Took me 20 years to comprehend Joseph
Late in his life, hunted and persecuted, Joseph Smith returned again and again to a single image of what his whole work was finally about. It was not a doctrine of separate souls saved one at a time. It was a welding.
He saw the human family as a chain reaching back through every generation, and he saw the work of salvation as the forging of that chain. Link by link. Father to child and child to father, until not one soul was left hanging alone at the end of the line.
Heaven was not a gathering of individuals who happened to be saved in the same place. It was one welded family. And the binding of it, the sealing of parents to children across the whole length of human time, was the very thing the restored gospel had come into the world to do.
"There is a welding link of some kind or other between the fathers and the children… For we without them cannot be made perfect; neither can they without us be made perfect." (D&C 128:18)
Postmodern America has built a secular civilization of separated souls. Every person sealed behind his own eyes, wired to everyone and bound to no one, more connected than any generation in history and lonelier than nearly any that came before.
And beneath the loneliness sits a quiet assumption we have half swallowed without ever deciding to believe it, that the isolation is simply the truth about us. That we arrive alone and leave alone, and spend the middle as fundamentally separate selves, straining across an abyss that cannot be closed.
This is the whole modern portrait of a person. An individual standing by himself, autonomous, complete in his solitude, a self for whom relationship is something added from outside rather than the very thing he is made of.
The LDS welding doctrine says that portrait is false at the deepest level there is.
You were never built to be a single soul. You were built to be a link, bound on every side, your own perfection tangled up in others and theirs in yours, so that not one of you arrives without the rest.
The isolation you feel in the worst hours is not your nature reporting in. It is your exile from it. It is the felt weight of the scattering, the ache of a family not yet welded back into one.
Joseph demolishes, in one stroke, the lonely picture of salvation, the idea that you get hauled out of the water one soul at a time while everyone else treads on their own.
No one is saved alone. Joseph put it in words I still cannot get all the way through in a single breath. We without them cannot be made perfect, neither can they without us.
The chain comes up whole or it does not come up.
I cannot be made complete without my fathers, and my fathers cannot be made complete without me.
The living and the dead are bound into a single body that has to be welded back together, link by link, before any part of it can be carried home.
This is true and is taught in the holy Temples of the Church of Jesus Christ… all over the world… to those with eyes to see and ears that hears and minds who listen to the still small voice of the Spirit of truth! Thank you!
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