One of the most important truths of the Gospel is that God is our Heavenly Father and we are His children. This is important not only so that we can grasp the fundamentally divine aspect of our character and essence, but so that we can understand the nature of our relationship with God. Our relationship with God, above all else, is the relationship of a child to a parent. We may strive to be His servants, His students, His friends, but woven through all of it is the fact that we are His children. When we rebel against our Father in sin, we become cut off from Him. It is as though we become fatherless orphans. The good news is that we don’t have to remain as such, but as long as we put off the day of our repentance, that filial tie to our Father has been cut. I will return to this in a moment, but I have to introduce a second element. In the relationships between the children of Israel and Jehovah in the Old Testament, or between the Church of the Lamb and Jesus Christ in the new testament, one of the recurring symbols to describe the relationship between the community of believers and their Lord is that of a Bride and a Bridegroom. When the children of Israel turned from their God to worship idols, the prophets accused them of infidelity specifically within a marital context. In other words, when we turn away from our Covenants, we treat the Lord as if He were dead, and we widows who no longer have any ties to a husband. I bring up these two kinds of relationships to illustrate that when religion breaks down personally for us, we become widows and fatherless. “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.” (James 1:27). Etymologically, religion means to tie or to retie. Pure religion, then, is to visit the fatherless and the widows in their affliction - those who have lost the ties to their Father and to the Bridegroom of their faith - and help them to retie those cords. In our grief and pain, we may assume that we have severed ties with our Father in ways that cannot be mended. “Thus saith the Lord, Where is the bill of your mother’s divorcement, whom I have put away? or which of my creditors is it to whom I have sold you? Behold, for your iniquities have ye sold yourselves, and for your transgressions is your mother put away. Wherefore, when I came, was there no man? when I called, was there none to answer? Is my hand shortened at all, that it cannot redeem? or have I no power to deliver?” (Isaiah 50:1-2). We all need to help each other remember that while we may have sold ourselves, no matter how high the price, our Savior not only can but already has paid the price to ransom back our souls. This is pure religion - tying the fatherless back to the Father, tying the widows back to their Bridegroom, healing broken relationships and mending broken covenants, and retying back together the bonds of fidelity. Every time we visit the fatherless and the widows, carrying to them that cord of love and mercy and faithfulness from our Heavenly Father and our Savior Jesus Christ, we knit our hearts together with theirs, and both of our hearts back to Jesus and God the Father. The more people we visit and the more hearts we knit together with ours, the thicker and more resilient become the ties that bind us back to our Father and Jesus Christ. “That he may know that thy faithfulness is stronger than the cords of death. Let thy bowels also be full of charity towards all men, and to the household of faith, and let virtue garnish thy thoughts unceasingly; then shall thy confidence wax strong in the presence of God; and the doctrine of the priesthood shall distill upon thy soul as the dews from heaven.” (D&C 121:44-45). One single fragile thread tying us to our Father will not be able to sustain us through all of the afflictions that we must face, but when we have tied ourselves to dozens, hundreds, even thousands of our brothers and sisters, each thread stretching back to our Heavenly Father, then will our faithfulness be stronger than the cords of death. I know that Salvation is each of our own individual responsibility, but we will only be able to achieve it if we weave together a strong, vibrant, many-stranded tapestry of ties and reties.
