As a single woman I lived, for a time, in a predominantly Muslim country where the nearest temple was 1000 miles away, and the nearest organized believers with whom I might worship were 800 miles away and, due to geography and politics, would require me to fly there if I wished to attend.
My experience required that I live my religious life without fellow believers or ordinances: without temple worship and without weekly sacrament.
I appreciate regular temple worship and I am grateful for the ordinance of weekly sacramental renewal of covenants. I am also grateful, in hindsight, for what I subconsciously learned during that period of time years ago...that participation in those ordinances is a blessing, and when they are not possible due to circumstances in the world where I am, I am still fully able to find peace, revelation, connection, recommitment, and communication with God. The memory of the covenants made with ordinances was enough.
At the time, I wasn’t surprised by that.
Certainly ordinances have, at times, assisted the levels of peace, revelation, recommitment, and divine connection in my life, and my participation in those ordinances is often a powerful assist. But when they are not available, the sense of loss is not acute, because that peace, revelation and divine connection and communication continues to be available.
The outward symbolism and reminders that those ordinances carry are blessed symbols and reminders of an inward commitment and connection. And, for me, that inward commitment and connection does not change when the outward symbols are not possible.
I am deeply grateful for those ordinances and the reminders they offer. And I am acutely aware of what I quietly regularly re-experienced far away, years ago: the reality of God’s loving sustenance being fully available for me, solo, as I reach out to Him
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