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Your endowment is, to receive all those ordinances in the House of the Lord, which are necessary for you, after you have departed this life, to enable you to walk to the presence of the Father, passing the angels who stand as sentinels, being enabled to give them the key words, the signs and tokens, pertaining to the Holy Priesthood, and gain your eternal exaltation in spite of earth and hell.-Brigham Young (JD 2:31)
FOR FAITHFUL LATTER-DAY SAINTS, the temple endowment ceremony is one of the most sacred and powerful ordinances received in mortality. One authoritative source called it the temporal stepping stone which all people must pass to achieve exaltation with God the Father and Jesus Christ.1
Since those who enter the temple agree, as part of the endowment experience, not to reveal certain key words or symbols that are part of the ceremony and since any discussion of the endowment takes place upon sacred ground, this essay will not discuss the theological significance, spiritual meanings, or symbolic dimensions of the endowment, important though they are in the lives of Latter-day Saints.
Each Latter-day Saint who participates in the endowment has a uniquely personal experience which, because of the sacred nature of the temple, is seldom discussed or shared with another in any detail. For some this experience is positive, peaceful, and healing. Others, from time to time, may experience the temple less positively. Such personal responses lie outside the limitations of this paper, although I acknowledge that each person's response to discussions of the temple is likely to be intense as a result. The temple also has a collective impact on the faithful members of the church, which again, is seldom shared or discussed although its power is acknowledged.
However, the temple has maintained its central role in the lives of Latter-day Saints by being able to create a point of intersection between human desires for righteousness and the divine willingness to be bound by covenant. This point has remained constant, even though emphases in the church have changed over time, also bringing change to the endowment ceremony itself. In this essay, I wish to enhance our understanding of the importance of the temple in the collective lives of the Saints by...