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Sacred
Stone: Come After Us
by
Heidi S. Swinton
“The
new building will stand as a memorial to those who built the first
such structure there on the banks of the Mississippi.”—President
Gordon B. Hinckley
In the autumn
of 1846, Colonel Thomas L. Kane landed alone at the wharf of Nauvoo.
He recounted the eerie atmosphere:
“No one
met me there. I looked, and saw no one. I could hear no one move,
though the quiet everywhere was such that I heard the flies buzz,
and the water-ripples break against the shallow of the beach. I
walked through the solitary street….The Mormons in Nauvoo and
its dependencies had been numbered the year before at over twenty
thousand. Where were they? They had last been seen carrying in mournful
train their sick and wounded, halt and blind, to disappear behind
the western horizon, pursuing the phantom of another home. Hardly
anything else was known of them: and people asked with curiosity,
‘What had been their fate—what their fortunes?”’1
Exiled, they
had only one place to go—across the river into the territory
of Iowa—and west. It was a wild, untamed land, with few roads
or settlements. The Mormons asked James Clarke, Iowa Territorial
Governor, to grant them safe passage. Unlike Governor Boggs of Missouri
and Governor Ford of Illinois, whose anti-Mormon positions caused
the near collapse of the Church, Governor Clarke promised them safety
and fulfilled his pledge.
These latter-day
children of Israel spent the next winter in makeshift quarters on
the western edge of the state in a settlement they named Winter
Quarters. In the spring of 1847, a vanguard company led by Brigham
Young pushed across the Great Plains to the desert valleys of the
Great Basin. For the next three decades, streams of new converts
followed their trail to a new Zion, “far away in the West.”
They built towns and enterprises, homes, farms, schools—and
temples..
It couldn’t
have been easy. They went from the buzz of building the Nauvoo Temple
to a wandering life on the wilderness trail. Before the winter evacuation,
they inscribed in gold capital letters on the wall of the grand
Assembly Hall, “THE LORD HAS BEHELD OUR SACRIFICE, COME AFTER
US.” Those words said so much about their time in Nauvoo. Dr.
Truman Madsen explains that the phrase had a double meaning: “It
meant even after all we have sacrificed to build this, we much leave
it. No only that , once you have come and made the covenants we
have made, then the explanation and the outcome of your covenant
will be to join us in the conquest of the Great Basin.”
Brigham Young
promised the Saints as they were packing to abandon Nauvoo and their
temple, “We shall come back here and we shall…build [temples]
all over the continent of North America.
The Mormons
dedicated ground for a temple in Salt Lake City just days after
the first caravan arrived in the valley. It took 40 years to build;
many of the Nauvoo laborers applied their experience to the Salt
Lake edifice. Since its dedication in 1893, it has become a visible
symbol of Mormon commitment to the divine. Three other temples were
completed in the meantime and more temples followed not only on
the American continent but all around the world. “We’ve
now built and operate 106 temples across the world,” President
Hinckley said of the forward march through two centuries of temple
construction. “We’ve reached a point,” he explains,
“where we can go back and re-create the past without losing
sight of the challenges and the opportunities of the future.”
Fifty-two years
after the Saints had surrendered Nauvoo, Arza Erastus Hinckley,
a young laborer on the Temple and a great-uncle of President Gordon
B. Hinckley, said, “We have not got back to the starting place
yet, but that must be soon.”3 It took another one hundred years.
The idea of
rebuilding the historic Nauvoo Temple had surfaced before. President
Hinckley’s father, Bryant, who was the LDS mission president
over the Nauvoo area in 1939, proposed rebuilding the historic temple.
Having just come out of the Depression, the Church did not act upon
his suggestion. It is curious that President Hinckley in his great
push to complete temples around the world would preside over the
rebuilding of this remarkable structure. “I count it something
of a strange and wonderful coincidence,” he states, “that
I’ve had a part in the determination of rebuilding this temple.”
But it is Joseph
Smith who is most pleased with the rebuilding of the temple, according
to President Hinckley: “This was his crowning objective. This
was the great desire of his heart. This represented his final great
effort.”
The Nauvoo
Temple “occupies a unique place in history and in the interest
of our people,” President Hinckley states. “It represents
a backward look, a peek into our history, restoring the memories
of the past.” He further suggested, “The Nauvoo Temple
might represent to the world a recognition of the maturity of this
Church in its history. It says that we are aware and conscious and
grateful for a great history that lies behind us. And that we are
aware and conscious of a great opportunity and challenge which lies
ahead of us. And this restoration stands as something of a monument
to that maturity in the Church.”
“The rebuilding
of any sanctuary on the ruins of one that preceded it is really
quite remarkable but also quite typical of temples in the ancient
world,” Dr. Carol Meyers points out. “This contemporary
practice resonates with what people did thousands of years ago.
There were buildings that were rebuilt after having been destroyed
time and time again.” Such a place is, she suggests, “where
God’s presence would easily come to rest.”
