The Temple Sealing

Dina Goodman went to bed on the night of December 29, 1989, telling her husband that the family was not ready to go to the Temple. "There was no use even trying with these stubborn teenagers," she said. They had been planning this for a year, since the day after her baptism on January 1, 1989. The sealing was scheduled for January 3, 1990. Five days away.

^{[J27]J27 — DocumentJOUR027 (Clifford J. Goodman Jr., July–December 1989)}

The adversary, as Dad framed it in his journal, had been working hard. The preceding weeks read like a catalog of small detonations: fights with Nicky, Peter's inability to attend the Temple for at least three months, children acting out during tithing settlement so badly that Dina refused to go. Christmas Eve had collapsed into a crisis, rescued only when Laura Sisk came over to talk to the little kids and then took them to her house for the afternoon.

^{[J27]J27 — DocumentJOUR027 (Clifford J. Goodman Jr., July–December 1989)}

The year in between

To understand what the sealing meant, you have to understand what preceded it. Dina's baptism on January 1, 1989, had been joyful. About 250 people attended. Dad performed the baptism and confirmation himself, and in the confirmation prayer, words came that surprised even him. "They just came into my head," he wrote, "and weren't anything like the things that I had rehearsed in my mind beforehand." He blessed her with discernment, missionary spirit, and the strength to endure.

^{[J25]J25 — DocumentJOUR025 (Clifford J. Goodman Jr., January–July 1989)}

The year that followed tested every one of those blessings. The family began weekly sessions with Lynn Holyoak, a counselor. "The big issues are still love and the expression thereof in our family," Dad wrote in March 1990, looking back. The teenage years of their two oldest boys, Nicky and Peter, produced episodes that Dad recorded with clinical frankness in the journal but which belong to those boys' own stories and are not ours to catalog here. What the journal does reveal, in aggregate, is that the Goodman household during 1989 was under sustained pressure from every direction: the medical practice growing toward a hundred deliveries per month, the adolescent storms, the ongoing adjustment of a family structure that was integrating a new religious identity.

^{[J27]J27 — DocumentJOUR027 (Clifford J. Goodman Jr., July–December 1989)}

The fly in the ointment

On December 23, 1989, Dad wrote a simple entry: "There's a fly in the ointment for the January 3rd sealing. Peter won't be able to go to the Temple for at least three months." Dina wanted to postpone everything until Peter was ready. Dad thought they should go ahead and then return with Peter later.

^{[J27]J27 — DocumentJOUR027 (Clifford J. Goodman Jr., July–December 1989)}

This was not an abstract theological disagreement. In LDS practice, a family sealing binds parents and children together for eternity. For Dina, a first-generation convert from Germany, the idea of doing it without all the children present felt incomplete. For Dad, a returned missionary who had waited decades for this moment, the risk of further delay outweighed the imperfection of an absent son.

The decision

The next six days oscillated. Christmas Eve was difficult. Christmas Day was fine: the missionaries helped with presents, Matthias and Dad got a telescope, the family went to Sherry's for the usual late gathering. By December 29, the tithing settlement incident had pushed Dina back to her original position: we are not ready.

^{[J27]J27 — DocumentJOUR027 (Clifford J. Goodman Jr., July–December 1989)}

Then came December 30.

"Dina went to bed last night saying that the family is not ready to go to the Temple," Dad wrote. "When I got home from my early surgery today, she was ready to go to Beehive Clothing to buy garments."

What happened between bedtime and morning is recorded in one sentence: "I had fasted and prayed all night and day, and we talked about the things that I felt inspired to tell her that she needed to know."

^{[J27]J27 — DocumentJOUR027 (Clifford J. Goodman Jr., July–December 1989)}

That single entry, the last in journal chapter 27, compressed an entire night of spiritual wrestling into a clinical summary. Dad fasted. He prayed. He stayed up all night. And when he came home from surgery the next day, something had shifted. They went to buy garments.

The sealing

The sealing itself occurred on January 3, 1990. Dad did not write a journal entry about it. Chapter 28 picks up on March 5, 1990, more than two months later. His opening line is deliberately understated: "We will not even mention hiatuses, will we?"

Then he said this: "It has now been two months since Dina's Endowment and our family's sealing and it has been, in most ways, a very good two months. Satan substantially backed off his overt campaign for this family when he saw that he would not win this round."

^{[J28]J28 — DocumentJOUR028 (Clifford J. Goodman Jr., March 1990) [Private due to Patient Privacy]}

The sentence reads as a victory declaration, but a qualified one. "In most ways" does the heavy lifting. The teenagers were the same teenagers. The household dynamics did not transform overnight. What changed, in Dad's telling, was the spiritual footing. The family had a foundation now. They had been sealed.

"Dina and I have been to the Temple six times since her endowment," he continued, "and are getting so that we really miss the Temple in a week during which we cannot go."

^{[J28]J28 — DocumentJOUR028 (Clifford J. Goodman Jr., March 1990) [Private due to Patient Privacy]}

The through-line

Dina Hofstätter was born in Vienna, Austria, the daughter of Peter Robert Adolf Maria Hofstätter, a renowned psychologist who had emigrated from Austria and raised his daughters between continents. She came to America, learned English, married an Arizona physician, and raised six children in a desert suburb fourteen time zones from her birthplace.

Her baptism on the first day of 1989 was the spiritual culmination of a journey that had begun years earlier, when she and her husband's best friend, Bob Sisk, taught her sister Nori the missionary lessons in Chandler. Nori joined the Church in Germany. Dina took a decade longer.

The sealing, one year and three days after the baptism, bound that journey to something permanent. The household was still chaotic. Peter was still absent. The teenagers were still teenagers. But the family, in the eternal sense that the LDS faith defines it, was now sealed.

Dad fasted and prayed all night. In the morning, they went shopping for garments. Five days later, they walked into the Mesa Temple.