A Thought on Degrees of Glory

Comfort vs. Capacity

I’ve been part of various discussions, in my ward and through my writing life, about Doctrine and Covenants 76 and the degrees of glory recently. In most of them, someone brought up the idea that we’ll end up in the kingdom we feel the most comfortable in.

That’s been a pretty common idea for as long as I can remember. It might be interesting to look into the history of when we started talking that way. It is interesting to me that many early Saints struggled to accept the idea of degrees of glory because they’d been raised with hellfire and glory for everyone seemed dangerously permissive, while our concern seems to be the opposite. We talk about degrees of comfort, if you will, to explain to ourselves why a loving God would keep anyone in lesser glory.

I don’t pretend to understand what the heavens will actually look and feel like. Doctrine and Covenant 19 makes clear that we often misunderstand our postmortal future and that God is perfectly willing to have us misunderstand what will happen then if a flawed and partial understanding helps us make better decisions now. To my mind, Doctrine and Covenants 88 makes clear that the three degrees of glory described in Doctrine and Covenants 76 are a simplified model for a much larger and more complex reality.

That said, I feel ready to move on from the comfort model as a way to imagine the borders between kingdoms in the afterlife.

At the same time we were studying degrees of glory this year, I happened to run across a Brigham Young quote in the old teaching manual chapter about eternal progression. “What are we here for?” Brigham asked rhetorically. “To learn to enjoy more, and to increase in knowledge and in experience.”

Increasing in knowledge and experience are pretty familiar ideas to me, but I was struck by the first part of the quote: “What are we here for? To learn to enjoy more.” That tells me that part of the purpose of life is learning to elevate my attention and appreciation. God put beauty and glory all around me, but I have to learn how to see it.

I was talking with a friend recently who’s been processing questions about his faith and trying to figure out where he stands now. “How’s it going?” I asked him. He shrugged. “Still haven’t seen any angels,” he said. But technically he’s wrong. In Latter-day Saint thought, people are just angels with skin on. Seeing angels isn’t the hard part. The hard part is recognizing them.

What if we imagine heaven in the same way? What if we imagine the degrees of glory not as separate places, but as separate ways of seeing and experiencing the world around us? Maybe heaven is a concert and we all hear the music, but it penetrates most deeply into the softest hearts. Maybe marriage is wide as eternity only when we’ve developed the trust and vulnerability to take the whole breadth of experience in.

I don’t love the idea of an eternity where the most valiant people have to go slumming to see anyone else, and where tons of people aren’t willing to come over for dinner to a friend’s house because they’re too self-conscious about their relative unworthiness. I think that model is pointing to some truths. I appreciate that it helps many people reflect about the role of the human conscience in divine judgement and the weight of the glory of God. But the comfort metaphor is no longer bearing much fruit for me.

I like thinking in terms of capacity more. Maybe in heaven you and I will be hanging out together. And I’ll realize that you’re enjoying experiences I don’t fully understand. You’re seeing things I don’t see because you’ve become a kind of person I never learned to be. Like Brigham Young was saying, you know how to enjoy more.

And maybe in that world, I can still go to Jesus. I can still ask him to anoint my eyes clay. Maybe in that world, he can still teach me a higher law and turn the key of knowledge that comes with it. Maybe piece by piece, I’ll learn to see more and one day—boom—I’m standing in celestial glory. Because my eyes are open. And I can see that I was standing in the presence of gods all along.