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Lee Edward Wiles-Op

After winding upward on a curving inclined ramp through the middle of the North Visitors Center at Salt Lake City's Temple Square, one might be asked by a pair of young sister missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (i.e., LDS, Mormons) whether s/he would like to "see a short presentation on the family." Without inquiring as to the type of family that might be presented, the visitor responds affirmatively. S/he is then led further upward—moving away from an eleven foot replica of Bertel Thorvaldsen's Christus that stands framed by a depiction of the cosmos, its gaze cast downward, hands and feet displaying the wounds inflicted on Christ during his crucifixion. On the next floor, s/he would be ushered into a small, bland room beyond which a dark cavern—space yet to be explored—lingers just out of reach of the room's slightly dimmed light. The visitor is asked to sit, and s/he does.

Following a brief introduction from the sister missionaries, the lights dim further, and the television mounted on the wall comes to life with a story of generations, each one feeling out its relationship with the others, discovering along the way that though life provides a number of uncertainties, the love of kinship bonds appropriately formed, "sealed," and maintained can extend into an eternal existence. The visitor moves from room-to-room, ushered through small replicas of two well-kept, clean, middle-class homes. In each space, passages from a document titled "The Family: A Proclamation to the World" appear on television screens, and a new trial or mystery presents itself to the characters, resolved in the end by appropriate acts and desires of kinship.

During the presentation, new mixed-sex parents ponder the process by which a child passed from a pre-mortal spiritual life into the body in which she could become their daughter, entwined within a specific set of kinship relations that would shape her desires and feelings of family in the future. Next, a father postpones necessary work on his home to play with his children, only after first telling them that he was too busy. In subtle, indirect ways, a grandmother explains to her granddaughter the different types of love that are expressed by her husband toward the three generations of his living family. Finally, after the grandfather and grandmother both die, that granddaughter, still in her youth, expresses her desire to again live as a family with her grandparents after she passes away.

These feelings of kinship so established and maintained on earth continue into the afterlife and from there the desires for and of the dead work upon the living, fashioning their feelings for living kin and providing models by which appropriate families can be organized, recognized, and sustained. With the support of the Iles Fund for Study of Myth, I visited this and other sites of significance to Mormonism, many of which are intimately linked with the project of forming, discovering, displaying, sustaining, and eternalizing families within specific forms. From the ward buildings in which Saints worship together to the Family History Library, which is the flagship gateway to the largest collection of genealogical data ever assembled, to the temples in which families are sealed within specifically arranged units for eternity, the Latter-day Saints aspire to the goal of not only arranging all of humanity into a particular family structure in genealogical charts but also of fostering the feelings by which that structure can become embodied in the living and of discouraging those feelings that detract from that embodiment. It is in the spaces owned by the Church but also in mundane life that this project is enacted, in domains broadly recognized as religious but also in those generally seen as secular and political.

As our imagined visitor views the conclusion of the presentation described above, a soothing, baritone voice imparts the message to him/her that "death is not the end..." Neither, however, is it the beginning. Whatever follows mortal life, the Mormon Church's family-building projects have efficacy among the living, and it is the foundations and effects of that project that I hope to understand as my graduate work progresses.