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“Oh the Rains of Holland”, Part 1
Photo Essay: Temple Dedication in The Hague
Text: Maurine Jensen Proctor
Photos: Scot Facer Proctor

Editors’ Note: Meridian’s editors covered the Sunday, September 8, 2002 temple dedication in The Hague, Netherlands with 848 photos and extensive interviews. Our goal was to give you the sense that you were there.

This September Sunday is the kind of day for which photographers long, an alternate play of sunshine and drizzle which enriches colors, invites plays of light, and gives the air a kind of fluid sparkle. Yet, the most focused light on this day of the temple dedication in The Hague is on the faces of Saints from Belgium, France and the Netherlands who have longed for this event.

Faces tell the story. Across them is etched faithfulness and hope and a variety of life experience and longing.

They have come on buses and bikes, by car and airplane, and already at 7:30 a.m., people are lined up along the sidewalk to the temple entrance for the first of four dedicatory sessions. Missionaries who have served in the area have made a pilgrimage back to their area of labor.

Reporters from the national press are on hand with cameras and long microphones with fuzzy covers. Neighbors in the adjacent apartment complexes stick their heads out the windows to watch, and a couple, on an early morning walk, come to see what’s happening and stay to watch the coverstone ceremony.

The prophet, President Gordon B. Hinckley will be coming soon, and everyone wants a glimpse of him, but the Spirit is already so tangible that there are tears and excitement and a sense of culmination of intense spiritual longings.

Unlike many temples that have seen hostility from neighbors who try to block their construction, people who live by this temple, have embraced it. Though they are not members of the Church, they call it “our temple” and are happy for its beauty in their neighborhood.

Click here to go to Part 2 of “Oh the Rains of Holland”

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