And I, Nephi, did build a temple; and I did construct it after the manner of the temple of Solomon save it were not built of so many precious things; for they were not to be found upon the land, wherefore, it could not be built like unto Solomon's temple. But the manner of the construction was like unto the temple of Solomon; and the workmanship thereof was exceedingly fine.
Tuesday evening I entered a Latter-day Saint temple for the first time in over a decade.
Don't have a stroke—it wasn't a religious relapse. The LDS Church has taken its blocky, six-story meetinghouse near Lincoln Center in Manhattan and hewn from its rocky heart a new temple. (I've touched on the subject of this construction project in earlier writings.) This edifice is open to the public, more or less, through June 5, after which it will be closed to heathen, given a final hard spit and polish, and dedicated to Elohim, as God is known to His friends. My wife Laura and I, along with three intrepid friends, were fortunate enough to attach ourselves to a tour this week.
Having returned, I shall soon report. (If you happen ever to have experienced a Mormon temple endowment ceremony and possess an evolved sense of irreverence, you are busting a gut at that line. Otherwise you're either scratching your head or reaching for a firearm.) But first, a brief word about temples.
A temple-building people
To members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS or, less correctly, Mormons), a temple is a building much more holy than a standard Sunday meetinghouse. It is a place where sacred ordinances, or ceremonies, such as baptism for the dead, endowment, and celestial marriage are performed. After its dedication, a temple can only be entered by a worthy member of the LDS Church who carries the proper authorization, in the form of a wallet-sized card signed by his ecclesiastical leaders. It it quite literally, to the faithful, the House of the Lord.
The Church has more than 10,000 meetinghouses scattered around the globe and is building more a rate greater than one every day. Of temples, however, they have only 117 in operation, with a dozen or so others announced or under construction. It should be noted, though, that the number of temples worldwide has far outpaced the growth of Church membership in the past 25 years. Only 17 of those 117 were operational before 1979.
Temple ordinances are so critical to eternal salvation that, in earlier decades, Mormons in remote locales might save for years so they could travel ten thousand miles to spend a day or two in the House of the Lord, and count it money well spent. Nowadays temple attendance is becoming far more convenient for the average Saint. The blessed members of Manhattan, for instance, must no longer make the arduous trek to Boston or D.C. to save their souls and the souls of their ancestors.
But I'm getting ahead of the story.
What really goes on in there?
My little gang of five—Bob, Jim, Liz, Laura and I—met up on the sidewalk in front of the Manhattan temple at about 7:45 pm on Tuesday, May 18. Of the group, I was the only one who had ever been LDS, let alone seen the inside of a Mormon temple. The other four were raised Catholic, though the indoctrination didn't stick with any of them.
Bob and I had ridden the subway uptown together from work. On the way, he said, "I understand why I'm interested in taking this tour—I'm curious, and everything I see is going to be new to me. But it's less clear why you want to subject yourself to it again."
It was a fair statement. "I haven't been inside a temple since 1992 or 1993," I said, "and then it was mostly the older, established temples. I'm curious to see what the newer ones, where they've streamlined the processes more, look like inside. I'm also curious to see what they will and won't show us, and how they've crammed all the functions into a couple of floors of that building."
Construction equipment still littered the sidewalk, and from all the plywood on the exterior of the building it seemed that restorations to the marble-looking façade were still in progress. A contingent of a dozen young, fresh-scrubbed missionaries waiting outside the entrance to greet arrivals and lure in unsuspecting passersby. At curbside, beyond the LDS property line, stood two or three anti-Mormon pamphleteers, each with his or her own street display. The one nearest us wore a T-shirt reading TRUST JESUS and stood beside a sign detailing what "really" goes on inside a Mormon temple, complete with drawings of little figures in funny robes and hats embracing and making strange gestures. He handed me a booklet published by New Testament Ministries of New Bedford, Texas, in which a couple named Richard and Cindy Benson related their progress from Mormonism to the true worship of Christ. (I skimmed it later and found nothing very interesting about it, with no accusations against the Church I hadn't encountered before.)
Lest anyone be confused, an official-looking sign near the missionary cohort said something to the effect that opinions proferred outside temple property were decidedly not the views of the LDS Church.
Our gang of five chatted idly for a few minutes in the cool evening. Laura smoked a cigarette for the benefit of the watching missionaries. At about five minutes to eight we ran their gauntlet—with a brief pause to allow the elders to check our shoulder bags for bombs and video cameras—and entered the temple.
Busy little bees
To be more accurate, we entered the meetinghouse, negotiated a dogleg turn right and left, and congregated with twenty or so other tourgoers in a small foyer. As we would learn in a few minutes more, the temple occupies the fifth and sixth floors of the building, and a portion of the first. We were waiting in the non-temple portion.
The lighting was bright and the walls very white. The room was finished in a trim that looked like a prefabricated wood veneer—neat and clean, semi-ornate, but a little cheap-looking. I realized as we waited for an elevator to arrive that I was nervous. What feelings or flashbacks might arise as I ventured again into the sacred-not-secret guts of a Mormon temple? Would my observations remain clinical, or would the experience scare me? Would the feelings themselves end up scaring me? It wouldn't be the first time my indoctrination overrode my reason.
Our group piled into a wide elevator that would ferry us to the third floor. The interior was all done in the same wood veneer, with a large beehive in bas-relief on each panel. The elevator operator was a portly, balding missionary whose nametag read ELDER BUSH. (He didn't look much older than 22 or 23. Male Mormon missionaries are infamous for premature baldness.) Someone asked if the beehive symbol was religiously significant. Elder Bush said no, it was just a symbol of industry and diligence.
