Blessings of the Temple

Stake Conference Saturday Session

October 2017

I’m delighted-- and a bit surprised but probably not as surprised as those of you who know me--
to find myself standing here tonight with the assignment of speaking about the blessings of the
temple. I have loved the temple from my first experience when I realized that I was going to be
playing dress ups. I loved playing pretend games as a child, was always begging others to play
with me, and was quite sad when I got too old for pretend and had to give it up. I was therefore
enchanted when I went to the temple and found that I was being invited by God to play
pretend-- to dress up so as to imagine that I could actually become the eternal being God
created me to be.

But I know that not everyone experiences the temple the way I did the first time. This summer I
had two nieces who went to the temple for the first time prior to going on missions. Both of
them are lovely, bright, righteous women. One of them had a reaction to the temple that was
quite similar to mine. She was delighted. The other was nearly paralyzed by it. In the days
leading up to her scheduled endowment, she, one of the most organized people I know, lost her
recommend necessitating the canceling of the endowment. Finally, the day before she was to
report to the MTC, she found her recommend just in time to go with only her mother. She
worried that the temple would not meet her expectations or that her reaction would not meet the
expectations of others. .

Watching my niece go through this struggle, I was reminded of a saying my husband and I say
frequently to each other. We have moved a lot in our life together. Everytime we move we
begin to imagine ourselves as new people in a new place but what we’ve learned is that “where
ever you go, there you are.

This is true of the temple as well. We are not taking our perfected selves to the temple. We
can’t manufacture our reaction and experience to meet whatever expectations we or others
have. We are who we are. We will therefore all have different experiences with the temple.

In fact, in my 36 years of going to the temple regularly I have had as many different
experiences and reactions as I have had years of going. When I was nursing and caring for
young babies, the temple was a haven where I went to do initiatory work so someone was
touching me without demanding something from me. When I had young, messy children, I went
to the temple because it was so clean-- an escape from my messy house. When I was working
a demanding job, the temple was a place where I could actually turn my brain off for a period of
time and, I admit, even dose peacefully for a few minutes.

The temple has also sometimes been a difficult place for me as I know it is for others. Many
years ago when I had a baby struggling in the ICU, I went to the temple desperately seeking
comfort. It was a Saturday morning, a very busy time, and the cheerful hustle and bustle of the
place was so inimical to my grief that I felt alienated and had to flee in a panic. There have
been times when the sparse presence of a female voice creates an absence so strong I wonder
why I ever go back. I know that there are some of you here tonight that find the temple a painful
topic because of your particular circumstances. I assume we all know dear, devoted members
of the church who find it a complicated place to be.

However, running through the tapestry of all my experiences of the temple is one precious
thread I would like to focus on tonight that I identify as my blessing of the temple. While it is true
that no matter where you go, there you are, at the temple you are not alone.

Joseph Smith describes the temple as: a house whereby the Lord could reveal unto His people
the ordinances of His house and the glories of His kingdom, and teach the people the way of
salvation; (Joseph Smith, History of the Church, July 1843)

It is the “teach the people the way of salvation” that I am interested in. I retired a few years ago
and had the luxury of re-creating myself without any external factors making claims on my use
of time. I’ve had my children, they are grown and gone. I had as much educational and career
success that I wanted. Our finances are arranged such that I don’t need to worry about that
anymore. I have plenty of health and energy. So what was I to do with my time to make my
existence matter? One day I was reading in D&C 101. The Lord is addressing the Saints at a
time of great distress in 1833. The Saints in Missouri were being persecuted, had lost their
homes, their property, their hope for the future. The Lord says to them in verses 37 and 38

Therefore care not for the body, neither the life of the body; but care for the soul and for the life
of the soul. And seek the face of the Lord always, that in patience ye may possess your souls,
and ye shall have eternal life.

Care for the soul and the life of the soul. The Lord is telling us what matters-- the life of the
soul.

Around the same time, I had a very close friend die very quickly and unexpectedly. She was not
a member of the church but she liked to call herself an honorary Mormon. She had many
Mormon friends in Belmont, had been to wreath making many times, and knew the doctrine
pretty well through many long discussions with me and other Mormons.. She had no interest in
being a member of an organized religion. When she died I told myself that I was not going to do
her temple work unless she sent me a very clear sign. I didn’t want to insult her. If she didn’t
want it here on earth, I could not assume she would want it after earth. And since I’m not
someone who ever has experiences with non-earthly beings, it was going to have be a strong
and convincing sign.
A year and two months after she died, I spent an entire night dreaming about her. These were
very vivid dreams so vivid that I would start awake thinking she was in the room and then I
would fall back asleep and continue the dream right where I had left off.

