Temple Sealing

A sealing is short. The couple kneel facing one another across a small altar in a sealing room, a man holding the sealing authority pronounces the ordinance, and it is done. The room is small by design, holding perhaps thirty or forty people, and mirrors on opposing walls produce a receding reflection that Latter-day Saints commonly read as an image of the eternity the ordinance is about. The wording is fixed and the church holds it sacred, and the atlas does not reproduce it.

What distinguishes it from a wedding elsewhere is the claim being made. The church teaches that the marriage is for time and for all eternity rather than until death, and that children born to a sealed couple belong to that marriage permanently without any further act. Children born before a sealing, and adopted children, are sealed to their parents afterward in a separate ordinance. A person may be sealed to their parents, and to their spouse, and the resulting chain is understood to run back through the generations, which is what the movement means when it speaks of the welding link between the fathers and the children.

Only members holding a current temple recommend may be present, which makes the guest list at a temple wedding a matter of religious standing rather than of family closeness. That is the cost of the ordinance and it is a real one, felt most sharply by parents who cannot watch their own child marry.

The great majority of sealings performed in any year are not weddings. They are proxy sealings, carried out for couples and families already dead, once their names, dates and relationships have been established by family history research and submitted for temple work. A living member stands in for each of the dead, and the ordinance is performed exactly as it would be for the living. This is why the movement built the genealogical apparatus it did: the ordinance is available to everyone who has ever lived, and the limiting factor is not willingness but identification.

The most consequential recent change to the practice was administrative. In many countries the law requires a civil marriage, and in those countries a couple married civilly and were sealed afterward. But in countries where a temple sealing is itself legally recognised as a marriage, church policy until 2019 imposed a one-year wait after any civil ceremony before a couple could be sealed. The effect in the United States and elsewhere was to force a choice: be sealed, and exclude every relative without a recommend, or marry civilly with everyone present and wait a year for the ordinance.

The waiting period was removed in May 2019. A couple may now marry civilly with all their family watching and be sealed the same day. The change was reported inside the movement as one of the more humane adjustments of recent years, and the warmth of that reception is the clearest measure of what the previous arrangement had cost families.