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Joseph,
Joseph, Joseph
The Temple Has Returned to Nauvoo
Photo Essay 3—Nightfall at the Nauvoo Temple
Photography:
Scot Facer Proctor
Text: Maurine Jensen Proctor
Note:
Click any images below to enlarge.
In April of
1999, when President Hinckley announced that the Nauvoo Temple would
be rebuilt, some say they heard an audible gasp in the tabernacle.
Across the church, wherever people were gathered around a TV screen
listening, the amazement echoed in tears and hugs and near disbelief.
Rebuilding the Nauvoo Temple meant so much more than putting stone
upon stone; it was a message about loss and resurrection, about
a driven people arising from the ashes to reclaim the vision.
And somehow
we never thought it would be, that this loss would stay like an
old ache.
Cut us open
and there is the trail, Emma Lou Thayne once said. Cut deeper and
there is the poignant story of a white temple, built to express
a yearning for the Lord that a people would be forced to abandon.
But the yearning stays.
"Next year in
Jerusalem," the exiled Jews told each other at Passover. Temple
memories wistfully bound them. For us, Latter-day Saints spread
across the world, we remember a people who rushed to build a temple
as they cured hickory to make wagons that would take them away.
"By the rivers
of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered
Zion."
We know Nauvoo.
We cannot count the times we have been at the temple lot, where
the only mementos of a people's hope and sacrifice were lines of
stones in a sunken grass lot. We have seen the Nauvoo homes made
of temple rock scavenged from its remains, marked like fossils with
the past.
So that first
impression driving up the Mississippi river road and seeing a glowing
temple on the hill where a sunken lot had been was a fulfillment
that seemed as large as scriptural promise to us. Waste places are
transformed to gardens. The barren yields fruit. The scattered are
gathered. Against all odds and every impossibility, when hope is
dashed and graves are scattered along a wilderness trail west, the
promise that seemed forgotten is fulfilled.
"For can a woman
forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on
the son of her womb? Yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget
thee, O house of Israel" (2 Nephi 21:15).
When I saw that
temple, lit like a heavenly being against the darkness, I knew again
that God does not forget his children. The Nauvoo temple did not
seem like a restoration to me. Calling it "rebuilt" does not capture
what happened here. Seeing it first at night as I did, golden light
spilling out its windows, only the word resurrection truly fit.
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© 2002 Meridian
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