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We’re sitting on a beach around a campfire as the sun sets into the ocean—me, my parents, my three brothers. My mother chose this place for our reunion. It’s a not-yet-peopled earth: a telestial world, not a paradisiacal one, so the natural conditions are like those we experienced during mortality, the air heavy with the smells of both life and decomposition. A maritime climate, on a westward-facing coast, this beach is a close match for those of the Pacific Northwest, where my parents retired to spend the last years of their earth life. The flora and fauna of this world are somewhat different; but the sounds and smells of the ocean are familiar, the feel of the air, the cloud formations painted with the colors of sunset, the glassy smooth beach and the tidal pools my mother is fond of. It reminds me, as it’s meant to, of family vacations we took back on earth when my brothers and I were growing up.
By agreement, this reunion is strictly for our nuclear family. No ancestors, no posterity, not even spouses. There is one exception. We’re expecting to be joined later by my niece Christine and her husband, whom she met and courted posthumously. They also “happen” to be on this world, doing a running tour as R&R following their latest mission—the kind of diehard athleticism they both relish. We all understand that my mother chose this world for our reunion in large part for the opportunity to see Christine, too. We don’t begrudge her that. We’re long past begrudging each other anything.
But for the moment, it’s still just the six of us. We don’t get together as a family very often, contrary to what we may have once imagined the slogan “Together Forever” to imply. We’re each busy with different projects, ministries, stewardships, our own families, and ever-widening circles of other relationships to keep track of. Even within mortality, we naturally grew apart as my brothers and I left home, built careers, became coupled, started families; in immortality, those divergences have widened exponentially.
Still, it’s a joy to come together. It’s important. The little net of relationships that binds us together is at the core of who we are as embodied beings, just as our relationship with our Heavenly Parents—“I am a child of God”—was at the core of who we were in the premortal life.
After the resurrection, there was a long, long period of judgment, a period that at that early stage of our immortality seemed interminable. It took us millennia to come to terms with the white-hot, seething instant that was our mortal life—unfathomably short but incredibly eventful and utterly significant for determining what can follow, like the first infinitesimal fractions of a second in a Big Bang, when a new universe explodes into being. We spent the equivalent of lifetime upon lifetime sifting through everything we had done and everything that had happened to us during mortality; learning to know as we are known; growing in charity and empathy for those with whom we had crossed paths over the years; taking accountability for the myriad ways we had wounded or failed our fellow beings; seeking out those we had wronged to apologize, and forgiving those who came to us to do the same.
Like all families, we had a lot of work to do together during that period. One of the slogans of that time was that “our nuclear family was a nuclear reactor.” For my brothers and me, this family was the atomic reaction—the Big Bang—that brought our embodied selves into existence. It was the source of our particular genetic identities and the setting in which our psyches first started to take shape. For my parents, this family was the crucible in which they forged their married lives and undertook for the first time the role of parent, a role they've prized for almost as long as they have had bodies.
But the “nuclear reactor” metaphor was also supposed to convey that family relationships are “radioactive.” As members of the same nuclear family, we were more intimate with one another than we were with anyone else in earth life except, for my parents, the nuclear families from which they had come, and for my brothers and me, the partnerships and families we formed in turn as adults. Given the uniquely raw conditions of mortality, we will never, in all eternity, be intimate in those particular ways with anyone else ever again; we will never again create relationships with those same particular capacities for joy. But living for so many years in that kind of hothouse intimacy also meant that we could and did hurt each other—a lot. We faced up to some of that during earth life, which made it easier for us to work together after death. But there was a lot more reconciling still to do after the resurrection, especially after the judgment made our lives entirely transparent, which they never were during mortality—every secret revealed, every cruelty and betrayal, great or petty. Not all families make it through that process; or at least the work of reconciliation has to be laid aside, incomplete, until family members are ready to come back and take it up again.
So the joy of being with one another here on this beach is a joy we’ve worked hard together to make possible. It’s partly the joy of nostalgia—of coming together to share the memory of a past we once shared, to recreate that past the best we can at this remove in time and space. But it’s also the joy of a long-time intimacy that has endured and evolved. We’re not the same people now that we were even by the end of mortality—thank God! But whatever we now are and are becoming builds on foundations we created together during earth life, even if clumsily, or often thoughtlessly, or by sheer happenstance.
That’s what we honor and celebrate as we sit on this beach around the fire. We sing songs that we haven’t sung, literally, in ages. My father plays his harmonica—badly, the way he used to do in earth life, to make us laugh, not the virtuoso performances he’s learned to give since then. We narrate favorite memories, diplomatically overlooking discrepancies between what have become the standard dramatic renditions and the actual facts as our perfectly restored memories now recall them. We talk about the present—our spouses; the activities of our posterity, those of us who have them; our current labors in the vineyard. We savor the peace of having passed beyond wounded hearts and malfunctioning bodies. Night falls as we enjoy the sensations of being on this world that is both like and unlike the earth where we were born and died, reminding us of what used to be while pointing toward futures still to be written.
In the moonlight shining on the water, I can make out two figures in the distance, running across the ocean toward us. Any moment now, my mother will see them too, and run out to meet them.
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