His point was debatable, but I didn't feel I should take up the challenge. The beehive appears in many Church contexts, and also on the flag and seal of the state of Utah. Its provenance is a passage in the Book of Mormon describing the arrival in the Western Hemisphere of an ancient people fleeing the confounding of languages at the Tower of Babel:
And they did also carry with them deseret, which, by interpretation, is a honey bee; and thus they did carry with them swarms of bees, and all manner of that which was upon the face of the land, seeds of every kind.
On the basis of this verse, early Mormons seized on "Deseret" as the name for their new territory, and the industriousness of bees as their watchword. ("Industry" is still Utah's state motto.) Of course, you only see the beehive as a religious symbol if you regard the Book of Mormon as a purely religious work. A person can only see it otherwise if he believes the Book of Mormon to be literal history. An esoteric argument for a different day.
Souls in limbo
On the third floor, we were deposited in a large chapel to wait for the start of our tour. The five of us slid into a long pew in the center section. There were maybe forty other people in the chapel, many of them missionaries. The chapel itself was stark. The ceiling was high, with two row of unadorned white globes hanging from the ceiling, giving off light. The walls were white and devoid of ornamentation except for the front wall behind the dais, where a large square patch of primer indicated where painting had yet to be completed. The wooden pews, at least, were solid and stained dark, and had upholstered cushioning.
I tried not to think about the three or four sacrament meetings I had attended in that very chapel, during my brief backslide in 1998.
"I can't get over how bright it is," said Bob when we were seated.
"More used to churches being gloomy and dim?" I asked.
"Sepulchral."
"Mormons aren't big on gloomy churches. Every one I've ever seen has been pretty bright and airy. Of course, most of those were lined with big windows on both sides. This one doesn't even have any windows, which makes the brightness more remarkable."
"This isn't exactly a typical Mormon building," said Jim, who has an uncle who converted to Mormonism years back. "But is this chapel pretty much the same as what you'd see in most churches?"
"Very much so," I said. "The size and layout of the room are very standard."
"That's what I seemed to remember from some of the times we went with my uncle to something at his church," said Jim. "I also notice that you don't see a lot of decoration inside here. Will there be any when the renovation is finished?"
"Mormons don't go in much for iconography in their churches," I said, "though it's a little different in a temple. You wouldn't even see the beehives in most churches, and you won't ever see any crosses."
"Yeah, yeah," said Liz. "I was noticing there weren't any of those around."
"Mormons don't use the cross at all as an icon. You might see some paintings here and there in a Mormon church, but nothing in the chapel itself. Maybe a portrait of Jesus at the front, but that would be about it."
We spoke in hushed voices, like everyone else in the chapel was doing, a group of souls in bright limbo. After another minute or two of chat, a medium-sized fellow in a suit and tie entered the chapel and stepped up to the first pew. He had sandy-grey hair, a youthful face, and a neatly trimmed, almost military-style mustache. A white name badge pinned to his lapel identified him as a volunteer temple worker.
"Is this our tour group?" the man asked in a voice so soft we could barely hear it in the fifth row. He was speaking to us all, but he bent his head in such a way that he seemed only to be looking at the people in the first pew. "Welcome to the House of the Lord. I'm Brother Creigh—you'll find that we all call each other 'Brother' and 'Sister' in the Church—and I'll be your guide here on this tour of the Manhattan New York Temple. We're excited that you're here to learn more about what we do here. We just ask that you help us preserve the atmosphere of reverence in the temple during your visit, and remind you that no picture-taking is permitted."
Brother Creigh turned out to be that soft-spoken for the rest of the tour, although most of the time we were in rooms quiet and close enough that there was no trouble hearing him. After a bit more introductory patter, he led our group of twenty or so out of the chapel down a hall.
Better than most corporate productions
We filed obediently into a small classroom filled with four or five rows of stackable upholstered chairs. At the front of the room, a television sat atop a tall rolling A/V cart which was shrouded in white cloth, like an altar. The television screen showed the DVD VIDEO logo. A volunteer handed us each a pair of elastic-topped white plastic slippers to wear over our shoes. These would protect the light-colored temple carpets from our shoes during our tour. It made me feel as if we were visiting a semiconductor factory.
When we were seated and settled and sanitized for the building's protection, the lights went down and a 13-minute video presentation on temples began. As a narrator delivered calm, reassuring words over a bed of reverent strings, views of different LDS temples around the world panned across the screen. I felt chills crawl up my body, the same chills I had once interpreted as the presence of the Holy Ghost testifying to me of truth. Stop it, I told myself. This is a Pavlovian reaction to long conditioning, I told myself. You feel the same thing during the opening frames of Star Wars. Control it.
I touched my chest briefly. Under my blue dress shirt I was wearing the "X-Mormon" T-shirt (based on a design sent in by a loyal reader) for which I had done the graphic design. Between the realization of why I was feeling what I was feeling, the reminder of my true convictions, and the presence of my gentile family and friends, I got the "rightness chills" under control. I didn't feel them again for the remainder of the tour.
The video offered us a sketchy history of temple-building in the ancient and modern worlds, touching on Moses's portable desert tabernacle and Joseph Smith's constructions in 1830s Ohio and Illinois. The narrative followed the persecuted early Saints west to the shores of the Great Salt Lake where they began the forty years of construction that would culminate in 1893 with the dedication of the iconic Salt Lake Temple. Interspersed with this narrative were sound bites from a couple of talking heads, professors from the Department of Ancient Scripture at Brigham Young University. (I mentally translated the name of their college to "Department of Wishful Archaeology.")
This put me on alert for references to the Book of Mormon (one of those "ancient scriptures" they study at BYU, together with the Bible and the Pearl of Great Price) during the remainder of video. But despite the prominence of Joseph Smith in its first half, no mention was made of the grand second testament of Christ he produced in the late 1820s, a book that the Church promotes as "the keystone of our religion." In fact, no mention was made of the Book of Mormon for the duration of the tour. The focus was squarely on Jesus Christ, and on the doctrine of eternal familes, which received due attention in the second half of the video, with apostles like Boyd K. Packer and even the Mormon prophet, Gordon B. Hinckley, extolling the importance of temples in helping families be together forever.
