Lifting the Hammer: A comprehensive guide for how you can use marriage to get to heaven

 Lifting the Hammer

             Imagine going to work and your boss hands you a fifty-pound sledgehammer, blindfolds you, and asks you to use it to demolish a wall. How difficult would it be to wield such a heavy hammer? How could you even know where to swing? Now if you had someone help you lift the hammer you could wield it no problem. With someone else you could swing more and therefore be more likely to hit the wall too. The hammer in this analogy is the Brutal Hammer of Divine Prudence which represents making judgments, which are decisions. The person that helps you swing the hammer is the person who you marry. Lastly, demolishing the wall represents the work that needs to be done to get to heaven. Marriage can be used to wield the hammer more efficiently, more prudently, and to make better decisions that will lead you to heaven. Below is a comprehensive guide for how you can use marriage to get to heaven. It describes the hammer, marriage, trine, and how all of those connect to swing the hammer more effectively.

The Hammer

            Every instant of our lives we make decisions. Those decisions are either good or bad and either lead us closer to heaven or hell. Some decisions are harder than others and can carry more weight than others. The hammer we wield can feel like it is only ten pounds, and we only need to knock over a Jenga tower. Other times the hammer feels like it is fifty pounds, and we need to demolish a stone wall. Destroying that wall can feel impossible and can cause us to freeze or to just set the hammer down and walk away. The Brutal Hammer of Divine Prudence lays out how we can make these seemingly difficult judgments. These decisions lead us to taking actions in the world that leave an impact, however big or small. The hammer is how uses are performed.

            The Brutal Hammer of Divine Prudence is a concept for how judgments are made. It starts with the idea that we do not know what the Truth is. The capital ‘t’ truth represents divine wisdom that only the Lord has. There is a right answer to everything, but only the Lord knows. Not only do humans not know the Truth, but our internal affections are also hidden, that is our motives or intentions. The only thing that we can rely on is the fact that we are nothing and that we can change (DP 191). There is nothing real about us except the Lord in us and the more we get rid of the evil stuff the more of the Lord we get. The decisions we make are what lead to more or less of the Lord in us and that is what changes us. We must make these judgments without knowing whether they are right or wrong and not knowing if we are doing them for the right reasons. After we make a judgment, we can look back on it and decide if it was the right call or not, then move on. We swing the hammer with the blindfold on and if we hit the wall then we know at least somewhat where we should aim for the next one. This is how every judgment is made.

            We make judgments on what actions we perform. We all have a ruling love inside of us that all of our affections spring from. Both of these are mostly hidden from us. All of our thoughts are based on the wisdom that we have from other people that resonated with our affections. How we interact with the world is based on actions that we perform by choosing which thoughts to act on. This means that to perform uses we must use the hammer to make a judgment on which action to perform. We can choose where to turn and how to swing the hammer and then swing away. If we hit the wall we know we are on the right track, and if not, keep swinging.

Marriage

The essence of the universe is a marriage of divine love and divine wisdom. This is also the essence of every real marriage (AC 3). The world we live in calls many things marriage that are not a real marriage. There is a way to have a form of real marriage in this world. It does require work, but it also helps you to lift that heavy hammer. A real marriage will help you lift the hammer and use it to destroy the wall. A fake marriage can make it appear easier to lift that hammer, but you will end up swinging it at the wrong wall or even at a co-worker. A fake marriage is one where only the externals are connected, not the internals. You need a real marriage to wield the hammer in a meaningful way. It is important to note that you can have an internal marriage between yourself and the inner love of someone who is evil, and this is not helpful to wielding the hammer. This will not condemn you to hell. You can be a good person and go to heaven and they will go to hell, although you may be dragged down to hell with them initially until all the externals are peeled away. A real marriage with married love can be used to better connect love and wisdom inside us which is what wields the hammer.

