Eternal Polygamy

When the subject of polygamy ever came up in church in the lessons or discussions, it was always quickly asserted that we don’t practice that anymore, that it was something in the church’s past because there were more faithful women than men, and that you will be excommunicated if you practiced it now. I always found it a difficult subject and wished that it hadn’t ever been practiced, though in the back of my thoughts I knew that the church taught that polygamy would be practiced in the eternities, and sometimes jokes would be made about someone being a second wife in heaven. The present president of the church and his councillor are both married to their second wives as their first wives passed away, but what about a woman whose first husband passes away, if she remarries she can’t have both husbands in the eternities. When I was about 20, living in England, I had a conversation with a sister of our ward in the ladies toilets. This sister had two young children but her husband was less active, she told me that her first husband had tragically died in a car accident about a year after their marriage, which had been performed in an LDS Temple, ‘for time and all eternity ‘. Several years later she met and fell in love with her present husband, but because she already had a Temple marriage they couldn’t be married in the Temple to each other and had to make do with a civil marriage ‘until death to they part’. If she had been a man who lost his first wife then there would have been no problem as men can be sealed to more than one wife. The really sad thing was that her children who where born to her second husband were automatically sealed to her and her first husband, an not to her second husband, their biological father. No wonder that her present husband was less active in the church and was very sad about this policy. I remember her telling me that she loved her first husband but they had only been together for such a short time and she now loved her second husband and had been with him for more than ten years, and he was the father of her children. What a difficult choice for her to make and what a weight of sadnesses that this family had to carry. Just recently I read Carol Lynn Pearson’s book ‘The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy’ and read about young widowed women not being able to find a new husband in the church because potential husbands didn’t want to loose their chance of having a Temple marriage, these young widows faced a life remaining singel. Carol’s book contains innumerable accounts of how lives have been tragically effected by polygamy in the past and in the present. My next Blog will be an account of a man who lived in the nineteenth century whose story I found in an old Newspaper and whose own life was tragically effected through polygamy.