What Garments Teach That Words Never Could

By Becky Squire

I’ve noticed that when people criticize The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, one of the first things they reach for is symbolism, especially the garment of the holy priesthood. It’s weird, they say. Why not just have Jesus in your heart? As if devotion must always be invisible to be sincere. As if meaning only counts when it can be reduced to a sentence.

And I get why it sounds compelling. We live in an age obsessed with clarity, efficiency, and plain speech. Say what you mean. Mean what you say. Explain everything. But there’s a problem with that worldview that we don’t like to admit: language is… bad at describing the most important things.

Love. Loyalty. Covenant. Belonging. Sacrifice. Holiness. Try to fully explain any of those using only words and you immediately feel the limits. You can describe them, circle them, gesture toward them, but you can’t quite deliver them. Words flatten what the soul experiences.

Joseph Smith understood this frustration deeply. He once pleaded,

“O Lord God, deliver us in due time from the little narrow prison, almost as it were, total darkness of paper, pen and ink; and a crooked, broken, scattered and imperfect language.”

That line hits me every time. A prison of language. Darkness of paper and ink. That’s not a man who believed words alone were enough.

But here's the thing: what if one of the reasons the Lord uses symbols—especially sacred ones—is precisely because words fail us?

Ancient Jewish writers knew this. They didn’t rely on abstract theological essays. They used rituals, garments, meals, altars, gestures, repeated physical acts that carried meaning deeper than explanation ever could. Symbols bypass the intellect and speak directly to memory, emotion, identity. They don’t just tell you who you are. They remind you, over and over, in ways your body and spirit understands.

Critics say, “You don’t need garments. Just have Jesus in your heart.” But that assumes the heart is somehow strengthened by abstraction alone. Scripture doesn’t agree. The Lord has always taught through tangible reminders: a rainbow, a passover meal, phylacteries worn on the body, bread and water blessed and eaten weekly. None of these replace faith. They train it.

Garments aren’t a substitute for Christ. They are a symbol that quietly points to Him when the world can’t keep up. They carry covenant memory into ordinary moments like laundry days, rushed mornings, tired evenings, when eloquent prayers are scarce and spiritual language feels thin. They say, without words: You are not your impulses. You are not your appetites. You belong to something eternal.

Symbols do what explanations can’t. They endure when feelings fluctuate. They speak when we’re exhausted. They bypass the defenses of our over-analyzing minds and lodge truth into muscle memory.

If having Jesus “in your heart” were enough on its own, God wouldn’t have bothered with symbols at all. But He did, again and again, because He knows we are embodied souls living in a broken prison of language, and symbols are one of the ways He sets us free.