“Nauvoo,
for more than a hundred years, had been a ‘quiet’ hamlet.
The LDS announcement changed that; the community of 1,200 residents
braced for religious pilgrims. The Mormons haven’t always been
treated well in Nauvoo,” states LeRoy A. Utkes, a resident
of nearby Carthage. “There is always some resistance, but we’re
warming up to their presence. They are not a pushy group and have
bent over backwards to be helpful. In fact, all of us are invited
to view the temple interior before the public open house begins.”
The LDS groundbreaking
ceremony of 24 October 1999 drew more than 4,600 people and put
in motion a massive rebuilding project with a fast-track schedule.
As with its predecessor, the Nauvoo Temple was built by the donations
of Church members. Cash came in large and small sums including penny
drives by children. Doctors, lawyers, college professors, farmers,
bankers, and businessmen all volunteered their time. But it was
a steady crew, a couple of hundred at its peak, who reconstructed
the hallowed edifice. Their efforts mirrored the expressions of
their counterparts two centuries ago: “There is no sacrifice
required at the hand of the people of God but it shall be rewarded
to them an hundred fold in time or in eternity.
From the outset
of the rebuilding of the Nauvoo Temple, the Church has paid attention
to meaningful dates and events related to the initial construction
of the building and culminating in the dedication. The three-day
services slated to begin on the anniversary of the Prophet Joseph’s
martyrdom, June 27, 1844. While the temple dedication in May 1846
was open to the public for a small fee, this dedication will be
broadcast by satellite to congregations of faithful Saints around
the world. The highlights of the services will be a prayer of dedication
of this most significant “House of the Lord.” The Mormon
Tabernacle Choir will sing a Mormon hymn composed by early Church
member William W. Phelps, which has been sung at temple dedications
since the first in Kirtland, Ohio.
A cornerstone
ceremony on 5 November 2000 hearkened back “as nearly as possible”
to the pageantry of the April 6, 1841 event. The four cornerstones
weighed 1,400 pounds each. President Hinckley commented at their
placement, “My wife was asleep when I left this morning and
I left a note for her. It said, ‘Have gone to Nauvoo. Will
be back at 4:30 this afternoon.’ Now, that’s a miracle.
If I had said to Brigham Young, ‘Brigham, I’m going home
this afternoon. It will take me two hours and ten minutes.’
He would say, ‘You’re out of your head’ because he
never could have imagined, never could have dreamed that we would
fly through the sky…550 miles an hour in coming to this place
which they left with such sorrow, such misery and such regret long
ago.”
In a prayer,
President Hinckley petitioned the Lord that the temple “may
become a holy site for Thy people across the world, that they may
wish to come here and to enter this holy house and here engage in
the ordinances of the gospel and also reflect on what occurred here
in this city of Nauvoo.”5 He was followed by President Boyd
K. Packer who drew the distinction, “The temple died. But now,
this day it has come to a resurrection. The temple stands here again.”6
By January 2000,
more than one hundred and fifty years following the mass exodus,
the temple began to rise again on the bluff above the Mississippi.
While the original was constructed entirely of limestone, the walls
of the new temple are reinforced steel with a thick limestone veneer.
The materials are representative of the worldwide reach of today’s
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The stones came from
a quarry in Alabama, were cut in Idaho, and finished in Salt Lake;
the stone carvers came from Canada, the hand blown glass from France,
the wood flooring from Indonesia, the paint from Holland, the stained
glass from Utah, and the bronze bell for the tower was cast in the
Netherlands. The 7 exterior doors and 126 of the 138 windows, distinctive
features of the Nauvoo Temple—then and now—were crafted
just up the street from the temple by the recognized expert in historic
restoration of window sashes and doors.
Much of the
construction process was a far cry from that of early Saints: i.e.
hard hats, giant hydraulic cranes, trucks, fork lifts, jackhammers,
power drills, and computer imaging. Still, the parallels of the
two building projects were dramatic. Both were characterized by
long, hard days. Wind, rain, heat, cold—mud and mosquitoes—backdropped
the six-day work weeks. In every aspect, then and now, there are
accounts of miracles—from finding the original plans, to discovering
the carved pattern on the stone buried beneath years of use on the
original site, to crafting the windows.
The Nauvoo
Temple stands again in its place as the centerpiece of old Nauvoo.
But it is more than a landmark. It is a statement of a people “whose
God is the Lord.” These nineteenth-century Saints chose God
because they believed He chose them. Said Sarah Rich. “We had
faith in our Heavenly Father, and we put our trust in Him, feeling
that we were His chosen people and had embraced His gospel.”9
The temple’s
legacy of sacrifice, courage, faith, resilience, and devotion is
not lost on this polished new structure. It, too, speaks of a cause
born within, a cause shaped by sacred purpose—within walls
of sacred stone.
©
Covenant Communications, 2002
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