After the video, the lights came up. We blinked as Brother Creigh explained to us how the Manhattan temple was unique in the LDS world in that most temples, as we had seen in the video, were expansive structures on wide expanses of manicured grounds in suburban setting. This one was the only temple besides Hong Kong's to be fashioned from an existing building, and the only one at all in which the sacred and restricted temple portions were tetrissed together with a general-access meetinghouse.
(My suspicion is that a Manhattan temple would never have been built had the Church's plans for a temple in Harrison, near White Plains, not bogged down in several years' worth of litigation. But I figured it wouldn't have been politic to raise my hand and ask Brother Creigh to comment.)
"We'll move back down to the first floor now and enter the temple proper," said Brother Creigh. "If you have questions while we're moving, feel free to ask, but there will be an opportunity to ask questions also at the end of the tour."
As we followed Brother Creigh back out of the classroom, Bob said to me, "That video was really well done. Very professional. I've seen corporate PR films that weren't nearly that accomplished."
"They've done their own production in-house for a long time, and they spare no expense," I said.
"You can tell. They do an impressive job."
"The Church is quite the PR machine."
From the time we first heard the announcement of the temple construction, Laura and I had been keeping an ear cocked for word of the open-house tours which would surely follow. When we finally did hear, the word came in a morning news story on WNYC, our local NPR affiliate. The Church PR machine was nothing to underestimate.
We five followed along helplessly as it carried us down the hall.
All ye who enter
Brother Creigh halted our unwieldy group near the third-floor elevators. "It looks like there are too many of us to ride down in one load," he said. "We'll fit as many on as we can, but if any of you are athletes you can feel free to take the stairs and meet us on the first floor."
Only in a Mormon temple is an athlete defined as someone who can successfully walk down two flights of stairs. Yes, Brother Creigh was cracking a little wise, but since the average age for temple workers and patrons is on the elderly side of senior citizen, the implication of his joke was more true than he had probably intended.
As people crowded into the elevator, the five of us opted to display our superior athletic prowess. Laura in particular was eager to avoid the elevator because the building was making her feel claustrophobic already. She fairly vibrated with nervousness and had since we entered the building. She had already heard plenty from me about what goes on in a Mormon temple, and had been served several helpings of more incendiary material from her born-again mother. As curious as she was to see the inner workings for herself, Laura did not like being inside a Mormon stronghold.
When Laura is uncomfortable, she tends to laugh more than usual, so as we and a few other tourgoers descended the stairs there was a bit more hilarity than Brother Creigh probably would have deemed appropriate. But hey, we weren't inside the temple proper yet, and we managed to work most of it out of our systems before we rejoined the main group on the first floor.
Brother Creigh led the group back along the dogleg we had originally negotiated on the way into the building. He halted us in a cramped area just inside the main entrance. "Now we're about to enter the temple itself," he said. "If you look right up there behind you, there's a phrase engraved over the front entrance that you'll find somewhere on every temple."
We turned to look. The entrance was four doors wide and was framed in a metal that looked like (but probably wasn't) weathered bronze. Engraved in the lintel over the central doors were these words:
That's to remind us," said Brother Creigh, "that we are entering the House of the Lord, very literally. The temple, unlike regular church buildings, is where the Lord dwells on earth."
He didn't mention that after the temple's dedication, the Lord would take residence and begin to charge admission.
Greasing God's palm
Opposite the main doors an entryway two people wide led into the temple. Brother Creigh guided us through it—I swear, Laura was emitting an audible tone by this point—and into an anteroom dominated on its rear wall by a stained-glass tableau brightly from behind. A little lectern or reception desk was centered a yard or two inside the entryway. Brother Creigh took up position behind it.
"Now, for regular church activities, you would come into the building and go right. For admission to the temple, however, you come straight in this way and check in with your temple recommend. This is literally a card you can carry in your wallet that's been signed by your bishop and other leaders, maybe an, um, area president, that says you've been found worthy to enter the temple. This is good for one year, and it will get you into any temple anywhere in the world."
Brother Creigh did not volunteer any details about what it means to be "found worthy," nor did anyone in the tour group ask, that I heard. Leaving aside the qualifications you might expect—refraining from sexual relations outside of marriage, abstaining from use of coffee, tea, alcohol, and tobacco, etc.—the two most important requirements for temple admission are:
- The disavowal of any connection with or sympathy for apostate groups or those who seek to destroy the Church.
- The payment of a full ten percent of your income as a tithe to the Church.
I see wet people
From the anteroom, Brother Creigh led us left into another bright passage. A twist and turn or three brought us into the baptistery, a high-ceilinged chamber that housed a huge white basin resting on the backs of twelve sculpted oxen. The oxen were arranged in an outward-facing circle and appeared to have been carved from white stone, though they could just as plausibly have been constructed of plaster applied to a supporting armature. A short flight of steps to either side of the circle gave access to a sort of balcony running around three walls of the baptistery. The floor of the balcony was almost level with the lip of the basin.
We trooped up the steps and arrayed ourselves in a ragged semicircle around the basin. Inside, the basin was lined with pale blue tile and filled with about four feet of clear water. Five or six steps led down into the basin from where we were standing. The air around the font was cool, almost cold, but not humid at all.
"This is the baptismal font, where one of the important ordinances of the temple takes place," said Brother Creigh. "Now, if you've looked behind you there on the back wall, you've probably noticed that large painting." In fact, we all had; a gigantic oil canvas filled the available wall space behind the balcony, picturing a river that meandered through a scrubby brown landscape. "That's the River Jordan, where Jesus Christ was baptized. As Latter-day Saints, we believe in emulating Christ's example in all things, so we become baptized as a sign that we're his followers."
