With my quest for more information regarding celestial marriage and sealings, I realized how little I knew about the actual temple ceremonies, and more specifically, the endowment ceremony. I was told that you can actually find videos on YouTube of the ceremony. I was completely floored by this! Some soul was brave enough to take a hidden camera into the temple and record the entire ceremony?! Sacrilege! At least that's what I would have thought if I was still an active member of the LDS church. Watching one of those videos sounded like a much better plan than me pretending to repent of my "sins" so I could go through the temple and experience it myself, which has crossed my mind once or twice. However, since I do the majority of my research on my downtime at work, I haven't had the opportunity to watch more than about 30 minutes of the ceremony. I did find a transcript online though, so I have read the ceremony in its entirety. The actual ceremony isn't going to be the focus of this post though. I want to first go over the idea of receiving blessings by going through the temple.
Taking out the endowment is like, the ultimate step into adulthood and it's something that every member of the Church is expected to aspire to obtain. After all, you receive "blessings" you could not otherwise receive and get to wear an undergarment that "protects" you from evil. But what are these "blessings"? No member of the Church will be able to give you a specific answer, because there isn't one. But the Church is very good at making it appear as if they have answers.
One article that I found is entitled Preparing for the Temple Endowment. I thought that perhaps an article with this title would be able to provide a specific list of things for a member to do before entering the temple and elaborate more on what one might encounter in the ceremony. However, as the article states: "The ordinances and procedures given in the temple are so sacred that they are not discussed outside of the temple. The Lord wants only those who are worthy to be introduced to those sacred blessings." So you have to jump off a cliff into water below, of which you have not checked the depth yourself, because your boss told you it's safe. It's blind faith all over again.
So how can one prepare themselves for this blind jump? Well, the article suggests that you ask your parents what the temple means to them, assuming that they've gone through the temple themselves. How does this in anyway prepare YOU to go to the temple? This is asking for an opinion. This mode of preparation does not obtain any facts that will actually aide an individual in what to expect. It's like taking an AP test based solely on your teachers opinion of a subject rather than studying the material itself.
The article also suggests that you "seriously study the scriptures...Church books and magazine articles can be a great help in preparing you to receive your endowment." Just, "study the scriptures". Overwhelm yourself so completely with them that you don't even realize that you haven't actually found an answer to your question. Just feel good. That's a sure sign that what you are about to participate in is the right thing to do. I also love that they say "Church books and magazines". Anything that isn't Church approved is of the devil, despite the fact that many of these unsanctioned articles and books provide clearer information, facts even, of history and the processes in the Church. Works like this worry the Church because they are so specific, and as soon as you introduce a clearer explanation to a member, that member is more likely to start questioning other aspects of their beliefs.
Another way to prepare to enter the temple is to "pray for clarity of mind on temple matters." You can't get a clear answer from this! Church leaders even say that most members will only ever have "impressions" when they receive "answers" to their prayers. The world is too "noisy" for the Spirit to manifest in any other way.
Impression: a notion, remembrance, belief, etc., often of a vague or indistinct nature. (Emphasis mine)
By the very definition of the word, one cannot receive a clear answer from an impression.
The Church stresses proper preparation before entering the temple, otherwise a young person might "come to the temple for the wrong reason, like family or peer pressure " which means that they "usually don't have a desire to come back. If they go with the right spirit, they'll be hungering and thirsting and wanting to find out all they can about what's taught in the temple." I am fairly certain that the majority of people that enter the temple, or do anything for that matter with the Church, do it because of pressure from their families and friends. The Church also puts an enormous amount of pressure on its members. There's constant talk of being damned, or not being saved in the last days if you don't keep your covenants. Being human, everyone seems to be inherently scared of death and what comes after, because there is no definite answer, but when you have people telling you that they "know of a surety" that something bad will happen if you don't follow the guidelines of their church, you're more inclined to believe them. You don't "know", but someone else sure does.
The leaders of the Church are also constantly telling its youth that they were put on this earth at this time because they are stronger and more resilient to the temptations of the world. They are the "Chosen Generation". They are the ones that will bring the truth to the world and the ones that the world will turn to for strength and answers. That's a lot of pressure to place on an impressionable teenager. Most teenagers feel the need to live up to expectations, no matter how unhappy they feel, because they don't want to disappoint those that they love. You get that kind of thing with any situation inside or outside of religion, but the Church exploits that feeling.
As for those who "have the right spirit" and come out of the temple hungering and thirsting for more, they will never be satisfied. They will constantly be searching for answers regarding the temple and its ceremonies because the Church is very good at stringing people along. They tell you that you can never be perfect but to strive for perfection anyway, and the only way to do that is if you're consistently reading your scriptures, praying for guidance daily, attending all church meetings and fulfilling your callings. They create this drive in people to stick with the Church because they have been convinced that they will end up in terrible and dark places in their lives without it. The Church has created a reliance within its members to the point that they are no longer independent. They can't make decisions without praying and fasting and quite often second guess themselves because maybe that good feeling they got really came from the devil because they probably weren't worthy enough to hear the Holy Spirit whispering the real answer to them. I can say all this because I have been in that situation.
