Christ to immortal bodies, and each person will be further rewarded according to his or her deeds and intentions while in this mortal life, some to Eternal Life, which we believe is to live in the presence of the Father, to inherit His divinity as joint-heirs with Jesus Christ, and to enjoy eternal family relationships; and most* others to varying lesser degrees of glory, each and all of which are regarded as happy and desirable states of being although they do not include the fullness of divine nature.
Based on this outlook, you likely can see already how Latter-day Saints might take a positive view of death, seeing it as merely one further step in God’s plan that is designed for our eternal happiness. However, notwithstanding this, death is still a sorrowful separation, and grief is considered a natural, genuine and respected emotion amongst Latter-day Saints.
[*Latter-day Saints believe a very small proportion of people - we can generally name only a handful of candidates - will ultimately reside in a state lacking any glory, known as "outer darkness", the true nature of which is unknown to us. Cf. here and here.]
Grief is a Fact of Life
neither our people nor our faith is naïve as to
the many and profound causes of suffering, grief and sorrow
that exist in the world.
Some of you might know the history of our Church, and particularly of the intense persecution that was suffered by its members in the mid-19th century, during which time all of its members were touched by the spectres of torment and death. Joseph Smith, Jr., the founder and first prophet of the Church, himself suffered profound losses: the majority of his children dying in childhood, many of his friends and followers being killed or driven from their homes, and he being tarred and feathered, beaten and mobbed, robbed, slandered, jailed and ultimately murdered.
Although, like most other people, Latter-day Saints will choose to avoid suffering if they can, we believe it is a necessary component of mortal life.
In fact, in The Book of Mormon, the prophet Lehi who had led his family out of Jerusalem narrowly escaping its destruction by the Babylonians, says to his children who are struggling with life in a new and primitive environment,
“it must needs be that there is an
opposition in all things,”
and referring to the transgression of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, he tells them that if Adam had not transgressed, then they could neither have known any joy nor done any good, for they would not have known either misery or sin. Accordingly, in our view,
Grief is a Facet of Joy
joy can be felt in and through suffering; that
grief can cause joy,
because of what it does to us and for us through
the grace of Jesus Christ.
One of the things it does for us is to help us relate to the suffering of Christ himself.
We know that He suffered for the sins, transgressions and weaknesses of the world; and we believe that when we suffer we can gain an appreciation of what He did for us, minor in comparison though our suffering actually is. As we learn to appreciate Christ’s suffering, we can better comprehend the depth and extent of His love for us. This awareness opens our hearts and minds to more readily receive the spirit of testimony, to be filled with His love and to begin to know the indescribable joy that is caused by the presence of God in our individual lives.
Without knowing personal suffering,
we might not be able to personally know God.
Therefore we also believe that,
Grief is a Source of Sacred Experience
As it says on the mormon.org website, under the heading, “When Bad Things Happen”,
We get sick. Loved ones die. We lose our job or home. Our spouse is unfaithful. It’s hard not to ask why God allows us to suffer so much. Know that while God takes no pleasure in your suffering, your difficulties, regardless of their cause, can bring you closer to Him and even make you stronger |
One example we sometimes look to is when Joseph Smith was imprisoned in the ironically named Liberty Jail, and knowing that his family and followers were suffering further persecutions, he complained to God, essentially,
“Where are you?
Where are you hiding?
How long will your hand be withheld and
how long will you avoid seeing
the suffering of your people
before you are moved with compassion toward them?”
And then the Lord answered him and said,
“My son, peace be unto thy soul;
thine adversity and thine afflictions shall be but a small moment; and then,
if thou endure it well,
God shall exalt thee on high…”
and
“...know thou, my son,
all these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good.”
Note that God did not release His prophet from prison, but spoke of peace and promises. We believe that when we turn to God in our afflictions, then even if the affliction is not lifted from us, yet through His Spirit we will be given comfort and peace and the ability to endure.
In this way, we partake of the divine power of the atonement of Jesus Christ, which gives peace “not as the world giveth” (John 14:27) but His unique peace which heals us first inwardly before external things are made right.
Ultimately, as indicated in God’s words to Joseph Smith, we believe that enduring through suffering improves the individual:
“...all these things shall be for thy good ...God shall exalt thee”.
Therefore,
Grief is an Opportunity to Grow
But grief and other kinds of suffering in and of themselves do not necessarily cause us to grow well.
It is particularly when those feelings are filtered through an understanding of and belief in the redeeming, loving, enduring and eternal gospel and atonement of Jesus Christ, that they can help to transform us in positive ways.
One aspect of this refers again to our knowledge of Christ’s suffering. This knowledge may give us perspective that helps us avoid debilitating self-pity: not only is our grief a natural and necessary component of life, but Jesus Christ has suffered more. As the Lord also admonished Joseph Smith when recalling his tribulations at Liberty Jail:
The Son of Man descended below them all; art thou greater than he?
But aside from simple endurance, we believe that the greatest strengths that grow from grief are those aspects of our character that qualify us as moral and compassionate beings.
Mormon teaching is primarily moral rather than metaphysical.
Of course, there are metaphysical teachings a-plenty, but that, to us, is not the point.
The point is not about what we know,
so much as it is about what we do.
Therefore, in all things that we experience, good and bad, the Mormon tendency is to ask, “how can this make me more effective in doing good for others?”
Thus, my last heading is:
Grief is an Opportunity to Serve
he will take upon him death, that he may loose the bands of death…and he will take upon him [our\ infirmities, that his bowels may be filled with mercy, …that he may know…how to succor his people, |
In that he himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to succor them that are tempted. |
through the things that Jesus suffered in His mortal life,
He was better able to know how to serve and save us.
Likewise for us,
one source of the hope and joy that emerges
through our personal experiences of grief
or any form of suffering,
is the discovery of the ways in which they make us
better able to serve others,
obtaining both the compassion and the credibility
that experience alone can provide.