When I woke in the morning I couldn’t shake her presence. It was Dec 24 and I had 40 people
coming to my house for dinner but I couldn’t focus on my tasks because she was so present. I
decided I would make a small effort to locate her son whom I had not seen in years because I
knew I would need information from him and his permission. I promised 15 minutes to her-- I
said “I’ll start the search now and then maybe by January when the holidays are over, I’ll find
him and get your work started. Within 15 minutes I had found four people with his same name
living in New Jersey. I took a stab at one of the numbers, left an odd message on a potential
stranger’s phone expecting not to hear back from him because, after all, it was Dec 24. He
called me back shortly thereafter. It was him. He gave his permission and the information I
needed. In January when the holidays were over, I took her name to the temple.

I had never done temple work for someone I knew so I was acutely aware, as I took her name
through the various ordinances, of her name. It was such a pleasure to say her name out loud,
to make her existence matter again. I started counting how many times her name was said:
from baptism in the baptistry, through initiatory, the endowment and the various sealings. The
name is said 20 times. 20 times.

Let’s pause and think about that for a minute. We take the names of individuals-- a person
who breathed, and lived and loved on earth but whose body, whose deeds, whose worries and
concerns, actions, and choices and have long since vanished and been forgotten, -- yet we
seek them out, one by one, take them to the temple, where we speak their name again and
again. When the name is first said in the baptistry, for some people that is the first time their
name has been spoken out loud on earth in hundreds of years.

I find this deeply moving-- that at the heart of religion, in our holiest space, we are taught about
a Creator God who loves us individually, who cares about our existence, who knows our name.
By speaking the name of the deceased, we make each individual matter-- not because of what
they did or did not do here on earth but because they matter.

Even more deeply important to me, is that through this act of taking names to the temple and
doing the ordinance work for others, we learn that God, whose self declared work and glory, as
it says in Moses 1:39, is “to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man,” invites us, as
part of our way to salvation, to participate in this work. Everytime I go to the temple no matter
what my current state of being-- I do not go alone. I carry with me tucked in my pocket the
name of someone else who matters and I remember that God’s plan for my salvation is never
about me alone.

When we lived in India, we lived across the street from a very busy and active Hindu temple. I
would see people arriving with offerings of a wide variety of flowers and fruits for their gods. As
they would leave the temple, they would throw a coconut on the ground as a final offering. If I
was walking near the exit door, I had to be careful not to be hit by bits of flying coconut. (I can
tell you it feels like getting hit by a rock.)

I enjoyed watching other people at their temple ritual. It made me think about what we take,
metaphorically speaking, when we go to the temple-- we give offerings of time, our hearts, our
attention and physical presence; we take our expectations, our pride, our pains, our doctrinal
struggles with God and with others, we take prayers of needs and worries. When we go to the
temple, there we are, but we are not alone. We offer it all to God and in return we are taught
that the way to our salvation is to participate with a Saviour God who has shown us the way
through his sacrifice for us, to offer every soul that has lived on earth the opportunity to be called
by name before God.

In the Saturday morning session of this most recent conference Elder Christopherson gave a
beautiful talk about Christ. He said:

The glorious truth is we are not alone. We have the love of God, the grace of Christ, the
comfort and guidance of the Holy Spirit and the fellowship and encouragement of fellow Saints
in the body of Christ.

I would also like to add that, through the blessing of the temple, we also have a name tucked in
our pocket as a way of demonstrating our willingness to accept that in Christ’s salvation, we do
not matter alone, we matter with others.

While I don’t fling coconuts about when I walk out the door of the temple, I do emerge with a
similarly vigorous call to action, a determination to fling my “stuff” to the ground, to go forth
seeing the soul of every person I encounter, to know that in their essence-- not in their surface--
they matter and it is my task to call them by the name God gave them-- my sister, my brother,
my fellow in Christ-- to care for (their) soul and for the life of (their) soul. And to seek the face
of the Lord always, that in patience (we) may possess (our) souls, and (we) shall have eternal
life. This, my dear sisters and brothers and fellows in Christ, this is the way of salvation.