Temples

I feel fairly certain that Dornan Willett would have been shocked to learn that his years of devotion were newsworthy. I thought of gentle Willett this week as news media once again made a story out of the practice of baptisms for the dead. His example showed me some of what I think the media coverage — as fair-minded as some of the coverage has tried to be — has missed.

Calling proxy baptism in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints "eccentric, not offensive," Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby wrote recently that "Mormons undergoing peaceful rituals in their own temples aren't on the list" of the "very real, very dangerous enemies" to Judaism. "In Judaism, conversion after death is a concept without meaning," wrote Jacoby, who is Jewish. "No after-the-fact rites in this world can possibly change the Jewishness of the men, women, children and babies whom the Nazis, in their obsessive hatred, singled out for extermination.

In a Republican presidential campaign marked by controversies over birth control, moon bases and the proper means of transporting a dog, it was perhaps inevitable that incantations spoken on behalf of the dead would get their turn: In a gesture widely covered by the U.S. media, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel has called on Mitt Romney to denounce the Mormon practice of posthumously baptizing non-Mormons - Jewish Holocaust victims, in particular. Here in Canada, former Canadian Jewish Congress president Bernie Farber is publicizing the issue. In a column (see above), he writes that, "the effort at posthumous conversion stings our collective Jewish soul."

A New York Times columnist has apologized for using an anti-Mormon slur about LDS undergarments on Twitter. On Wednesday during the Arizona Republican debate, Charles Blow's Twitter feed said:

Toward the end of May, 1970, I stood waist high in water in a baptismal font of a temple in Hamilton, New Zealand, while the name of my deceased father was read aloud. Moments later, on his behalf, I was buried in the biblically mandated full-immersion baptism that is so powerfully symbolic of rebirth and entry into the kingdom of God. That first visit to a temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints --and my first experience of what Mormons call “baptism for the dead”--was one of the most intensely significant religious experiences of my life.

While serving as a stake president, I interviewed a 30-something couple and their two young boys for a first-time temple recommend. They were about to become an eternal family, but for their youngest son, the price for that privilege was everything. The youngest son was fidget-appropriate for a 5-year-old. As I interviewed his parents, Jimmy couldn’t take the motionless moments any longer. He leaped from his mother’s lap, smacking his head on the corner of my desk.