Covenant Hearts

Covenant Hearts by Bruce C. Hafen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Mostly doctrinal discourse on the importance of marriage and family. Hafen digs deep into the doctrine here, with statistics and some anecdotes. it was good to be reminded about the fundamentals of a good marriage, although he doesn't really go into practicalities, other than to remind us that our spouse should be our first and main priority. The last part of the book talked about how marriage was a critical to the community,which I hadn't thought about in those terms before. It is slightly outdated, and the anecdotes tended to be on the dramatic side....wished some of them could have been a little more relateable.


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Authority in the priesthood is given through ordination, but power in the priesthood is received through righteous living.” 6

these plots all represent variations on Freud’s family romance—the process whereby a young person comes to terms with parental authority, ventures out into the wider world, faces assorted tests and eventually achieves independence. Along the way, confusion is dispelled; alienation gives way to a new sense of wholeness and well-being,”

Yet marriage can mysteriously empower personal growth and fulness, so much so that the adversary helped hide marriage from priests, monks, and nuns during the darkness of the early Christian apostasy.

As the opportunities for women expand, it becomes harder to settle at being home

When the law upholds the individual’s right to end a marriage, regardless of social consequences (as happened with no-fault divorce), that principle can also seem to uphold the individual’s right to start a marriage, regardless of social consequences (as with same-gender marriage). That is how today’s national debate on gay marriage is conceptually linked to no-fault divorce.

The changes in recent decades have portrayed marriage as an individual adult choice, rather than as a crucial knot in the very fabric that holds society together. We have increasingly lost sight of how much every marriage, and every divorce, affects other people—especially children.

Nobody really wants to be lonely, but the lifestyles associated with today’s frenzied search for “individual freedom” often lead, unsurprisingly, to loneliness.

optimism and pessimism are definitions of the world, [and often we create the kind of world we live in because] our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.”

As the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore wrote, “Death is not extinguishing the light; it is putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.”

life story of Adam and Eve is the story of receiving the Atonement.

agree with Sister Marjorie Hinckley. Someone asked her the secret of her happy marriage, and she said, “I lowered my expectations.”
Because of its “unlimited ethical motivation,” the “sacrifice” of the covenant partner is “regarded not as a ... personal loss ... , but as a privilege freely and gladly bestowed.”
It is possible that Hosea was able to comprehend Jehovah’s capacity to forgive, not just to judge, because Hosea learned to replace harsh judgment with forgiving compassion toward his own wife. The merciful are the only ones who can obtain mercy.
The woman’s innate spiritual instincts are like a moral magnet, pointing toward spiritual north, except when its magnetic particles are unnaturally traumatized. In addition to his own spiritual instincts, the man’s presiding gift is the holy priesthood, except when he is not living the principles of righteousness. And their “counseling” is reciprocal: If he is wise, he will listen to the promptings of her inner spiritual compass, just as she hearkens to his righteous counsel.
Alma describes justice as masculine and mercy as feminine: “Justice exerciseth all his demands, and also mercy claimeth all which is her own; and thus, none but the truly penitent are saved” (Alma 42: 24; italics added). This does not mean that women are not just nor that men are not merciful. But in the masculine sense of justice and the feminine sense of mercy, we see interdependent principles that are reconciled by the higher unifying power of the Atonement. Here is perhaps a type of the way a husband and wife are unified by the combined male and female elements of a higher divine nature.