Visiting the Temple

It's not often that I get to scratch an item off my list of "things to do before I die", but I got to do that today.

I visited a Mormon temple.

For those of you not familiar with the LDS faith, a temple is where Mormons perform certain secret religious rituals. Patterned after the ancient Jewish temples, Mormon temples allow access only to members of the church is good standing. But for a month or so after a temple finished but before a temple is dedicated, it is open to the general public.

The temple in question is the Sacramento Temple, in the city of Rancho Cordova, just outside of Sacramento off of US-50. Since I'm not nor ever will be a Mormon, visiting a temple's open house is the only way I'll ever see the inside of one. And since few temples are built (the last one to be built in Northern California was dedicated in 1965), I figured this was my only chance.

Why did I want ot visit a temple? I find the LDS faith interesting from a philosophical point of view. Also, I was raised in a form of Christianity that is light on ritual and has no secret stuff. I find intriguing any variant of Christianity that has lots of ritual and/or secret stuff (sort of the "forbidden knowledge" effect, I guess).

Anyway, I got in my car at about 11:15 for the two hour, fifteen minute drive to Rancho Cordova.


I expected the trip to take just under two hours, but I ran into several traffic jams. I got to the temple at 1:30, fifteen minutes before my tour started.



For some reason, the Mormon church tends to get a lot of grief from mainline Christians. There were a couple of protesters in front of the temple.



Before the tour people gathered in a visitor's center. We watched a short video that described the importance temples play in the Mormon faith. Then we walked to the front of the temple, put booties on our feet to keep dirt out of the new building, and entered the temple itself. We visited various rooms:

• A room where Mormons do proxy baptisms for their dead, non-Mormon ancestors.
  
• A movie theatre. A film that dramatizes various portions of Mormon beliefs is used as part of a temple ritual. The particulars of this ritual is very secret, however, so we were in the odd position of standing in a theatre that the guide never told us was a theatre.
  
• An "endowment" room.
  
• A "sealing" room.
  
• The Celestial Room. This is the holiest room in an LDS temple, and we were asked not to speak while inside it. It was the largest room, and sported a very large lead crystal chandelier.
  

Other than the theatre, which featured a mural of natural California landscape on three walls, the general decor was white and gold, with fancy overstuffed chairs, fine wood tables, and vases of flowers. The idea, apparently, is to model the rooms of the temple (especially the Celestial Room) so as to remind the believer of heaven. It was obviously a very holy place to our tour guide.

It was not to me.

I've been trying to figure out why all day, and I think I've worked it out (and no, it's not because I'm a jaded homo). For me, in order for a place to feel holy, it needs to be challenging in some way. Not easy to figure out. Chartes Cathedral, for example, is like this: old and imposing, a place of refuge but nevertheless bigger than you. What I saw at the Sacramento Temple felt more designed to comfort than to challenge. It felt to me like a very fancy version of my late grandparents' house.

The temple reminds one of heaven, but Chartres reminds one of God. Thinking about heaven is easy and comforting. Thinking about God is difficult and can even be frightening.

I prefer the difficult path.

After the Celestial Room, we retired to the visitors center for cookies and lemonade. After that, I headed to my car, got my camera (no cameras were allowed in the temple itself), and shot some pictures of the temple.