The Provo Temple

The Provo Temple has closed and started its renovation process—renovation being a gentle word for it, because what it really is is total destruction…followed by a sort of rebirth, but in a completely different style. It's not the Ship of Theseus, even, where you can debate whether or not it's the same ship after each separate part has been replaced. No, it's wholesale eradication. The Provo Temple will cease to exist.

We went to see it one last time the day after it closed, to take a few pictures of our family there. The gates were shut, but there were crowds of people milling around, taking pictures and sitting on blankets on the grass. It was an unseasonably warm February Sunday afternoon and the crowds felt almost festive, except it seemed sad too, all of us just looking in from afar, unable to enter this place we had loved.

It's okay, of course. There will eventually be a Provo Temple again, surely a lovely place that will look…much like every other temple in the area. And it's God's house, so I suppose He gets to say what He wants done with it. For all I know, this is a metaphor for the wholesale rebuilding of all of us, as C.S. Lewis imagines it—you know the quote: 

…He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”

So I don't wish to complain. Blessing enough that God Himself invites me into His house, without me thinking He should also consult me on the design and disposal of it. However…allow me a few random reminiscences about this temple that was, for so long, my temple, and a place where I came to know God.

• I used to run around the temple every single morning at 5 a.m. All through high school, through much of college and some of junior high, every morning I did that 3.3 mile loop—past the church (which became the "old church" at some point when we switched chapels)…through the parking lot…up the Wymount Terrace Hill…then around the temple property clockwise in the dark while sleepily thinking about the "pillar of fire by night." 

• I got hit by a bird there once, startling me perhaps more than I've ever been startled in my life—one minute running along freely, the next minute feeling the tiny poof of soft wings and delicate bones, like a ball of dough collapsing against my chest. I staggered and stopped, and so did the bird, pausing mid-flight somehow as we looked each other over—and then off it went, wobbly and disgruntled, and me off in the other direction wondering about chance encounters and if they mean anything.

• In cross-country we would occasionally head up to the temple for the dreaded "Temple Hills" workout…10 or 12 repeat hill sprints up the north side trying to catch Coach Olsen, then back down past Coach Low with his white pickup truck and orange water cooler, trying to stretch out those last few downhill meters as long as possible before we had to turn and tackle the hill again.

• My young women's classes visited the temple often—not as often, perhaps, as youth are able to do now, because we still used group recommends and didn't have our own—but it felt comfortable to me there, if maybe not as exciting as I'd hoped before I knew what it was like. My friends and I stifled giggles in the chapel and shared hairdryers in the dressing room, and shyly smiled at the boys across the elevated oxen-borne font. I got up the courage one day to ask to wear my glasses into the water, so I could look into the "mirrors of eternity" and actually see my reflection stretching back forever and forward forever, rather than seeing the blurry pool of darkness and light my poor eyesight usually showed to me after I handed my glasses to someone else to hold. When I got contact lenses, one of the things I most looked forward to was swimming, and doing temple baptisms, with clear vision.

• Sam and I used to walk around the temple while we were dating, planning out our life together bit by bit and piece by piece. It felt distant, and then it felt possible, and then terrifying, and then exciting—all those walks, all those talks giving us time to haltingly fit the pieces of ourselves together as maybe—someday—we would do it for real.

• My first time visiting the temple for my own endowment was on a warm April evening. The ladies helping me with the ordinances were comforting and familiar—I really did know some of them from stake girls camp and other encounters, but they all felt like grandmothers or aunts. I felt so loved as I went from place to place, never going more than a minute without a smile or a gentle touch on the hand to show me where to go. I watched the endowment ceremony unfold with a sense of mingled wonder and unreality—pausing to briefly exchange pleased glances with my mom when the temple film showed a bunny—and to steal looks at Sam sitting between my dad and his dad on the other side of the room. I wondered if I'd feel transformed when I left the temple that night. I didn't. But I felt like I'd had the tiniest, briefest glimpse of a vision that might someday be realized.

• I wasn't at the temple when I got the answer to my prayer about marrying Sam—that came on a golden Fall day running the Squaw Peak road—but I got subsequent reassurances there, and when the wedding day finally came, the Provo Temple is where we chose to be sealed, feeling like royalty the way we were celebrated and fussed over by the temple workers, who told us sadly, "Most of the brides these days want to go somewhere more photogenic." We walked by "our" sealing room every time we went back there after that—squeezing hands as we remembered how it had felt to sit there on the couch together, holding hands, with all our lives before us.

• In the Provo Temple, my beloved nursery leader—the one who loved me and held me on his lap every Sunday when I was two years old and crying at being left by my mom—my gentle neighbor and kind friend, Richard Ellsworth— sealed Sam and me for time and eternity, and told us the beautiful roots of the words I have always remembered—husband, hus-bondi, the one who is bound to the house, and though he has to go away to fight battles and provide for his family, he always comes back, because he is bound there with the bonds of his own love and theirs. And wife, the viv, the life of the home—the one who animates, illuminates, creates, enlivens. When I think of who I have tried to be in our marriage, I think of that sealing room and those words.

• At some point the powers that be decided to repaint or redo the Provo Temple spire, to add Moroni and make it white. I didn't mind it. I missed the "pillar of fire," but I liked seeing Moroni up there too, waiting patiently for the Savior as I myself was trying to. I liked the new fountains they added on the grounds, and hoped they would entice more people to come for weddings, so those dear old ladies could be as excited for them as they had been for me.

• There was a year I couldn't attend the temple, but my bishop instructed me to go there often, to the grounds, and feel its spirit. I went every week. Alone in the car or on foot, I sat and thought about what the temple was, what it meant to the world—what it meant to me, and what it might yet mean to me. The day I went back, Sam and I were asked to be the witness couple in an endowment session, and I felt—as strong as anything I've ever felt— God's love and acceptance and forgiveness, welcoming me back to His house. He knew and understood. He rejoiced to have me there. It was the first of many miracles that led me back from thinking miracles, at least for me, were "done away."

• Under a pine tree in the Provo Temple grounds, Sam asked me for the second time to marry him, and for the second time I told him yes—this time knowing what it had cost, what it might still cost, and embracing that joy and that cost as one joy.

• We walked that familiar around-the-temple route a few times with our children, but life got busier, and by the time Malachi was a few months old, we had moved away, and a new temple near our new house became "my" temple. I have had sacred experiences there too—too many to count. For me, going inside any temple is going home. I hope my children will feel it too, wherever they go.

• My last time visiting the Provo Temple was almost exactly a year ago, when my brothers were in town for a niece's wedding. We got to go to an Endowment Session, my mom and all four of us children and our spouses, and it was familiar and unfamiliar all at once. We walked into our sealing room, knowing it would probably be the last time. I sat in the celestial room and cried, not for the loss of the temple, but for the loss of so many other things. God spoke to me then as he had twenty years ago—He knew my losses, and kept them in His heart. He gave me peace.

• Plenty of people used to say the Provo Temple looked like a spaceship—like a wedding cake—too 70's, too old-fashioned—but to me it was one of the most beautiful places in the world. "The place of Mormon, the waters of Mormon, the forest of Mormon, how beautiful are they to the eyes of them who there came to the knowledge of their Redeemer." I love the Provo Temple—how beautiful it is to my eyes. I will miss it greatly. I wish it didn't have to change; I wish those places which are sacred to me and so many others could be preserved somehow. But they will be preserved here, and in my memories.