A central milestone of the Mormon experience, especially as a devout member, is the endowment, a ritual which is considered extremely sacred, revealed directly from God, and central to salvation in the highest level of heaven. There’s a lot to unpack with the temple, including the silence imposed around temple ordinances, lack of female representation, and roots in Freemasonry, which we’ll eventually touch on in other essays, but before I can think objectively (or even sort of objectively) about any of these issues, I have to reckon with my own experience of the temple.
My experiences in the temple have been a central paradox in my religious and spiritual life, and an apt metaphor for how my religious and spiritual life have overlapped imperfectly and incompletely. I’ve had terrible experiences in the temple, as well as experiences I still consider to be holy and deeply spiritual.
Complexity was wound up in my experience of the temple from the very beginning. You experience the temple very differently as a young teenager doing baptisms for the dead, and the ordinances performed in the temple as a youth are so separate and laden with their own baggage that they feel like part of an entirely different narrative, so for now I’ll just say that it was never a foundational aspect of my spiritual life.
It was in general inconvenient, and rarely spiritually significant for me. I didn’t like the hassle of having to get my hair wet and shower off there and then wash the chlorine out when I got home, and the baptismal area in the temple, especially in our 80s era temple, was far more utilitarian than other areas of that temple or other newer temples and I didn’t find it either especially spiritual or sacred, or even beautiful.
I was eager to someday participate in the adult ordinances instead, mostly because this would allow me to participate in the temple experience without the hassle of getting my hair wet, since generally baptisms are only performed by youth. And I was also intensely curious and full of a naive belief that the temple ordinance would bring me a closeness to God I could only imagine as a pre-endowed member.
Initially I was preparing for the temple as part of my preparation for a mission I didn’t end up serving (a different and pivotal part of my faith journey that deserves its own essay). When I decided not to serve, I had already taken most of the temple prep course and set a tentative date, so I figured I might as well still do the temple even if I didn’t go on a mission. I prayed about this and felt a really strong, undeniable drive to go. I felt not just like I should go through the temple, but that I should go through now. I ended up arranging things with my bishop and family so that I took an accelerated version of the rest of the temple prep course and went through the very next week. At the time my family was living in Seattle and I was in Rexburg at BYU-Idaho, so we met in Boise where my grandparents lived and I went through the Meridian temple in early March of 2020. I was eighteen years old.
There’s a lot to be said about indoctrination and the complex ethical issues that come with teaching kids to get baptized and commit to the church at age eight, then go through the temple as soon as they can, but to be frank I made this decision myself and felt no particular pressure from my parents. I was fully bought in, and I wanted to go. It felt right, especially as I changed my plans to serve a mission. And I still find beauty and significance in my personal spiritual experience of the temple, which generally speaking was entirely separate from the ordinance happening around me. It was a sacred space for me, and facilitated a genuine connection with the divine which had nothing to do with the doctrine given in the temple, and in fact often contradicted it.
It did not escape my notice in the weeks and months afterwards that if I had waited even a week, I would have missed my chance to go through the temple for nearly a year and a half, due to COVID-19. I genuinely had no expectation of the temples closing, and I remember being shocked when they did, actually, since at the time COVID-19 felt very much like a joke in rural eastern Idaho. I had no idea how serious things were and how fast my window of opportunity was closing when I made plans to go to the temple. I could not explain the sense of urgency I felt, but I followed it, and it felt very clear in the weeks and months after that I had been led to the temple by God. I still believe this, to some extent. I was only eighteen, but this was the only time in my life that I could have gone through, and I did need to go through. By the time the temples had reopened, I had deconstructed too much to want to make those covenants with that same trust and certainty. But my own spiritual experiences in the temple (during the few years in which I was attending regularly) were tremendously important for my life and spiritual journey, in overall positive ways.
