The Gospel and Romantic Love

As I young man I was aware of the sacred nature of sexuality but, as is too often the case amongst our youth, only obtained a superficial understanding of the subject. In church the topic often came up, as it should, and we were warned of the sadness and affliction that arise when sexuality is abused. Now, years later, as I study the gospel and think about my own life and observe the goings on in peoples' lives around me, the true magnitude of the power and sacredness of human sexuality is coming into focus more and more. I now realize that the love between a man and woman, both in this life and in the life to come, holds power beyond our understanding and is a vital part of what is required to return to and become like our Father in Heaven.

I recently came across a magnificent discourse on the subject by Bruce C. Hafen titled, The Gospel and Romantic Love. This talk was given in 1982 at BYU. At the time Hafen was serving as President of Ricks College. I listened to the talk in MP3 format about four or five months ago and then, just yesterday evening on our way down to San Diego for Sarah's brother Rob's wedding, I listened to it again. Although the whole talk is wonderful, I'd like to share just one excerpt from the talk which is actually an excerpt from something written by D. H. Lawrence:

Never was an age more sentimental, more devoid of real feeling, more exaggerated in false feeling, than our own. . . . The [TV] and the film are mere counterfeit emotion all the time, the current press and literature the same. People wallow in emotion: counterfeit emotion. They lap it up: they live in it and on it. . . .

. . . A young couple fall in counterfeit love, and fool themselves and each other completely. But, alas, counterfeit love is good cake but bad bread. It produces a fearful emotional indigestion. . . .

. . . The peculiar hatred of people who have not loved one another, but who have pretended to, . . . is one of the phenomena of our time. . . .

. . . [But there is a] profound instinct of fidelity in a man, which is, as shown by world-history, just a little deeper and more powerful than his instinct of faithless sexual promiscuity. . . . The instinct of fidelity is perhaps the deepest instinct in the great complex we call sex. Where there is real sex there is the underlying passion for fidelity. And the prostitute knows this, because she is up against it. She can only keep men who [want the counterfeit: and these men] she despises. . . .

. . . The [Chief Thinkers of our generation know] nothing of [this]. To [them,] all sex is infidelity and only infidelity is sex. Marriage is sexless, null. Sex is only manifested in infidelity, and the queen of sex is the chief prostitute. . . .

This is the teaching of the . . . Chief Thinkers of our generation. And the vulgar public agrees with them entirely. Sex is a thing you don't have except to be naughty with. Apart from . . . infidelity and fornication, sex doesn't exist. . . .

[However, the truth is that the Christian] Church created marriage by making it a sacrament, a sacrament of man and woman united in . . . communion, . . . and never to be separated, except by death. And even when separated by death, still not freed from the marriage. . . . Marriage, making one complete body out of two incomplete ones, and providing for the complex development of the man's soul and the woman's soul in unison, throughout a life-time. Marriage sacred and inviolable, the great way of earthly fulfilment for man and woman, in unison. . . .

. . . And this, this oneness gradually accomplished throughout a life-time in twoness, is the highest achievement of time or eternity. From it all things human spring, children and beauty and well-made things; all the true creations of humanity. . . . The will of God is that He wishes this, this oneness, to take place, fulfilled over a lifetime. . . .

. . . The oneness of . . . man and woman in marriage completes the universe, as far as humanity is concerned, completes the streaming of the sun and the flowing of the stars. [D. H. Lawrence, Essays on Sex, Literature and Censorship (New York: Twayne, 1953), pp. 96­111]

Spiritual Identity Theft

Excerpt taken from:

Robert C. Oaks, “Your Divine Heritage,” Ensign, Apr 2008, 46–50

From a devotional address given at Brigham Young University on March 21, 2006. For the full text in English, please visit http://speeches.byu.edu.

