Many thanks for allowing me to attend your seminar at Harvard Divinity School.
I will never be able to convey how beneficial this is for me on many different levels. Hence, I am deeply grateful.
My initial and immediate reactions to tonight's discussion were two:
1. The Church is a powerful marketing machine. With its varieties of doctrines, structural organization, social set up, individual involvement, policies and more, it gives something to think and do to many many people, which translate into a successful enterprise all together- all with Christ at the center of it.
I think it is pretty darn amazing.
2. If I had known 24 years ago when I first started investigating the church, what you so well presented tonight in two hours, I doubt I would have joined the church at age 19.
But today I am 44, I am a mother of three wonderful children and the wife of a good man and successful husband and a couple of thoughts came to mind about the polygamy issue.
Is Adam not portrayed as a polygamist because he is at least one step ahead compared to the other prophets who were polygamists: he took part to the creation of the earth with jeovah. He must have gained that status somehow- maybe by practicing the higher law of polygamy? Hence Eve may be the wife in this creation we call hearth. But there could be different creations elsewhere with other wives of Adam...
2.in regards to Joseph Smith trying to understand from God what this polygamy thing is truly about.
Could it be that all the other prophets mentioned had not yet achieved their state of exaltation of being with Christ to create worlds and that the only way to achieve that communion with Christ would be through celestial polygamist marriage by proper authority? Once the communion is achieved, then he can go on to be like Adam and participate in the creation of an earth?
Then I also thought that I am 44 yrs old and after 22 years of marriage, I am tired of being everything and anything for my husband , my children and even extended family.
If my primary responsibility is to nurture and raise my children, today at age 44 perhaps there is some wisdom in the possibility of relinquishing some of my duties and obligations of being a mother and a wife to some young and more energetic bride from time to time. It would take a very mature, older and special type of woman to accept this scenario. And it would be one way to avoid the physical and emotional destruction I have felt for years and probably will continue to feel.
But the man would by necessity need to be a man of God , someone's who is financially, emotionally and spiritually stable to be able to satisfy all those needs in her life.
But then, all this makes me thing what if we got it all wrong.? What if this has nothing to do with the big players involved - the adults- but only the children? What better environment for a mother to raise her children in the spiritually, physically and financial stable environment provided by her mature and stable husband?
Could all this go back to the initial plan of happiness? All those spirits, thousands, millions of them waiting to come to hearth to obtain and experience a body. A man can literally generate in about 30 seconds. A woman has to roughly wait nine months before giving birth. It will take for ever to multiply and replenish the earth nine months at the time...but if we had more wombs in the same family it might take less...
So, questions: what was the real problem? Emma Smith not being ready , because still young, to relinquish some of her duties and responsibilities to another or other younger women? Or was Joseph not financially, emotionally and physically stable enough to provide for her the support needed for this "next level"adventure"?
