Today, instead of going to the normal 3-hour church, the Prophet had all members of
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Utah go to the
Oquirrh Mountain Temple dedication. It was a beautiful experience, hearing a message from the Prophet from inside one of the holy houses of God. I love temples and temple dedications. I find it hard to explain how I feel about it.
So when I was reading
The Crystal City by Orson Scott Card, I determined that he described the way I feel about the Temple and being a member of the Church perfectly. Now, this is a fictional book, but the principle is what I would like to describe.
"They lived in regular houses on regular streets, and most none of them did regular jobs and had regular lives, except for a few hours a week they helped to build this extraordinary palace or...or library, or theater, or whatever the building was supposed to be...and when it was built, then for a few hours a week you go inside and look at what you see there, what the walls of it show you, and you learn from it what you can and try to understand what it means. Not some grand, earthshaking thing, maybe just...who your wife really is, or what your children might be, or some danger to avoid, or why the suffering in your life is bearable after all. Or why it isn't. Not everything would be happy. But you'd know things that you didn't know otherwise. Even if all you saw was your own hopes and dreams and fears and guilt and shame thrown back in your face, even
that would be worth going inside to see, because how else can you come to know yourself, unless you have some kind of faithful mirror that can show you more than just your face?
"It's a city of makers, not because everyone in it is a Maker, but because the whole city cooperates in making the Making possible, and the whole city participates in the good thing that they have made.
"So obvious now. Who is the builder of a great cathedral? The architect can truly say, I built this, even though he never lifts a stone. The stonecutters can say, I built this, even though it was not their hands that put the stones in place. The masons, the glassmakers, the carpenters, the weavers of rugs, they are all part of the building of it. And the bishop who caused them to build it, and the rich people who donated the money, and the women who brought the food to the workers, and the farmers who grew the food they serve, all the people of the city caused that building to exist. And fifty years later, when all the people whose hands did the work, they're all dead now, or old and doddering, their grandchildren can walk inside that building and say, 'This is our cathedral,
we built this,' because it was the city that built the building, and the city that goes inside to use it, and each new generation that keeps the city alive, and walks into the building with veneration and pride, the cathedral is theirs as much as anyone's."
Basically that's a taste of how I feel. Except not cathedral or "Making."
And, by the way, I love that I have been able to rediscover Orson Scott Card since finishing school. He is an amazing author, and makes you think about the world in a different way after reading his books. And he's LDS, so even though most of his books are not about anything at all religious (sci-fi, fantasy, or other fiction), if you are LDS you can see the underlying themes that
are LDS. Like this series, the Alvin Maker series, is what would have happened if a "Joseph Smith" figure had been born into an alternate history of the United States, where the Revolutionary War failed. Only you don't know it's Joseph Smith unless you know his story. But many clues make it very obvious, like his last name: Smith.
If you still haven't figured it out, check out the blown-up version below:
