Salt Lake Temple

Salt Lake Temple

By Jenny Komenda

"And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of the Lord's house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it. And many people shall go and say, Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths."

Isaiah 2:2-3

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When Brigham Young pushed his cane into the sun-baked soil of the Salt Lake Valley in July 1847, he declared, “Here we will build the Temple of our God.” Only days into what was then still a barren wilderness, he had already seen it. “I have never looked upon that ground,” he later said, “but the vision of [the temple] was there.”

The building of that vision would take forty years — granite walls nine feet thick at the base, hauled block by block on a four-day journey from Little Cottonwood Canyon, each stone weighing between 2,000 and 6,000 pounds. The foundation torn out and begun again, crops lost, and countless missions served in between. The press would later call the finished temple “a monument to Mormon perseverance.” George Q. Cannon wrote that the temple was “built to stand, without crack or quiver, for a thousand years.”

Yet what is most remarkable isn’t the finished temple, but the spirit in which the Saints were willing to work to build it. At the dedication of the temple site in 1853, Brigham Young taught them how to labor without being ruled by the outcome: “It is for us to do those things which the Lord requires at our hands, and leave the result with him. We should be as cheerful in building this temple, if we knew beforehand that we should never enter into it when it was finished, as we would though we knew we were to live here a thousand years to enjoy it.”

Isaiah had promised that “in the last days... the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established in the top of the mountains.” The Salt Lake Temple is that promise in granite. But the persistent labor of building a temple is not only physical. It is a spiritual work each of us is called to undertake—to become “sanctified,” something holy and set apart. Paul reminded the Corinthians “Know ye not that ye are the temple of God?” (1 Corinthians 3:16). Recalling that teaching, Elder Jeffrey R. Holland reaffirmed, “Most assuredly we are. As long and laborious as the effort may seem, we must keep shaping and setting the stones that will make our accomplishments ‘a grand and imposing spectacle.’ We must take advantage of every opportunity to learn and grow, dream dreams and see visions, work toward their realization, wait patiently when we have no other choice, lean on our sword and rest a while, but get up and fight again. We are laying the foundation of a great work—our own inestimable future.”

In no other place is that spiritual work more possible than inside the temple, itself. In the "olive leaf" revelation of D&C 88, the Lord invited the Saints to let the house of the Lord “become a sanctuary,” in their lives, “a tabernacle of the Holy Spirit to your edification.” That word—edification—comes from the Latin aedes, meaning “temple.” It literally means the act of building a temple within. As Truman Madsen taught, instead of talking of going through the temple, “I wish we could somehow speak of the temple going through us.”

As with the Salt Lake Temple, this work requires a lifetime of labor. May we build our own temples as the pioneers did—cheerfully, obediently, leaving the result with God. And may the blessing of Wilford Woodruff's dedicatory prayer likewise rest upon us: “may peace abide in all the homes of Thy Saints; may holy angels guard them; may they be encompassed by Thine arms of love; may prosperity shine upon them...and may we be a people blessed of Thee in our bodies and spirits, in our homes and habitations, in our flocks and herds, in ourselves and our posterity.”

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