If you were to tell a member of the LDS church to go have their palm read or to visit an astrologist to give them the answer to a big decision in their life, they would scoff and say that such things aren't real and are perpetuated by the devil. Well, what's the real difference between praying and expecting an answer from an invisible man in the sky and his messenger and having someone tell you your future from the position of the stars? There isn't any. They are equally crazy.
The information that these members want is not easily available through the Church's channels. It requires extra meetings, constant reading of Church sanctioned books, magazines and online articles in order to have enough information to just form more specific questions that they can then ask the higher leaders in the Church, to which they will usually be directed to other books and magazines sources, because if you don't come across the answer yourself, you're not looking hard enough. Nothing ever seems to be really answered, so of course they hunger and thirst for more. They are starving; they just don't realize it.
I found a more recent article, although it is still ten years old, about a young woman who was asked to keep a journal documenting her preparation to enter the temple. I thought for sure that something interesting could be found in these journal entries, but to my great disappointment, it's just as vague as everything else I found. This probably has something to do with the fact that the Church edited the entries themselves. Anyway, this young woman talks about reading articles published by the Church such as, Preparing to Enter the Holy Temple and Temples of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints". She says, "My bishop has been helpful. When we met, he talked about the power of the temple and suggested the goal to always be temple worthy. He said being worthy to go to the temple helps you find happiness." So, what is the power of the temple? How is that reflected in day to day life? He suggested the goal to always be temple worthy and she writes about it as if this is the first time she has heard that suggestion. If she grew up in the Church, even if she were a recent convert, this goal would have been drilled into her head. It's what every lesson from primary to death is centered on. There is nothing revelatory in her bishop's counsel.
She writes about having scripture study with her fiancé in regards to the Plan of Salvation. This is again something that every child learns as soon as they enter primary and continue to "learn" as they mature in the Church. 10 days before she goes through the temple she says: "I am so exited to go to the temple. I think about it every day. I want to make more covenants. I want to draw closer to God. I want to learn more about the Savior. I already feel excited to know everything now, but I know it will take a lifetime and longer to understand the ways of God. It is amazing that He has prepared a place on earth where we can learn things of an eternal nature." What part of the meaning of this sentence is acceptable? To the Church, the entire thing. This young woman has accepted the Church's response to everything that doesn't make sense and isn't clear about Church doctrine: "We cannot know everything now because we are only human. Our minds are incapable of understanding the inner most workings of God's plan, but if you remain faithful, all will be revealed in the life to come." This is the Church's response to everything that doesn't have a clear answer. So... to everything.
4 days before she enters the temple she has her interview with the stake president, to which she says this: "What joy! I wish everyone could sit with his or her stake president and look him in the eyes and honestly answer all the questions to receive a recommend." Bull shit. Even the most faithful members worry about these interviews. They're convinced that these "men called of God" can see into their souls and will find something that will require further repentance. If I were to actually say this to a faithful member, like my former bishop father, they would say that only people that actually have something to hide feel that way. A clean person will not feel guilty. But perfection is unattainable, meaning that every person that steps foot in their stake presidents office has some blemish that has not been accounted for. The loophole comes however, from the fact that these "sins" are all arbitrary. The severity of the sin is completely dependent on the person that "commits" the sin.
She continues: "I'm excited and ready to make more covenants with the Lord. I realize the responsibility that comes with that. I'm ready for that. I can continue being good, but I can see how my progression would stop if I didn't make more covenants. Making covenants in the endowment and then getting married in the temple will help me progress in ways I couldn't do on my own." Does she actually know how this happens, or does she believe this because the Church told her it would happen? That's kind of a rhetorical question.
On the day that she received the endowment, she wrote, "The blessings and promises I received in the temple were incredible. (Really? What were they?) I want nothing more than to always keep my covenants and to be worthy of the blessings promised me in the temple.(This is exactly what the Church wants from its members: to continue following the teachings of the Church without question for a reward that probably doesn't exist.) Now that I've received my endowment, I think the most helpful preparation was participating in baptisms for the dead because I was doing temple work and feeling the Spirit there. (This doesn't really explain why doing baptisms for the dead was helpful. It's a non-answer that she has been led to believe is an actual answer.) Studying the temple preparation manual was helpful, as was talking to Todd (her fiancé), my parents, and my bishop about their testimonies of the temple. (How?!) Asking someone about their testimony of the temple is like a child asking their parents or an older sibling to help them bear their testimony during fast and testimony meeting. That testimony that they are speaking is not there own, but the other person's. That child's "testimony" is a product of their parent's testimonies. It's the same with a testimony of the temple. This young woman went into the temple with her parent's testimonies in mind and looked for those reasons while participating in the ceremony. She came out with the same testimony she had going into it because it's what she expected to receive.
I realize that this has become another lengthy post, so I'm going to cut it off here. I wanted to use these two articles from the New Era as a means to highlight the vagueness of the actual ceremony and it's "blessings" that the Church professes to exist. This young woman came out of the temple with no more knowledge of things eternal than she did going into it. I think that I will be better able to show this when I get into the actual ceremony itself, from the transcript that I found online. There's some bat shit crazy stuff that goes on in there, and if you're not in the "right frame of mind", you're going to question exactly what it is you believe in.
Comments
Post a Comment