Friday December 15, 2023
Our run this morning was especially good. We went over four miles, and Betty was really pushing it. It’s good to feel healthy and strong going into this adventure.
In the morning we picked up the Sequoia and took it the mechanic for an independent inspection. Then Betty and I went for another walk while they looked at it. When we came back, the word was in. Mechanically, it’s in perfect condition! They couldn’t find a thing wrong with it.
I consider it a true Christmas miracle!
So then we went home and picked up the kids and we all went down to the dealership to sign all the paperwork. It’s a process that always takes way longer than it seems like it should, but in the end, we drove away with a new (to us) Sequoia. I think I mentioned it before, but it’s all Black, and the interior is really roomy and comfortable. It will be a huge blessing on the rest of this trip and hopefully for many years to come.
We drove directly from the dealership just across the street to the Orem Temple so that we could attend the open house.
In our church, temples are our most sacred places of worship, and once they are dedicated, they are only open to members who live according to certain standards. However, before the temple is open, they always do an open house in which anyone can visit the temple to see what they are like inside and to learn about what we do there, and why they are so important to us.
So what do we do in temples?
The quick answer is that in temples we perform sacred ordinances for the living and for the dead. These include baptisms for the dead, a special ceremony called the endowment, and marriages (which we call sealings).
That is what we do there, but for me there is a better answer about why temples are so important for us.
When I think about temples, and what they mean to me personally and to us as a people, I think of two fundamental texts. One is the book The Sacred and the Profane by the religious historian Mircea Eliade, and the other is an essay by LDS scholar Hugh Nibley called “The Circle and the Square.”
Eliade is a historian of religion. He takes a broad look at religions across time and across the world, and he points out points of contact between them.
In The Sacred and the Profane he describes two kinds of spaces. He calls regular space, profane space. It’s unorganized and homogenous, and it spreads in all directions like a sheet. At times, however, something powerful and divine manifests itself like a puncture in that profane space. The place where that happens is what Eliade calls sacred space. The key here is that humans organize themselves around sacred space. They order their towns and villages and even their daily lives around that sacred space. They place a stake in the ground at that point, build a temple there, and everything else becomes organized around that sacred center because for those people, it is the center of the universe.
Nibley says: “The temple as the center of the universe may be a myth, but it is the most powerful myth that ever possessed the human race.”
Citing Eliade, he continues: “The chief difference between the man of the archaic and traditional societies and the man of modern societies [...] lies in the fact that the former feels himself indissolutely connected with the Cosmos and the cosmic rhythms, whereas the latter insists that he is connected only with History. [...] But for thousands and thousands of years, our ancestors went through those things. So let us think about it all for five minutes.” (Nibley, Hugh. The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, Vol. 12: Temple and Cosmos: Beyond This Ignorant Present. Deseret Book Co. Kindle Edition.)
So the temple is the sacred center where we learn about God’s plan for us and our place in the cosmos. And we learn that central to that plan are two things: the Savior Jesus Christ, and the family.
Because of that, there is no better place to go with your family, than a temple, and the Orem temple is particularly beautiful. It’s decorated with a cherry tree motif, which is appropriate because Orem used to be all orchards. I grew up in a cherry orchard. With so many temples in Utah, I had never really thought that they would build one right in Orem, but now they have.
It was a beautiful evening, and it was only getting started.
From the temple, we went to my Mom and Dad’s church building for their ward (congregation) Christmas party. I grew up in that ward, and it’s always great to go back and see friends.
This evening was particularly great, because I ran into a friend I grew up with, Kenson Pribyl, and it turns out that a year ago, he and his wife sold their home, bought an RV, and have been traveling the country ever since. They have a YouTube channel called Exhaustive Joy. (You should check them out!) It was like finding a soul mate, and it gave me some inspiration for our upcoming adventure.