You do what with the dead?

I did give up Hatchlings, and still struggling to find writing time. Unfortunately, the other big contenders, work and sleep, refuse to budge. I have had some good journal sessions, and letter writing, so it’s not that nothing is happening, but I still hope for more.

Here is that first hard topic I mentioned. It’s religious, and one thing that makes this more difficult is knowing the amount of context to provide—how much is necessary? Where my weakness is the tendency to provide too much exposition, and to not have enough time to finish, well, there’s a vicious cycle in there somewhere.
Anyway, there has been some news recently about Anne Frank being baptized posthumously by someone in the LDS church, and protests against that.

Here is where I try and give a brief background, as someone who is not in any way a spokesperson for the Church, official or otherwise. If you believe that baptism is necessary, as the Bible says, and that God is no respecter of persons, as the Bible also says, and you know that not everyone lives and dies on Earth even has a chance for that, it can seem very wrong, and it leads to weird theological explanations and disbelief.

What we know is that there is more than this life. People can continue to be taught and to make covenants after they have died, in the spirit, but someone physically needs to go through the ordinance of baptism for them. Christ preaching to the dead and baptisms for dead are both mentioned in the Bible (1st Peter 4:6 and 1st Corinthians 15:29).

Something that we do is research our family history and do this work for our ancestors, allowing them the opportunity to be baptized and binding the generations together. We believe that the promise in Malachi, chapter 4:5-6 is about this:
“Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord. And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smith the earth with a curse.”

One thing we definitely believe is that it is each person’s choice. If they don’t want to accept the baptism, it does not matter how many times we do it, it does not count. Something that also logically makes sense is that we believe this is true, and that it matters, but if we are wrong, then what we are doing is really meaningless. My point there is that no one is becoming Mormon against their will.

Obviously, we are supposed to be doing this for our family members, but other people have had projects in the past where they have focused on Civil War dead or so on, and what really created the controversy is when some people strongly objected to Holocaust victims being baptized. After all, they were killed for being Jews, and some felt it was demeaning to detract from that. I do not agree that it is demeaning, but I understand the sentiment, and besides we are supposed to be working on our family lines.

Since 1995 the Church has routinely published reminders on that (we just got another round), and at first I found it somewhat irritating that it was necessary. I felt that anyone who was going outside of the norm was doing it out of ego—like it was not special enough to find great-great-grandmother like everyone else; I’m going to save Marilyn Monroe! (Seriously, I remember one person who was very proud of having baptized Moliere.)

With this last story, I ended up feeling differently, and what made the difference was reading that the latest time happened in a temple in the Dominican Republic. I started to feel like maybe it was not someone who knew the boundaries and just did not want to stay within them, but maybe it was a newer member who found this and thought it was great, and had read The Diary of Anne Frank and felt a connection to her (how can you read it without feeling a connection?), and just wanted to offer that gift.

I’m not saying that the restrictions should be raised, but it reminded me that people aren’t always just being bone-headed. There can also be kindness, and affection, and a desire to do good. And really, there is nothing wrong with this particular desire—we’ve just agreed to hold off on it because some people get offended by it.

I do have more to say about this at some point, both about discovering my own family, and doing work for a friend, which is its own story, but for now my point is just, hey, my church is made up of people. Yours probably is too. Even if you have no religion, and are atheist or agnostic, you are probably affiliated with other humans. It is worthwhile to have some understanding for that, and to have some compassion for good intentions and a desire to serve.