Is there any correlation between the sealing ordinance and giving birth to a child? Author Wendy Ulrich, whose most recent book, Live Up to Our Privileges, focuses on how women can use and access priesthood authority, recently sat down with All In host Morgan Jones and shared something the Spirit taught her while she was doing sealings in the temple.
Read the excerpt below or listen to the episode with Wendy here.
WU: We all participate in many ways in the work of the priesthood. I really felt that strongly when I went to the temple and I started really listening to the language there. [President] Ballard says we are “endowed with power” when we go to the temple and that we all are given that power, and I felt that in the temple—I see that in the temple in the ways that Joseph Smith said he was going to make of the Relief Society “a kingdom of priests.” That quote is still being used today in official places to describe what we do as women. We function as priests in the temple in a real way, in providing the ordinances of the gospel of Jesus Christ to all who have lived on this earth, and we are sort of vested with that priesthood power and authority when we go to the temple ourselves. And then when we return, we are acting in a priestly role for others who are waiting for those ordinances to be done for them.
MJ: That’s beautiful. It reminded me, I just went to an institute class last Wednesday and the teacher was talking about how when we go to a temple sealing that we’re participating in that ordinance by sustaining the ordinance just by being in attendance. He talked about how that’s [one reason] why we have to have a temple recommend to attend a sealing, because we’re adding our faith to that ordinance and kind of sustaining it for that couple. And I had never thought of it that way, but I love that.
WU: Yeah, that’s beautiful, and that’s one of the ways that we get authority is through a recommend. We are given a recommend by someone who has the keys that authorize us to go and perform ordinances in the temple, to go and receive ordinances and sustain ordinances and witness ordinances in the temple. We can be given authority through a calling and a setting apart. We can be given authority through an assignment that someone gives us to do the work of the priesthood in the world. So what I started looking at as I tried to understand this better is (1) what are the offices of the priesthood assigned to do and (2) what is my role as a woman in each of those offices? And it was helpful to me to realize that in every office there was important work that I did, or there are important things that I do just naturally in my life that are drawn on symbolically to explain what that work is that that office entails.
You bring up a sealing. I was very aware one day as I was doing sealings in the temple of children to parents that there are a lot of people who don’t need that ordinance done because they have been born in the covenant—they don’t need that ordinance to happen in the temple separately. That has already happened from the moment they were born, when they were born to a couple who had been sealed in the temple prior to that birth. And it’s really kind of interesting to think about it in that regard. There are only two ways a child gets sealed to the parents of that child. One is through a sealing ordinance in the temple, and one is through birth. When a woman who has been sealed in a covenant relationship gives birth to a child, she is in essence providing for that child something that can only be provided in another way through a sealing ordinance in the temple, that ordinance not being necessary if she has given birth to that child. So there are lots of ways that women participate in many aspects of the work of the priesthood, even including the sealing ordinances that are held so closely.
Listen to the full episode here.