Children of the Most High

Note: for the next few days, I'm going to be doing a series on the Family Proclamation. This is the first post in the series.

ALL HUMAN BEINGS—male and female—are created in the image of God. Each is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents, and, as such, each has a divine nature and destiny

-Family Proclamation, 2nd paragraph

I'll be honest -- sometimes I got tired of hearing that we were "children of God." Every week in Young Women's, we would recite "We are daughters of our Heavenly Father, who loves us, and we love Him" in a singsong voice. And sometimes it would become trite. People would talk about how much they loved the song "I am a Child of God" and I just didn't get it. (For whatever reason, I didn't like the picture associated with it in the Children's Songbook.) Why did we make such a big deal about this? Why did it matter so much to Mormons? I had a friend joke that the reason drivers in Utah were so aggressive was because that we knew that "dangit, I'm a child of God, so I deserve to get where I want to get as fast as possible." Was that all our divine heritage was good for -- a sense of entitlement?

Then the other day, I realized something while reading a C. S. Lewis anthology which contained his "signature classics." (While devouring it, I came to a sad conclusion. Much like pizza-flavored Goldfish or tortilla chips with hint of lime, a little C. S. Lewis is good, but you just get sick of the taste if you have too much.) In Mere Christianity while talking about the Lord's Prayer, Lewis says,

"Its very first words are Our Father. Do you now see what those words mean? They mean quite frankly, that you are putting yourself in the place of a son of God. To put it bluntly, you are dressing up as Christ. If you like, you are pretending. Because, of course, the moment you realise what the words mean, you realise that you are not a son of God."

This hit me like a ton of bricks, though he had been saying things in a similar vein for several chapters. I understand what he was saying -- that we are nothing like Jesus Christ with our fallen, imperfect natures. We are not perfect like He is and has always been. And in a sense, I believe that praying is sort of like "dressing up as Christ" (that's why we end our prayers with "in the name of Jesus Christ, amen"). But we are still children of God, "children of the most High" (Psalms 82:6). That is, God is the father of our spirits, the part of us that lived before our bodies were formed and will live when our bodies die. In some small, embryonic way that I can't comprehend, we are of the same race of God the Father and his Son, Jesus Christ.

Now, thinking about that for more than a minute makes me feel very, very small. (And it doesn't make me feel inclined to speed when I drive.) I can somewhat understand what Moses was feeling when he had talked to God (in this case, the Son of God, speaking for God the Father through divine investiture), been called "my son" several times (v. 4, 6, 7 and later 40 in Moses 1), and seen God's mighty creations. He said quite plainly, "Now, for this cause, I know that man is nothing, which thing I had never supposed" (Moses 1:10). And yet, at the same time, it fills me with such a sense of belonging, such a sense of hope.

So what does all of this have to do with the Proclamation on the Family? Well, if we're literal offspring of God, then that means we're all part of the same family! That's why families are so important to Him. It's not just a matter of families being the fundamental unit of society, not just a matter of family dinners leading to lower crime rates, not just a matter of socioeconomic solutions. The family is the fundamental unit of heaven. If we understand and truly believe that God is our Father, then we can better see the patterns He sets forth in the scriptures of how to be a righteous parent. We can achieve greater happiness in this life and the next.