Spiritual Identity Theft

One of the great blessings of understanding our true eternal identity as a child of God is that our personal sense of self-worth can only be high. He loves each one of His children. We are each His son or daughter, with the potential to become like Him. In the gospel plan based on moral agency, we fail only if we make choices that lead to failure. But in that same light, we can make choices that will lead to our marvelous success. One of the great beauties of the gospel is that critical decisions are ours for the making.

Let us briefly discuss a significant threat to achieving our divine potential. Today we receive many warnings about identity theft. Some of you may have experienced the trauma resulting from this fraud. In our cybernetic world of trust and rapid transmission of medical, financial, and other personal data, we are vulnerable to exploitation of our identifying details. Theft of our numerical mortal identity can be costly and cause us a great deal of misery. But the theft of our eternal identity has much longer effects and more dire consequences. I am not talking about addresses, credit cards, or any other identifying numbers. I am talking about something much more basic and more important than who the world thinks you are. I am talking about who you think you are.

We know we are sons and daughters of God, with the potential to become like Him as described in His plan of happiness. We know this potential is achieved through our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and through obedience to the eternal laws and principles embedded in His gospel. We also know that Satan is totally dedicated to thwarting and derailing this marvelous plan-of-happiness knowledge and process. We know that one of his primary tools is to entice us to forget who we really are—to fail to realize or to forget our divine potential. This is the cruelest form of identity theft.

How does Satan do it? He is quite straightforward and predictable. First, he attempts to prompt doubts in our minds about our divine potential. He even cultivates doctrine in the world implying we are much less than we really are. He undermines our faith—and thus our confidence—in our ability to achieve our potential. He strives to bring us to a mind-set in which we believe that we, individually, are not good enough to ever achieve our celestial goals.

In this same vein Satan seeks to convince us that we are so bad that even the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ is not sufficient to reach down to our lowly depths and draw us up unto our Savior. He tempts us into paths that seem to verify his cynicism about our grand and glorious potential.

He then hedges his bets by surrounding us with the gaudy, glitzy filth of pornography and other forms of immorality and thus precludes our being led by the Holy Spirit. He is a clever fellow with many tricks to make us forget who we really are: sons and daughters of God with divine potential.

Remembering Who We Are

Satan does not want us to understand our divine potential, but the Lord certainly does. He has provided us with countless scriptures and prophetic promptings to help us counter and resist these satanic pulls. One of the most powerful of these promptings is found when Helaman, under the Lord’s direction, counseled his sons, Nephi and Lehi. He repeatedly admonished them to remember who they were and whence their marvelous spiritual heritage came: “And now, my sons, remember, remember that it is upon the rock of our Redeemer, who is Christ, the Son of God, that ye must build your foundation; that when the devil shall send forth his mighty winds, yea, his shafts in the whirlwind, yea, when all his hail and his mighty storm shall beat upon you, it shall have no power over you to drag you down to the gulf of misery and endless wo, because of the rock upon which ye are built, which is a sure foundation, a foundation whereon if men build they cannot fall” (Helaman 5:12).

“Remembering” is a very important principle to help us keep in mind our true identity. This is why we partake of the sacrament each week: to renew our covenants we have made with the Lord in the waters of baptism, to remember Him and to keep His commandments, to refresh in our minds who we are and what our role is in God’s plan.

This is why we go back to the temple: to renew our covenants that we have made in those sacred halls and to remind ourselves of these covenants and obligations. When we thus remember these sacred obligations, Satan’s storms and attacks will not turn us from our quest—from pursuing our divine potential.

I pray that we may ever remember who we are: sons and daughters of a loving Father, who have the potential to return to His side and dwell with Him as celestial beings.

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My commentary:
I was struck by this discourse as I listened to it through the speakers of my car while driving to the university this afternoon. "Spiritual identity theft" is such an apt term for what is happening in our world. Satan, the negative force of the universe, is constanty attempting to steal our identities, to make us forget who we really are, to keep us from remembering our divine heritage and from whence we came.

In progress, I'll add to this later