Laura tapped me on the arm and lifted one of her feet enough that I could see the sole. She had apparently snagged her plastic slipper on something and ripped a hole in it the size of a quarter. She seemed chagrined and pleased in equal measure to be tracking some of the dust of her feet across the pristine temple carpets.
"I wasn't raised in the Church myself. I was in my twenties in college when I was baptized. My children were born in the faith and were baptized at the age of eight. But we were all baptized in humbler fonts than this, in regular meetinghouses. This font, as you saw coming into the baptistery, is supported on the backs of twelve oxen, representing the Twelve Tribes of Israel, and a different kind of ordinance takes place in it. What we do here is called 'baptism for the dead.'"
Brother Creigh spoke delicately, as if he knew he might be treading on tricky ground. "In the New Testament, the apostle Paul wrote the following to the Corinthians: 'Else what shall they do which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all? Why are they then baptized for the dead?' You see, baptism is a necessary step in following Christ, but what about the many, many people who have lived on the earth but never heard of Christ? We believe in performing this baptism for them, on their behalf, which is why the LDS people do genealogy. We feel a great desire to find out who our ancestors are, and when we do we bring their names to the temple so we can be baptized on their behalf. Children do this for their ancestors starting at the age of twelve."
His description made it sound as if baptism for the dead were a leisurely family affair performed sparingly and only for direct ancestors. While this is sometimes the case, the predominant mode in an operating temple baptistery is one of quiet but deadly efficiency. One mission of the LDS Church is to redeem all the dead, and to this end its members pore tirelessly over old records from across the world, microfilming as they go and compiling a vast database of as many names of dead people as possible. As new names are turned up, these get fed into temple computers. Youngsters of age twelve and above then descend on the temple in regimented droves, dress in white clothes, and await their turns to be baptized in rapid succession on behalf of a bewildering number of dead people apiece.
While we were hanging out in front of the temple before the tour, I had described for my companions my own first experiences with baptism for the dead, when I was twelve or thirteen. I remember entering a dressing room at the Ogden Utah Temple with other boys from my ward to change into pure white coveralls. We then queued up together with the girls in the baptistery. When my turn arrived, I climbed down into the warm water of the font where an older man in white clothing awaited. A television monitor was mounted near the font, on and the screen appeared a name and a set of dates. The name sounded Dutch or German, and the dates were from the late 17th Century. The man raised his right hand, rattled off a quick invocation that included my name and the name on the screen, then dunked my skinny frame backward in the water as I bent at the knees. As he raised me back into a standing a position and I sputtered for breath, a new name appeared on the screen and down I went again.
This happened thirty times in all. The whole process took less than five minutes.
Standing in the Manhattan baptistery, I looked around for any trace of a computer screen or a place where one could be mounted. I could find none. When it went into operation, that room would be like an Ellis Island for the dead, processing vast hordes of departed souls through Heaven's bureaucracy at assembly-line speeds. But that apparently was not the impression we were meant to take away from our tour—especially given that some Jewish groups are still locked in legal battle with the Church over its wholesale baptizing of Holocaust victims.
"Being baptized on behalf of deceased ancestors is such a special experience for young people," Brother Creigh said. "Many report feeling that those souls are present during the ordinance, and that they're conveying their gratitude and joy at finally getting to partake of its sacred blessings."
I had heard many tales growing up of people who didn't just sense their spectral benefectors in the baptistery but actually saw them and sometimes heard them speak. Such reports are so much hysterical rubbish, but as Brother Creigh led us back out of the room a certain spooky ambience seemed to tag along.
Me and Yeshua down by the churchyard
We trooped back into the anteroom, this time passing behind the check-in desk and pausing near the large stained-glass display. It consisted of three panels. The two flanking panels were merely decorative, while the wider center panel showed Jesus walking down a country road in the company of two robed men. One man had a beard, while the other was clean-shaven and balding.
"As we continue through the temple," said Brother Creigh, "you'll notice how much art there is throughout. This is original art, these beautiful and uplifting works, and we've spared no effort in providing it. This is the House of the Lord, after all, and nothing is too good for the Lord. This beautiful piece of stained glass, for instance, was commissioned especially for the temple. It depicts Jesus Christ on the road to Emmaus after his resurrection. If you remember from the New Testament, two of his disciples were walking along this road when they encountered a stranger . . ."
As Brother Creigh related this Bible story, Bob leaned over to me and said softly, "Looking at this picture, you know the thing I never realized? That one of Christ's disciples was Paul Simon."
Instructions from Big Brother
The next stop on our tour was the fifth floor, to which another beehive-festooned elevator whisked us in two batches. Brother Creigh led us to the heart of this level via what I presume was a shortcut through a ladies' changing room. (I can't think of any other reason why the Church would want to show us what was essentially a locker room.) This almost resulted in half the group wandering lost in the wilderness, though, when one older woman near the middle of the pack failed to keep up with the folks in front of her. When my contingent, in the rearguard of the tour, rounded the corner into a narrow passageway, we found this woman and a couple of other folks dithering back and forth between two different doors, unsure through which the vanguard had passed. Finally some clever soul thought to read the signs next to the doors and successfully identified the ladies' changing room. We passed quickly through it and caught up with the rest of the group in short order.
We gathered in a little nexus doorways and intersecting passages. One or two other tour groups were trying to negotiate this area at the same time, and their jostlings caused us to contract into a tighter and tighter knot, like an amoeba prodded by a microfilament. As we waited for the way to clear, I overheard someone asking Brother Creigh about the symbolism of the beehive. He offered this person a somewhat more expansive explanation than Elder Bush had given earlier, then went on to expound on temple symbolism. "For instance," he said, "as you look around you might see stars worked into the design here and there. . . ."
