do they consummate the sealing by proxy for them, too? My friend brought that up today while we were discussing her sister's temple wedding. I told her that I'd never heard that and I'd ask here on RfM!

Good Question. I'm also curious about the answer. Since they allow not married couples or even 2 strangers to act as proxy wife and husband it is a legit question. I was told that with every proxy endowment, sealing, baptism we also renew and strenghten our own covenants. But i never got it from an official source. Only from random members but also bishs and templeworker among them.

the LAST time I went to the temple. They didn't pull my husband aside. I was sealed over and over and over and over again to some weirdo that thought he'd found his true love. I had 40 minutes to sit in the foyer waiting for my husband. It gave me the time I'd always wanted to meditate (but I wanted to meditate in the celestial room--never even got to sit down in there). After this experience, I never have set foot in a temple again.

What do they do to seal by proxy? There's not a literal imagine that comes to mind, like baptisms for the dead.

When I did sealings, early 80s, I knelt at the altar, held hands with a perfect female stranger while the officiater repeated the sealing prayer over and over.

I also took turns being a proxy for children being sealed to parents. I knealt at the end of the altar, put my hand over the clasped hands if the folks representing the parents.

And luckily no marriage beds were included (at least not in the sealing room!) ;)

Kind of puts a damper on your own marriage experience. It just didn't feel right.

A sister in our group was a convert and had turned in a lot of ancestors names for proxy temple work. Somehow she got permission to have the initiatory, endowment and sealing done for her ancestors.

I got to play the part of a couple of husbands while she played the wives parts (I think she had a crush on me) the other missionaries in our group played daughters and sons.

No consummations were done that time. Did I miss my opportunity?

I did that too! Wouldn't it be funny if we were in the same group? It would have been fall of '96 for me.

Back when we were TBM, my husband and I would celebrate our anniversary each year by going to the temple and doing proxy sealing sessions.

In the early years - before I did much of our family's genealogy -- they would just give us a bunch of couples names who needed sealings, and we'd do them. It was hard on the knees, because you would just kneel there for close to an hour, and do one sealing after another after another...

We were NOT the people who were baptized by proxy for these individuals, nor were we the people who sat through the endowment for these individuals. We ONLY did the sealings for them. I guess we must have done maybe 40 or 50 different couples during that time.


Later, I did a huge amount of our family's genealogy, and so we'd be sealed by proxy to our own ancestors.

Youth in our ward did the baptisms -- except for my parents, my husband's parents, and my beloved grandmother -- we insisted on doing EVERYTHING for these special people. Even the baptisms that youth usually do.

But anyway, the youth would do most of the baptisms for our family, and then we and other members of our ward would do the initiatory and endowment work for our family.

Then, my husband and I would do all the sealings ourselves - usually saving them up so we could do them on or near our own wedding anniversary date, as a way of celebrating our own temple marriage.


I don't think many TBM couples celebrate their wedding anniversary each year by doing sealings in the temple.

But we sure did -- right up to the year we left TSCC...

Well for me...

I must have read the BoM at least 20 times in my youth and while on a mission. I could only bring myself to read the Old Testament 2 or 3 times. And the new testament I can't remember how many times but quite a few.

Without getting TOO crude, I personally feel that if I was out in the wilderness doing my own business and I had no toilet paper, the first thing I would do is tear out the pages of the old testament (after all, you can justify incest and genocide and just about everything in your life out of that book. Then the rest of the books other than the first four gospels in the new testament next. It's not that I'm a Jesus freak, the thing is that reading those 4 gospels has seemed like a good way to live life. Not everything...but the passages about loving others, trying not to get overly thrilled about wealth, giving to others...not throwing stones at whores (I use that word loosely...many women know any other way) and whatnot..well, they can be good guides on how to form a decent and peaceful society. But the rest of the new testament? Well...pretty much infused with so much BS that I can't take it seriously.

So that's my first beef with this whole baptism for the dead. The second thing? There's one freaking sentence talking about baptism for the dead. And it ends in a freaking question mark. Was the writer being sarcastic? I mean if you go to the life of Christ, whether you believe in him or not, there is no statement about Baptism for the Dead. And therefore, it doesnt personally hold any "water" pun intended...to me.

And to continue my observation. What kind of ridiculous higher power or being admit or deny admittence to heaven based on such a ridiculous notion? I mean it makes me think of how an 8 year old is getting baptized and it a single thread of their clothes doesn't get buried in the water with them the baptism isn't valid. What happens if no-one notices that? Do they get to heaven only to find that their baptism is null and void?

Lastly, the sad fact is that there are only I dunno what it is now, 12 million mormons in the whole world? Even if all of them were active members and spending all their time in that oxen filled water tank, they couldn't even keep up with the number of births in China every day, much less the rest of the world. The population is exploding at a rate much faster than the ability to baptize all the people who die in a day.

So, as with many of the magical mystical practices that still continue to this day that are based in myths from a few thousand years ago, I find it...well, just another ridiculous magical mystical practice that people today just can't seem to outgrow.

The even sadder fact is that they keep baptizing non-Christians and already baptized Christians.

I'm pretty sure that Anne Frank would never have become a Mormon if she had survived WWII.

And Pope John Paul II (baptized 6 times now) would also never have become a Mormon no matter how long he lived.

There are plenty of dead people for the Mormons to baptize, hell there are so many non-Mormons that they could just make up any name and it probably is a real person. lol

I have relatives who are brother and sister to eachother and who are each married to other respective spouses and who have done (together) proxy marriages (real life brother and sister standing in as proxy man and wife) for several family ancestors in the temple cealing ceremonies. I thought that was a little odd but it seems that's not strange to the church.

The idea is that after getting baptised by proxy for your dead gtandparents (for example), and that by holding a temple marriage ceremony for them, that if they (as spirits), agree to accept those proxy ceremonies done on their behalf, that their marriage can last forever too. In reality, it's all just a type of brainwashing for the living.



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 12/24/2014 11:03PM by azsteve.