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.

The Nauvoo Temple was riddled and nearly destroyed by fire in October 1848 and the remains all-but-tumbled by a tornado in 1850.This new temple is built to last into the Millennium. Two hundred years said one project manager. Five hundred years said another. As magnificent as that first temple was, built out of the sweat and sacrifice of our forbears, this new one will stand.

Glowing there in the darkness, it gave me the clearest, most tangible sense of resurrection I have yet known, except when I stood in the Garden Tomb.

I am reminded as I walk around this temple at nightfall that in the resurrection God compensates our losses, that gaping wounds are healed, that the endless night is truly broken in the morning. Things that seem ugly or hopelessly broken now will arise like this temple, beautiful, not just repaired or even renewed but resurrected.

Walking around the temple, Scot takes pictures from every angle, and I take mental notes. Everything is so excellent, so beautifully, exquisitely accomplished. I have seen a sunstone that remains from the original temple, but my imagination had not done justice to sunstones queued up around a temple wall soaring high above the ground.

Other members of the press arrive for the news conference that will be held the next day. They are in awe of this glowing, living thing before us, too. I am reminded of a scripture from Jeremiah: "For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end.

"Then shall ye call upon me, and ye shall go and pray unto me, and I will hearken unto you. And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart. And I will be found of you saith the Lord" (Jeremiah 28:11-14).

That God would ask the construction of this temple of a pioneer people says something about the thoughts he thinks towards them. To me it says, you are more than you suppose. You are not bound by poverty or mortality or sagging, tired days. I will teach you of the thoughts I think toward you.

But it also says to me something about the thoughts those builders had toward God-and I am moved. The sheer magnificence of this temple, then and now, speaks of the faith of its builders. This is the demonstration of the thoughts they had toward him.

I see the Nauvoo Temple, and it rings in me, "They knew."

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Author Scot Facer Proctor with daughter Mariah, Mariah's best friend Jenna Morgan, and son Truman sitting on a wagon near the barn on the Smith farm (July 2001).