At last the way was clear for us to file into what Brother Creigh told us was an "instruction room." This was a rather cramped little chamber with five or six rows of theater seats and an aisle down the center. At the front of the room, before a white wall, was a low altar topped with a velvet cushion. The other walls and the ceiling were painted with a mural depicting a bucolic landscape of trees, as if we stood in the middle of a forest glade. Beams of that same artificial-looking wood arched up the walls and across the ceiling, dividing the mural into panels. Brother Creigh invited us all to sit, if we liked. Laura was feeling very claustrophobic by this point and signaled to me with a shake of her head that she preferred to stand. We took up a position against the wall at the back of the room, at the end of the center aisle.
"Another important function of the temple for Latter-day Saints," said Brother Creigh, "is as a place of learning and instruction. To gain answers to the great questions of existence that we all have—where did I come from? why am I here? where am I going after this life?—is why members of the Church come here. They enter the temple and change into all-white clothing—white pants and shirts and ties for the brethren, long white dresses for the sisters—then assemble here in this room. The white clothing they wear symbolizes not just purity but also equality. With everyone dressed in white, you can't tell the difference between the young and the old, the healthy and the sick, the rich man and the poor man. Everyone is equal, just as they are in the eyes of the Lord."
I suppose that's how it works in theory, but on all my visits to the temple I'd never had any trouble telling the wealthy from those of more modest means. Even with white clothing, gradations of quality aren't that hard to detect. Furthermore, in most temples people who don't own their own white clothes are able to rent white jumpsuits for a small fee. Believe me, the jumpsuits stick out like a sore thumb. (I believe I read somewhere that the Manhattan temple does not feature clothing rental; there was just no room in the building for that and the requisite laundry facilities.)
"You'll notice the lovely mural here on the walls. This room is actually called the Creation Room, and the mural is symbolic of the creation of the earth." (To me it looked representational, not symbolic, and representational of the Garden of Eden at that. But that could just be me.) "It's in this beautiful setting that the Saints are instructed in the answers to those great questions I mentioned."
"Who does the instructing?" asked someone seated in the first row.
Aha, I thought, this should be an interesting revelation. Anticipating the answer, I looked straight up the back wall, above my head, to where I knew there would be a small rectangular opening or two.
"The instruction is done by video, projected onto this wall behind me," said Brother Creigh. If he understood how creepy and 1984-ish this sounded, he didn't let on. "The Saints watch and listen in reverence, and they learn where they came from before this life and all about the purpose of existence."
He went on a few moments more in that same non-informative vein while I reflected on how immeasurably more fascinating the unvarnished truth would have been. The video he mentioned was not some dystopian talking head, as the tourgoers might have imagined, but a filmed version of a peculiarly Mormon mystery play. In it, the story of the Creation is enacted, together with Lucifer's tempation of Adam and Eve and their subsequent Fall and expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Along the way—and I shit you not—Adam and Eve are taught the handshakes and passwords that will enable them to enter God's Kingdom when they pass from this life. The white-clothed audience learns them too.
As I explained to my companions later that evening, this is what is known as the "endowment" ordinance. It may sound outlandish and fantastical, but I've seen it with my own eyes, heard it with my own ears, and given the secret shakes with my own right hand. If you don't believe me, it's not all that difficult to find a reliable transcript of the ceremony online and read it over for yourself.
In older temples the mystery play is performed live, with stiff elderly temple workers taking the parts of Elohim, Jehovah, Adam, Lucifer, and the rest of the gang. As the play progresses, the audience rises up and moves from room to room, the Creation Room giving way to the lush Garden Room yielding up to the desolate World Room. A new streamlined design was introduced in temples built after 1953, however, with the functions of those three rooms collapsed into one, and the mystery play projected as a movie. Various updates of the "temple film" were produced over the subsequent years and shown in rotation, with my personal favorite being one produced in 1969 and featuring none other than Gordon Jump (of WKRP in Cincinnati and Maytag repairman fame) in the role of the Apostle Peter. (And yes, I'm the wag who submitted the credits listing and plot summary to IMDB.com back in the late '90s. I garnered the information from a book by David John Buerger entitled The Mysteries of Godliness: A History of Mormon Temple Worship.)
We filed out of the Creation Room in an orderly fashion; another restless tour group was waiting outside to take our place. As Brother Creigh led us down the hall to our next destination, someone asked him if the instructions in the video presentation were different on different visits to the temple.
"No, it's the same instructions every time," said the unflappable Brother Creigh.
I don't know whether or not he realized how much like a recipe for brainwashing that sounded. And I wonder if anyone else in the group realized how much stranger the truth was than the thin veneer we were allowed to see.
A clash of symbols
Our next stop on the tour was the Terrestrial Room, although Brother Creigh never did refer to it by name. This was a high-ceilinged, very bright and spacious chamber just down the hall from the Creation Room, and painted all in eggshell white. The light came from teardrop-shaped fixtures suspended from above. Several rows of theater seats were arranged in gently curving arcs before a sumptuous ruffled curtain hanging inside a proscenium arch at the front of the room. The room might have functioned as a particularly high-class playhouse or cinema.
"This is the next room to which the visitors come for instruction on their visits to the temple," said Brother Creigh, "and again it's very symbolic. The high ceilings indicate that we're moving more and more into the presence of the Lord, while the brightness of the room is symbolic of the light of Christ that's shed forth upon the earth."
Rather glaringly, he didn't say a word about the symbolism of the curtain at the front of the room. I stayed alert during the rest of the tour for a chance to pose him that question, but the opportunity never came—at least, not where I could ask it for the benefit of the entire group. I was quite interested to hear how he would answer, given that the heavy curtain is actually there to conceal a much gauzier curtain called the Veil. And the Veil is symbolic of the veil that separates our material world from the afterlife.
