Joseph, Joseph, Joseph
The Temple Has Returned To Nauvoo, Part 4
"Lift Up Thine Eyes"
Text by Maurine Jensen Proctor
Photography by Scot Facer Proctor

Lift up thine eyes, we are reminded, a physical gesture. I will cut my covenant in your flesh, he told Abraham, cut it so that you and your posterity are forever marked as mine. You can eat of the tree of life, he told Lehi, consume it in double handfuls until that white fruit becomes you and your very physical makeup is no longer the same. It is not enough, somehow, that we comprehend God and his ways in some vague and abstract way. He wants it in our flesh, in our molecules and marrow, in the wasting and wearing out of our lives for his sake, in the very glance of our eyes. Only then, as it becomes us, drawn into our physicality so that we never forget, can we begin to know. To look at a temple, we lift up our eyes.

We are a covenant people who live in a corporeal world. Apparently, it is not enough that we have covenant ideas, for God would build his truths into our sensibilities and bodies. We lift up our eyes to the temple, and all the while the temple is being lifted into us.

"Lift up thine eyes," is, in fact, a covenant phrase laced into the scriptures, for those who have eyes to see. God makes his covenant with Abraham and tells him, "Lift up now thine eyes, and look from the place where thou art northward, and southward, and eastward, and westward. For all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed for ever. And I will make thy seed as the dust of the earth; so that if a man can number the dust of the earth, then shall thy seed also be numbered" (Genesis 13: 14-16).

Three holy men come to Abraham as he sent in a tent to make the announcement that Sarah would bear a son, and he "lifted up his eyes and looked" to see them. When Jacob departs from Laban, he "lifts up [his] eyes" and saw how the Lord had blessed the increase of his herds.

In speaking of the gathering of Israel in the last days, Isaiah says, "Lift up your eyes to the heavens, and look upon the earth beneath; for the heavens shall vanish away like smoke, and the earth shall wax old like a garment, and they that dwell therein shall die in like manner: but my salvation shall be for ever and my righteousness shall not be abolished"( Isaiah 51: 6).

Click here to continue with "Lift Up Thine Eyes" and see more photographs of the Nauvoo Temple 'from the flats.'

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