When a Mormon is sealed to a spouse for eternity, what happens in those situations in which one or the other spouse isn’t really that great? Maybe even arguably abusive? They’ve been sealed and are stuck?
LDS doesn’t have purgatory, through which someone would be perfected and cleansed of their sins, so the suffering spouse doesn’t have that to look forward to.
As a Catholic in a tough marriage, I believe in sticking it out and ‘offering it up’ while here on earth, but there are times when I’m awfully glad it’ll be over one day.
That said, even if it wasn’t, I could at least count on purgatory to cleanse my husband and myself of our problems.
The LDS church does have a procedure in place for Mormons to unseal themselves from someone in the case of divorce. Though it may matter to them the whole thing is pointless anyway because there is no such thing as celestial marriage. Christ says in the New Testament that there is no marriage in heaven–we will “neither marry nor be given in marriage” in heaven (Matthew 22:30). Like Mormonism itself, eternal marriage is something Joseph Smith made up with another one of his many “revelations,” none of which are true. He was a complete and utter fraud, a false prophet, and actually a pretty bad person when you look at his actual history–not the romanticized, rosy one that the LDS church puts forward.
The whole eternal marriage thing sounds great if everyone is living well and striving for holiness, but for many…oy vey!
If you spend any amount of time thinking it through, though, eternal marriage is not great because the whole idea makes absolutely no sense. The worst thing about the idea of eternal marriage is that LDS are taught that if they fail to be sealed in the temple, they will lose their family in the hereafter. So they grow up believing that they must do this or else.
On a side note, eternal marriage in the Mormon church still allows for polygamy, even though the LDS church says it no longer practices it. An LDS man can be sealed for eternity to another woman if his first spouse dies, and they will be his plural wives in the celestial kingdom. An LDS woman, on the other hand, cannot be sealed to more than one man in her lifetime because she cannot have two husbands in the celestial kingdom.
The whole LDS idea of heaven then becomes very complicated very quickly with men and women becoming gods and goddesses over their own worlds, children being sealed to their parents for all eternity yet going off to their own worlds with their own eternal spouses at the same time. It’s a giant headache and most LDS really don’t bother thinking it through. The just accept it without question and move on to really important things like making sure they avoid caffeinated beverages or two-piece swimsuits.
The Catholic concept of heaven is much simpler. There is no marriage in heaven because every human being ever born is really our brother or our sister as we all have the same true Father—who is God. Marriage is meant for our earthly life as a way to raise families, but our true family is really the entire human race.