As, again, I explained to my companions later that evening, the endowment ceremony continues in the Terrestrial Room. After some further instruction, handshaking, and bad acting, the heavy curtain is raised to reveal the Veil. Symbols borrowed from Masonry such as the square and compass have been stitched into the fabric, and an officiator proceeds to explain their meanings. The endowees then approach the Veil in orderly queues. As each arrives at the Veil in turn, he or she reaches through slits in the fabric to embrace a temple worker stationed on the far side. This embrace is known, or used to be known before the endowment ceremony was abridged in 1990, as the "Five Points of Fellowship," and is another blatant borrowing from Masonry. Locked in this position (which, when enacted by an old male temple worker and a young female petitioner, some Mormon friends of mine smirkingly referred to as the Six Points of Fellowship), the temple worker quizzes the endowee on the passwords and handshakes taught during the ceremony.
Most of the passwords are short, but the last one is quite long and bears reproducing if only because it's so much fun to say quickly. Over beers that evening I repeated it from memory for my companions, with only a brief pause or two: "Health in the navel, marrow in the bones, strength in the loins and in the sinews, power in the priesthood be upon me and upon my posterity through all generations of time and throughout all eternity."
When the petitioner has successfully passed the test (and no one fails because a prompter is standing by to fill in any gaps in memory), he or she is invited to pass through the Veil and symbolically enter the Kingdom of Heaven by moving into the chamber beyond, the Celestial Room. So when Brother Creigh spoke his next words to the tour group—"Let's now move on to the Celestial Room, in the same fashion that temple patrons would do so"—I believed irrationally for a moment that this was the route we were about to follow.
But it was not to be. "The Celestial Room is the very heart of the temple," he said. "It represents the highest level of Heaven, and it's a place for sacred meditation and prayer. I ask as we enter that we all preserve the reverent atmosphere of the Celestial Room by not speaking until we've left it again."
He led us out the door of the Terrestrial Room and down a short and very prosaic hallway. There would be no passing through the Veil for us that day.
Super Masonic
Before we continue, a brief word about Mormonism and Masonry. Though most Latter-day Saints downplay or even pooh-pooh the connection, Joseph Smith was a Mason, and he borrowed liberally from Masonic rites when he created the first version of the endowment ceremony in 1842. This is ironic in light of the fact that the Book of Mormon struck many people as a rabidly anti-Masonic work when it was published in 1830.
The Book of Mormon is, of course, a product of the place and time in which it was written—upstate New York in the late 1820s. Those years were a period of intense suspicion and hatred of Masonry, so it's not surprising that the latter half of the book is rife with stories of "secret combinations"—gangs of robbers and murderers who join together, bound by secret signs and blood oaths, to sow suspicion and dissent, to overthrow all that is good and decent, and to profit by their mutual black iniquity. One typical passage in Ether (the section which perhaps prompted Mark Twain famously to declare the Book of Mormon "chloroform in print") condemns the activities of these marauding bands in unequivocal terms:
And it came to pass that they formed a secret combination, even as they of old; which combination is most abominable and wicked above all, in the sight of God;
For the Lord worketh not in secret combinations, neither doth he will that man should shed blood, but in all things hath forbidden it, from the beginning of man.
And secret combinations were much on the mind of the people of New York thanks to the abduction of William Morgan.
In September 1826, hooded men burned a printing press in Batavia, New York, and beat the owner severely. The press had just produced proofs of a book exposing the rites and covenants of Freemasonry. Shortly thereafter, the book's author, William Morgan, was abducted, never to be seen again. Five men, well-known Masons all, were tried for Morgan's kidnapping and presumed murder in January 1827 at Canandaigua, New York, not far from Joseph Smith's home. Three of the five were acquitted, while the two others received light jail sentences. Further trials the next month resulted in more acquittals, and an anti-Masonic fervor the likes of which the country has never seen since swept New York and many surrounding states.
By 1842, however, the pendulum had swung the other way again for Masonry. It had enjoyed an enormous resurgence in popularity in the years after the Morgan affair blew over. The Mormons were growing into a powerful voting bloc in the state of Illinois, and Masonic candidates for public office would have been foolish not to curry Mormon favor. So it was that Joseph Smith, a man once painted as fiercely anti-Masonic, underwent a meteoric advancement through the ranks of Masonry at the hands of Abraham Jonas, Grandmaster of the Illinois Lodge and a prominent candidate for public office. On March 15, 1842, Joseph Smith received his initiation as an Entered Apprentice Mason, the lowest of Freemasonry's three degrees. The next day, he received the Fellow Craft and Master Mason degrees, despite the normal thirty-day waiting period required before advancement.
On May 4, 1842, a scant fifty days after first participating in the Masonic mysteries, Joseph Smith introduced a new ordinance, the "endowment," to his most trusted followers in a room above his red brick store in Nauvoo, Illinois. This new ordinance bore a striking similarity to the Masonic initiation rites—a parallel which could not have been lost on Joseph's inner circle, since most of them were Masons as well.
I won't belabor the many correspondences between Masonic rites and the Mormon endowment. Suffice it to say that, the moment I mentioned the compass and square stitched into the Veil to my friends that evening, Jim said, "Hey, that sounds like Masonry."
I guess some things are easier to see from the outside.
Heaven means never having to say a word
Trailing Brother Creigh, our silent group entered the Celestial Room. I don't have much to say about the experience. The room's ceiling was even higher than that of the Terrestrial Room, the appointments grander and more ornate. Instead of theater seats, it contained groupings of expensive chairs and couches. The walls were bright white but not painfully so. The overall effect, though, was less of welcoming and warmth than of cold, remote formality.
I looked around the room, trying to spy out the place from which endowees would emerge after passing through the Veil. In other temples I've seen, there's a sort of baffle in the Celestial Room screening the Veil from direct view, but in this room there was no such thing. I did spot a couple of doors in the Veilward wall, and I can only presume those provided ingress to endowees.
