Continuing form Bruce C. Hafen and his book “Covenant Hearts” Marriage and the Joy of Human Love, for the first post of this series click:The Doctrinal Pattern of Adam and Eve: No misery, No Joy, now continuing;
Eve, Mother Eve, Your sorrow and your faithful questions bring a hush across my heart.
I wonder if Adam and Eve ever worried about how much fault was theirs for losing Cain and Abel. Did Lehi and Sariah ever wonder about Laman and Lemuel? What does it tell us about what we could face in our own marriages, our own families, that these two “first couples” from the scriptures had to contend with so much family sorrow?
We may have ready answers to all these questions, but we do know that because they accepted the Atonement of Christ, Adam and Eve, Lehi and Sariah, could all grow from their experience without suffering irreparable damage. With their family life as their main place of spiritual schooling, they learned from both misery and joy, discovering firsthand that “God . . . shall consecrate thine afflictions for thy gain” (2 Nephi 2:2).
Adam and Eve didn’t understand all of this just by tasting the forbidden fruit. The fruit was but the beginning of a lifelong quest for meaning—not an event but an extended process, marked by having children and discovering misery, sin, goodness, joy, and the very meaning of eternal life. After all this then, when Adam and Eve returned “home” to God’s presence being with Him in act three was very different than being with Him in act one. They didn’t simply return to the innocence of Eden, as if the Atonement wiped out their very experience.
Rather, they progressed, until they reached the Lord’s presence. But this time they understood what they never could have known in Eden—now they knew what it meant to be there, with Him, and with each other. This journey is in polar opposition to the blank drawn by Macbeth’s idiot, signifies everything. T.S. Elliot captured Adam’s process of discovery: “We shall not cease from exploration, And the end of all our exploring, Will be to arrive where we started And know the peace for the first time.” 2
Doctrinally, the experience of Adam and Eve makes clear that the Fall was not a terrible mistake, as most Christian religions portray it. Without the Fall, we couldn’t have known good and evil, we couldn’t have known joy—we couldn’t even have been born.
Our understanding of covenant marriage is all bound up, then, with the doctrines of the plan of salvation, the Fall, and the Atonement. Since Augustine’s day, traditional Christianity has wrongly viewed the Fall as a preventable disaster. But the Restoration views it as an essential step in our Heavenly Father’s plan for His children. The fall introduced the process by which we can learn from personal experience the central meanings of existence.
Our prototype for this learning is in the marriage and experience of Adam and Eve. Much of our essential learning is together as a couple, like Adam and Eve together facing the opposition that “must needs be” (2 Nephi 2:11). Thus marriage—and overcoming troubles together—has a religious doctrinal significance so powerful that we often underestimate it.
Before their temple marriage, each couple learns through the temple endowment about the perspective of eternity on the opposition they will encounter in this world of time. The endowment will also show them, as Elder Bruce R. McConkie explained, that “the marriage of Adam and Eve is a pattern for all others.”3
Married couples who sense all of his instinctively strive to sustain and lift each other, as Adam and Eve did. But most married couples can hardly grasp what await them when they happily walk arm in arm, from the garden like temple grounds. If they did realize what lies ahead, they would probably walk more slowly, like Adam and Eve driven from the garden, bowed down in unspoken sorrow. Do they know that it is only a matter of time until trouble comes and that it will keep returning, because learning from hard things is what life is about? I liked the honesty and insight with which our six older children and their spouses shared their own Adam and Eve like perspectives with their youngest sister and her fiancé the night before their wedding. On this, her last night as a single person” (the theme of the evening!), with no platitudes allowed, each person shared one insight he or she had learned, from experience, about marriage.~~~Bruce C. Hafen and his book “Covenant Hearts” Marriage and the Joy of Human Love (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2005), p.70-74 (continued)