            For a marriage on this earth to better connect love and wisdom it must be between one man and one woman who are internally connected and actively turning towards the Lord. It must be between one man and one woman because men have wisdom over love and women have love over wisdom (AC 54, 568). A man and a woman are described as being two halves that create a more perfect whole when conjoined (CL 37). The reason it must be monogamous is that polygamy forms external connections, not internal ones (AC 162). It must be an internal marriage because anything that is external is shed after death and thus is irrelevant to get to heaven (TCR 449). An internal marriage has married love rather than sexual love. Sexual love is a primal desire to procreate and indulge our senses (CL 38). If sexual love is in a monogamous relationship, it can be seen as the expression of married love (OP 163). As long as the internals are there, a desire for married love, then the external expression, sexual love, is a good thing. In fact, sexual love becomes more passionate and better when there is married love. Married love comes from a husband and wife that turn towards the Lord and live their lives according to His teachings (CL 71). This allows the Lord’s love into each of them. This love then connects to the part of the Lord that is present in the other. We are finite beings and as such we can only connect to that which is finite which would be an external marriage. Allowing the Lord in lets that which is eternal regard that which is eternal in our partner and thus have an internal connection (DP 46). This internal connection is the perfect marriage of the Lord’s love from a woman and wisdom from a man. This marriage leads to a better-connected love and wisdom that can be used to swing the hammer.

Trine

            All of this matters in so much as you are trying to get to heaven. It is much simpler to get into heaven than people think. The answer lies in the fact that heaven is a kingdom of use (AC 997). To get to heaven you must use love and wisdom to perform good uses. This is where the trine comes from, love, wisdom, and use. The trine is what heavenly life is and provides angels with happiness and can also provide us in this world the joys of heaven. This is stated nicely in the Writings, “So if a person has this marriage in him he is in the paradise of heaven - in other words, in heaven" (CL 8). We need to use love and wisdom to perform uses in this life to get to heaven. Performing uses is a waterfall effect from the Lord. The Lord flows into our loves that produce thoughts based on our wisdom and then flows out into the use. If we do this, we make that love and wisdom actually part of us because we decided to do that action. By making the Lord’s love and wisdom part of us we become better people and are closer to heaven.

This does rely on the fact that we have access to the Truth. Although it is evident that everyone has access to the Truth because the Last Judgments occurred to ensure that everyone continued to have access to the Truth. So, everyone has access to the Truth through other people and the Church, that is the people that hold Truth. These Truths are how to best join love and wisdom into a use that will actually get you to heaven. As stated earlier we cannot know these Truths. We are essentially blindfolded while swinging the hammer and can only guess where the wall is. The more you try and the more wisdom and love you have the better your guess will be and the more you will hit the wall and perform a use. Performing uses, knocking the wall down, is how you get to heaven (CL 8, 16).

Swinging the Hammer

            We now know how to make decisions, how to better join love and wisdom, and how to get to heaven. Now we are ready to use marriage to swing the hammer to get to heaven. The hammer relies on the fact that we need to make judgments based on the love and wisdom inside of us. If we join these two things together more perfectly than we can swing the hammer better. You can swing it better because to express love you need wisdom on how to express that love and then you can perform the use corresponding to that. Your love is the desire to break the wall and your wisdom is knowing how to swing a sledgehammer and break a wall effectively. You can see that if you have a stronger desire to break the wall and a lot of good information on how to swing a sledgehammer you would be better at breaking the wall than someone who doesn’t care as much and doesn’t know how to swing the hammer. So, if you are in a marriage, as described above, you have successfully joined love and wisdom more perfectly inside yourself and can use that to make a better judgment on which use to perform that will get you to heaven. You can imagine two people who want to destroy a wall together and have practiced swinging a fifty-pound hammer together. They would demolish the wall much more effectively than one person, no matter how much they also wanted to destroy the wall and knew how to wield a hammer.

Conclusion

            That is how you can use marriage to get to heaven. You must swing the hammer using love and wisdom, which can be done better in marriage, to perform uses that get you to heaven. As implied in the previous paragraph, you can swing this hammer alone. You do not have to get married to get to heaven. I am however saying that marriage is a tool that can make it easier to arrive there. It explicitly states that people who do not get married on earth do get married in the other life if they go to heaven. If they do not want to get married, they are in a separate place in heaven from everyone else (CL 54). This paper assumes that you want to get to heaven and if you do why not make it easier and get married? Yes, it can be difficult, and it does need to be a real marriage to work, but if you find someone that works you are much more likely to find yourself in eternal happiness. Imagine going to work and you are blindfolded and handed a fifty-pound hammer. Would it not be comforting to have someone else grab the hammer with you as you blindly swing away?