My eyes came to rest on the high stained-glass windows set into one wall. Each window depicted a stylized tree with tangled branches and white fruit. I'm guessing that this was either the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil from which Adam and Eve ate, or, more likely, the Tree of Life of which the prophet Lehi dreamed early on in the Book of Mormon. What struck me about the depiction of the trees, though, was that in some cases the white fruit hung in pairs, resembling nothing so much as tidy little scrotums.
I wanted to point this out to Laura, but we were in the Celestial Room and no one was speaking. Not that utter silence was something I'd ever observed in operational Celestial Rooms. On the occasion of my first endowment, in 1986, I was told that the Celestial Room is in fact the only place where the endowment can be freely discussed and questions can asked. Not that this discussion ever rises above the level of a murmur, but at least it does take place.
(Speaking of speaking, upon the successful completion of my own endowment—August 15, 1986, in the Salt Lake Temple as it happened—my father hugged me in the Celestial Room and said to me, "No matter how many times I go through it, I always learn something new." He meant the endowment ceremony itself, in which he had participated regularly for at least a quarter of a century. Why undergo the ordinance so many times? Because, of course, on subsequent visits you're doing it by proxy for dead people.)
But whether filled with quiet murmurs or deathly silence, the Celestial Room is hardly my idea of Heaven. Any place where I'm afraid to sit on the furniture and I can't try to make my wife laugh is not a place where I care to spend eternity.
An ear for dialog
After a decent interval, Brother Creigh led us out of the Celestial Room again. The group breathed an almost palpable sigh of relief. And if my companions were any indication, they also carried with them a large misconception about the purpose of the Celestial Room. As Jim commented later that evening during my explication of the endowment ceremony, "You mean you can't just visit the temple and go directly to the Celestial Room to meditate?"
"No," I said. "You can only get there by going through the whole ceremony, with the video and the robes and the handshakes."
"What a ripoff!" said Jim. "I got a completely different impression from what the guy said on the tour."
Our tour group bunched up again near the elevators. I ended up standing near Brother Creigh, and while we waited to be ferried up to the sixth floor he tried to strike up a friendly conversation. "So where are you visiting us from today?" he asked me.
"We live here in the city," I said, "but I'm originally from Utah."
"Oh! Where at?"
"I grew up in a town called Kaysville," I said.
"I grew up in Florida myself," said Brother Creigh. "Never even made it west of the Mississippi until after I was twenty-three."
We chatted pleasantly for a moment or two more. If anything surprised me about the conversation it was that Brother Creigh completely failed to ask me whether or not, being from Utah, I was a member of the Church. In retrospect I probably shouldn't have been surprised. I'm sure the tour guides had been carefully instructed not to make assumptions about the participants on the tour, to avoid giving inadvertent offense.
Either that or my ear piercings made him wary.
A throbbing in the temples
The sixth floor of the temple was devoted to weddings—or, to use the more proper terminology, "sealings." Whereas Mormons consider a wedding to be a civil bond that dissolves upon the death of either party, sealing is an ordinance by which a man and a woman are spiritually married "for time and all eternity." The ordinance can, as I'm sure you have guessed, only be performed in a temple.
Furthermore, the endowment ordinance is a prerequisite for sealing. Young Mormon men usually undergo the endowment at the age of 19, before serving missions, so they have plenty of time to absorb the oddity of it before being sealed to a bride. But for many young women, the first endowment comes the day of or maybe the day before their nuptials. If you think normal wedding-day jitters are bad, try throwing an endowment ceremony in on top of them!
Our first port of call on the sixth floor was the so-called Bride's Room. This was a glorified dressing room, complete with vanity desk, a little arrangement of settees, and several mirrors. The walls were done in reverent shades of a color that hitherto undiscovered portions of my brain tell me was lavender or mauve.
"This is where, before her wedding, a bride is able to prepare for the coming ceremony, together with her mother and a few other female relations," said Brother Creigh. "It's furnished with every amenity a new bride could possibly need—which means, of course, a lot of mirrors."
An appreciative ripple of laughter rolled through the room, though beside me Laura bristled.
"You know," Brother Creigh went on, "I just got a call from my daughter in Utah last week, and she told me she's engaged. August fourteenth she'll be entering a room in Salt Lake City just like this one to prepare for her own sealing. It's strange to think that as many times as I've been in the temple, this is the first time I've seen the inside of a Bride's Room. There is no Groom's Room, you know. What they do before the ceremony I couldn't tell you."
He was cracking wise again, in that self-consciously eye-twinkling Mormon way. I leaned over to Laura and whispered, "Strip club."
By this point Laura was so keyed up you could have used her to tune a piano. She let out a laugh that could have brought down the walls of Jericho.
The tour was already leaving the Bride's Room, and people pretended they hadn't noticed. Laura glared at me in chagrined mock-fury, and she punched me in the arm.
Victory is sweet.
A passion for the Christ
As we moved along the wide main corridor of the sixth floor, Brother Creigh pointed out waiting areas for wedding attendees and more examples of what he referred to as "original art." It's true, there were a lot of paintings hanging on the walls of the temple. But not all of them were what I would have called original.
I'm not deriding the quality of the work. I am saying that, having spent my first 28 years as a member of the Church, I recognized most of it. In most instances what we were seeing were not in fact original works but skillful copies of well-known pieces by important Mormon artists. For example, a painting I had seen hanging near the dressing rooms adjacent to the baptistery was a copy of an Arnold Friberg work, "Alma Baptizes at the Waters of Mormon," originally commissioned as an illustration for the Book of Mormon. Near the Bride's Room I thought I had picked out a piece in the style of Minerva Teichert, a portrait of Mary or some other important Biblical or Book of Mormon woman.
There on the sixth floor we passed one painting that I recognized as a partial detail of a work called "The Second Coming." Laura stopped dead.