That said, my initial experience of the temple was complex. I remember being shocked by the initiatory ordinance— which is performed entirely by men for male participants and entirely by women for female participants— and having a genuinely emotional, spiritual experience of that ordinance, since I’d never seen women acting in that kind of ritualistic role. I’d never had a woman put her hands on my head in a sacred rite, the way men do outside the temple, and it felt enormously important to me. I was a budding feminist and I returned from the temple determined to tell every one of my friends about this, since I was baffled as to why no one had told me to expect that, or even why female priesthood authority in the temple was never discussed in lessons about priesthood.
However, the endowment was far more uncomfortable for me. I had taken temple prep, but the accelerated timeline of my preparation meant I didn’t have the chance to do any studying on my own, and the materials I was given for preparation had emphasized the central focus on the plan of salvation and God’s love for his children, rather than actually preparing me to encounter the heavily symbolic, Freemasonry-inspired rites of the endowment. It felt very alien to me, almost like an out of body experience, and for the first time I understood (or began to understand) the allegation that Mormonism was a cult.
The prayer circle in particular was uncomfortable, and I remember feeling cornered, confused, and overwhelmed. My intuition and common sense were screaming at me to hold that kind of rote repetition in heavy suspicion; the subliminal messaging behind a ritual which culminates in obedient, word-perfect recitation of a prayer composed somewhat arbitrarily by an old man felt (and feels) very powerful and very scary.
There is something extremely sinister about vowing to give everything you have and are to the church (not to Jesus or God, but to the church), and then standing in a circle to parrot back the words you’re fed by the man leading the ceremony. And at the time I went through the temple, you were not given any preview of the covenants you’d make when you began the ceremony. There is always a point at the beginning in which people who don’t want to make the covenants of the endowment are given a chance to leave, but without knowledge of the ordinance ahead of me I could not truly consent. And even if I had known, I was surrounded by my deeply orthodox family and socially I could not back out. If I had known, I like to think I might have felt some pause at the requirement that I covenant to give everything to the church, but I was still so bought in that I probably still would have gone through with it; and again the social pressure to go through is powerful, even if I did make the decision to attend the temple more or less independently.
That said, I was at the time in the very, very early stages of my faith journey and not truly challenging any basic church doctrines or practices, so I more or less swallowed my concerns and discomfort and saw it as the beginning of a lifetime of coming to understand the ritual of the temple. At the time I very much believed that every part of the ceremony had deep intrinsic spiritual meaning that I would come to understand if I studied and went often enough.
I was saddened by the lack of female representation in the endowment portion of the ceremony, but at the time I was just waking up to patriarchy and it didn’t chafe as much then as it would later, and the initial positive shock of finding female priesthood authority in the initiatory outweighed that frustration.
My first experience in the temple and the contrast between my feelings around the initiatory and endowment ordinances serves as a microcosm for my future experiences and perspectives on the temple: a blend of divine connection and sinister indoctrination, of joy and fear.
The post-Mormon experience is an exercise in self-trust. You are coming to see everything you’ve been taught about yourself and the world as possibly untrue, and finding holes in church history and doctrine everywhere you look. The temptation to dismiss everything as the product of a “frenzied mind”, as it were, is intense and requires less of you than blurring the distinctions and lines between true and untrue and allowing some things to sit in the middle. It’s simpler to say it was all fake and wrong than to admit that some of it might have been real, and it requires a tremendous, world-shifting amount of trust in yourself to allow some of it to be indoctrination and some of it to be a genuine connection to the divine.
Navigating my temple experience and accepting that it can have been both painful and powerful requires this kind of trust in myself, and it’s so, so much harder than buying in completely or pulling all the way out. I’ll probably be doing the work of accepting the blurriness of it for the rest of my life, since there is no easy way to write it and no easy way to understand it. It was horrible, and it was inspired. I was connected to God for much of it, and impossibly distant from Them for more of it. The best I can do is say that it was real and my experiences were real, whatever the legitimacy of the ordinance itself.
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