The Highest Good
A small part of the chapter entitled "Participants in the Divine Nature," from the Book, The God Who Weeps, by Terryl & Fiona Givens
(How Mormonism Makes Sense of Life)
"Heaven will consist of those relationships that mean the most to us now. Plato, the father of Western philosophy, believed our paramount moral duty was 'becoming like god so far as is possible' and was certain that to do so was to honor, not to blaspheme against, the Divine. Genuine love always desires the highest good for the objects of its affection. We think his words on this subject are among the most inspired ever spoken in the ancient world, even if they originated in a culture far removed from the traditions of Judeo-Christianity.
He who framed this whole universe . . . was good, and one who is good can never become jealous of anything. And so, being free of jealousy, he wanted everything to become as much like himself as was possible..
The common view today is that the traditional family is an earthly institution that evolved largely in response to sociocultural or economic forces and motives. It is true that family composition and roles have changed over time. But given our relationship with God that preceded the Creation, the family may be said to have origins just as old. In this sense, one may say “the earthly is the image of the heavenly.” In other words, “that which is earthly conform[s] to that which is heavenly,” or “that which is temporal [is] in the likeness of that which is spiritual,” not just the other way around.
What God envisions for us, what His Son prayed most earnestly for toward the end of His life, was for us to achieve the harmony He shares with His Father. In essence, we are invited to participate in the heavenly family of God Himself. Not through metaphorical melding, but through the studied, arduous practice of a holy life that prepares us to love as He does. Parley Pratt wrote that 'our natural affections . . . are the very main-springs of life and happiness. They are the cement of all virtuous and heavenly society. . . . From this union of affection, spring all the other relationships, social joys and affections, diffused through every branch of human existence. Man was designed for a social being.'
A child we knew wanted an ant farm. Year after year, he asked for—and received—an ant farm. Left to his own devices, he would happily hasten outside, collect cupfuls of black ants (red ones were too fierce), and carefully place them in their plastic city. Then he would sit back and watch them.
Over the next few days (they would) wander aimlessly, dwindle, and die. He was never one to read directions, and his dad was not one to supervise childish projects. Only years later did he realize he needed to order a queen ant, so they could all function as a community.
Ants, like bees and termites, are social. They cannot survive individually. The philosopher Aristotle famously defined humans, too, as …'social animals.' But our humanity involves more than just living in communities, or forming social arrangements, or practicing the division of labor. We are, fundamentally and inescapably, relational beings.
Across time and culture, societies have imposed penalties and chastisement in the cruel recognition of this fact. Many ancients considered exile from one’s community a more grievous penalty than death. Religious groups have practiced excommunication and shunning as the ultimate sanction, and preachers project outer darkness, or isolation from God and loved ones, as a burning beyond hell. In a penal context, many consider solitary confinement a form of psychological torture; in prolonged cases, it can lead to complete mental collapse. The most terrifying specter that haunts the modern psyche is not death or disease or nuclear annihilation. It is loneliness.
We pass through birth and death as individuals. But the years in between are filled with the unceasing search for community, for companionship, for intimacy. There is no self-evident reason why this should be so, and why an existence alone should be fodder not just for melancholy musings, but for nightmares and madness.
Relationships are the core of our existence because they are the core of God’s, and we are in His image. God’s nature and life are the simple extension of that which is most elemental, and most worthwhile, about our life here on earth. However rapturous or imperfect, fulsome or shattered, our knowledge of love has been; we sense it is the very basis and purpose of our existence. It is a belonging that we crave because it is one we have always known.
In some cases, belief in our premortal existence was abandoned precisely because it implied a connection to the divine that was thought to be blasphemous, to span a divide thought to be unbridgeable. The church father Tertullian explicitly rejected preexistence in just such terms. He thought attributing an eternal past to the spirit “put it on a par with God.” Making the soul 'unborn' suggested to his mind perfect divinity, 'which properly belonged only to God.'
A century later, the church father Arnobius agreed that only those with 'an extravagant opinion of themselves' believed that souls were not created at birth, but were literally 'descended from that parent and sire, divine.'
Extravagant or not, the emphasis on a heaven that recovers and extends relationships forged in this life and before, gives meaning and focus to our life in the here and now. Our growth into godliness is a process directed and enabled by God, in accord with an inherent capacity. It is in the continuity of our lives now with our lives hereafter that we find rescue from the dangerous heaven of fairy tales. We say rescue, because a recurrent temptation in Christian history has been to imagine a heaven that is an escape from the hard slog of life, a sudden liberation from life’s disappointments, shattered dreams, and wounded relationships.
Nietzsche was right when he said Christians had a tendency to turn away from this life in contempt, to dream of other-worldly delights rather than resolve worldly problems. We humans have a lamentable tendency to spend more time theorizing the reasons behind human suffering, than working to alleviate human suffering, and in imagining a heaven above, than creating a heaven in our homes and communities.
What we call the virtues are precisely those attributes of character that best suit us to live harmoniously, even joyfully, in society. Kindness only exists when there is someone to whom we show kindness. Patience is only manifest when another calls it forth. So it is with mercy, generosity, and self-control. What we may have thought was our private pathway to salvation, was intended all along as a collaborative enterprise, though we often miss the point.
The confusion is understandable, since our current generation’s preference for “spirituality” over “religion” is often a sleight of hand that confuses true discipleship with self-absorption.
Holiness is found in how we treat others, not in how we contemplate the cosmos. As our experiences in marriages, families, and friendship teach us, it takes relationships to provide the friction that wears down our rough edges and sanctifies us. And then, and only then, those relationships become the environment in which those perfected virtues are best enjoyed. We need those virtues not just here, but eternally because 'the same sociality that exists here, will exist there, only it will be coupled with celestial glory, which glory we do not now enjoy.' (D&C 130:2)
Christ is the model to which we aspire. C. S. Lewis wrote, 'The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose. It is even doubtful . . . whether the whole universe was created for any other purpose.'
What we are most certain of is that our natural affections . . . are the cement of all virtuous and heavenly society. Ultimately, we understand God’s nature, and human salvation, to be the simple amplification of that which is most elemental, and most worthwhile, about our life here on earth. The divine nature of man, and the divine nature of God, are shown to be the same—they are rooted in the will to love, at the price of pain, but in the certainty of joy.
Heaven holds out the promise of a belonging that is destined to extend and surpass any that we have ever known in this wounded world.
We believe in a heaven—and heavenly inhabitants—that are dynamic, not static, in their existence. Nothing in the ever-evolving cosmos God has fashioned, nothing in the relentless self-perfecting processes of species and individuals, nothing in the insatiable longings of the human heart, suggests otherwise. Even so, preachers and poets alike have been much more effective at portraying the torments of the damned than the (bliss) of the blessed."