"Wow," she whispered to me. "I never knew Jesus was so hot. I'd let him lay hands on me."
"Eww," I said, shaking my head. "This is a copy of a Harry Anderson, and I've never really liked the way he portrays Christ."
"What's not to like? This Christ looks like he doesn't take shit. Like Willem Dafoe."
"Well, okay," I said, tugging her along.
A whited sepulchre
Brother Creigh was pointing out fancy architectural details. "Again, take a look at the marvelous detail that's gone into these cornices and moldings. Work like that doesn't come cheap, but like we say, nothing is too good for the Lord."
Actually, the architecture did look a little cheap to me—cheap and bland and tasteless, in a nouveau riche kind of way.
Bob saw it a little differently. "You know," he said, leaning into the center of our little group, "it's all very beautiful and immaculately maintained, but with the cold air and the silk flowers and the white walls and the hushed atmosphere—it's not like a house of worship. It's a funeral home."
"Yes, yes, yes!" said Liz, jabbing the air in Bob's direction with her finger. "That's it exactly, what I was thinking!"
As Laura and Jim added their agreement to the general chorus, I was having an epiphany. A funeral home! Of course! A temple was an edifice with far more focus on the dead than the living. It really was a mortuary. Why hadn't I ever picked up on that before?
Because some things are easier to see from the outside.
Yes, but what happens in the Boston temple?
The penultimate stop on our tour was the sealing room at the end of this main corridor. This was where actual temple wedding ceremonies would take place. The sealing room was a somewhat close rectangular chamber with thirty or forty chairs lining the walls. In the center of the room stood an altar covered with velvet and surrounded by a cushioned perch just the right height to kneel on. Mounted on the two side walls, facing each other perfectly across the altar, were two large mirrors. Below one of the mirrors was a bench chair wide enough for two people to sit on.
We took seats around the outside wall. Brother Creigh stood near the altar. "I see none of you took the wide seat under that mirror," he said with a smile. "I guess that means everyone here is married already. That's where the prospective bride and groom sit while the officiator addresses the wedding party before the actual ordinance is performed."
He went on to explain how a temple sealing joined a man and woman into the eternal family stretching back into the infinite past and forward into the everlasting future. "The bride and groom kneel here, across from each other at this altar, and in these opposing mirrors they see themselves as part of that endless chain reflected back and forth to eternity, ancestors trailing back forever in one direction and descendents in the other."
He did not describe much more than that of the ceremony, which also consists of the bride and groom giving each other the secret handshakes from the endowment ceremony across the velvet top of the altar. He did, however, bring up the matter of proxy sealings, whereby dead couples receive the ordinance with living persons standing—or rather, kneeling—in for them at the altar.
My attention wandered a little, I will admit. There was a beautiful little stained-glass window set high in the back wall of the sealing room, and as I looked at it in fascination I realized that the natural-looking daylight shining through it could not possibly be natural. Imagineering: it's a powerful thing.
I'm not sure quite how it happened, but while I wasn't paying attention one question or another set off a chain of associations that led to Brother Creigh's attempting to untangle the complicated skein of theology that permits a man whose wife has passed away to be sealed eternally to another woman but does not permit a woman whose husband has passed away to be sealed eternally to another man. A discussion of polygamy and how it's bound up with this matter is beyond the scope of this report, but suffice it to say that the topic is endlessly diverting, especially to a non-LDS crowd attempting to understand it.
As Brother Creigh led us out of the sealing room, a handsome, strapping fellow—to my eye and ear, half of a gay couple who were studiously not holding hands during the tour—was asking him, "If there's temple marriage, is there such a thing as temple divorce?"
While our erstwhile guide chased down that particular hare (the answer, by the way, is yes, sort of), Laura said to our small gang, "Oh, my God. When he pointed out that no one had taken the marriage seat, how much did I want for me and Lizzie to go sit there together?"
"I think the two fellows there were considering it as well," said Bob.
Brother Creigh was leading us to a stairwell that would take us back to the third floor. "So yes," he was saying, "in that situation the man and woman could certainly be married civilly. It's just that a temple sealing could not take place."
"So even though the man could be sealed to another woman," said the handsome man, "he couldn't to her because she's already sealed to someone else."
"That's it exactly," said Brother Creigh.
"Yeah," said Laura as Brother Creigh passed out of hearing, not loudly but still two shades louder necessary to speak just to the other four of us, "but you can fuck whoever you like."
I thought I saw the ghost of smile flit across the lips of the man ahead of us, who I believe was the handsome man's partner.
The obligatory coda to any LDS function
We emerged from the stairwell onto the third floor, skinned off our protective slippers and deposited them in a bin, and bid Brother Creigh farewell. We were back in the non-temple portion of the building, and our final stop on the tour was the "cultural hall," a sort of glorified gymnasium where a refreshment table had been set up. Pleasantly plump folks behind the table served us large oatmeal raisin cookies and plastic cups of cold water. I was mildly disappointed and a little embarrassed that my people weren't serving their guests red punch, or green Jell-O.
This was apparently where the Q&A at the end of the tour was meant to take place, on this brightly lit basketball court where a dozen round tables had been set up for tourgoers to rest their hindquarters after a stressful hour of touring. Missionaries stood by ready to answer the deepest of questions and to sign people up for a personalized visit at their homes.
Bob, Jim, Liz, Laura, and I finished our cookies, drank our water, and headed for the exit. Not that the victuals weren't appreciated, but we were more than ready to tromp up Columbus Avenue through the noise and stink of an Upper West Side night to a bar called Peter's, where the beer is cold, the dominant decorative motif is the female nude, and the conversation is so loud you need to shout to be heard. When we got there, we talked ourselves hoarse.
I say these things humbly in the name of Informed Consent, amen.
Bob has posted his own impressions of the temple tour online at LiveJournal.com.