Raiders of the Gilbert Temple

This morning after mom made us waffles, we set out for the distant land known as Gilbert. The Mormon church had finally completed and opened their newest temple, the fourth in Arizona, and we were all curious to see it. The problem is that there is a huge Mormon population in the Sunsprawl as well as gawkers like us, so the tickets to see it quickly sold out (although you could still go and get in if you didn't mind waiting a long time, but they didn't mention it on the website).

Mom's newest coworker is a Mormon, and he kindly procured tickets for us, so we were able to go this weekend. The design of all Mormon temples are supposed to be influenced by the locality, so I was curious as to how that would be expressed in the architecture. Every Temple is wildly different from the others:

the entirely unique Gilbert Temple

Oh well.

The first thing I noticed after trucking out to the middle of nowhere Gilbert was there is a lot of people here! There were huge lines of people which snaked around the property like the worst Disneyland ride ever. The second thought was I am seriously underdressed. Glumly and in vain, I searched for someone wearing jeans. Everyone, it seemed, was wearing their Sunday best while I was schlepping around my jeans, still with tomatillo salsa dried down the front. It was almost like they were going to church. It occurred to me then that perhaps the people who were most likely able to get weekend tickets to the Mormon temple tour, were in all likelihood, Mormons.

Huge families, tons of kids. I wished I'd brought my hat as we stood in line for about 45 minutes waiting to get in. My mom's coworker came with his wife and three kids and they were all very nice. We made small talk as we waited and his wife told me the bits she knew about the architecture. The building was faced with precast concrete with a granite aggregate. It looked freaking expensive. It must have been freaking expensive.

Finally, praise be to Allah! we handed over our tickets and were ushered into the meeting house, a separate building from the Temple for the common Mormon. We were separated into small groups and led to small conference rooms. I had flashbacks to the way people get shepherded around theme park attractions.

Say what you will about the Mormons but everything was organized and coordinated to the highest degree. There was a vast army of volunteers, stationed all over the grounds and about every twenty feet inside the buildings. There were professionally printed and typeset pamphlets with particular photos and copy for this open house. There highly produced video which they played for us skimming lightly over Mormon history and trying to highlight the connection to Gilbert. There is serious money being spent on this event, and corporate level organization to rival Microsoft or Pepsi.

Actually, as far as I can tell, the entire meeting house was a series of conference rooms of various sizes. I didn't see anything that resembled a major large gathering space the entire time I was at the Temple complex. According to mom's coworker, people come here on Sundays for what I guess amounts to Sunday school.

After the movie, we were left to peruse the pamphlet for about ten minutes before were escorted out of the room, across the parking lot along a roped-off path to the main Temple.

There were an army of seated volunteers who put disposable booties on our shoes while thanking us for coming. There is a level of dedication to the cause which is a rare thing to see.

The temple proper is actually a quite lovely building. It looks like a 10-20 million dollar project. Marble floors everywhere. Immaculate detailing. Gold detail on the ceilings, every lamp was a custom pendant, and every piece of glass was custom cut and engraved. While the building looked identical to all the other Mormon temples, the motif of the agave plant was used throughout. Custom CNC milled pew sides. Solid wood doors. Brass hardware and railings. It looked as though money was no object on this building.

That's a statement- the architecture, the materials and finishes all were meant to inspire awe and intimidation. This is a building which says "do not mess around with us, we are bigger and more powerful than you can imagine." The 'Celestial Room' which is supposed to be a kind of Heaven like space, is lovely, white, and aetherial (except for the Liberace Swarovski chandelier). It looks like the designers said "I want a room that will be nicer than anything else these people will ever experience."


I'm not a Mormon, but it sounds like actually, one of the few times most Mormons will be able to access this building is via this open house. The Temple is a place for ceremonies- baptisms, weddings, child-binding, what have you, but not for the usual experience. This is a palace for the priest caste.

The baptismal suite was very strange. You enter through a glassed-in viewing room with chairs and a massive window into the baptistry. There is a U shaped walkway around a glass tiled hot tub which is supported by 12 life sized bronze oxen statues on the floor below. Apparently, all of the temples have this. I am oddly entranced. It feels scandalously pagan. There must be a part of me that remains Congregational Christian to get such a wave of foreignness.

Let's be honest here, the only reason Christians are confounded and amused at the wacky beliefs of the Mormons is because the wacky Christian beliefs have been around a lot longer. Frankly, I think it is a lot more plausible that Jesus buried gold plates in north America than Noah stuffing two animals of each species into an ark along with all of their food and water.

The inside of the Mormon temples are divided up into a warren of rooms with a maze of corridors, antechambers, changing rooms, and waiting rooms. The Celestial Room was the biggest room the Temple, and I actually passed by two kind of large, sumptuously decorated gathering rooms facing walls covered with gold curtains. I whispered to mom's coworker, "What's behind the curtains? Is it a sacred triptych? A Holiest of Holies?"

He whispered back "They're video screens."

If you look at religious architecture, usually there is an attempt to reflect the hierarchy of the organization. The building is the cosmology. The altar is the center of focus, the bishop sits on the throne, the high clergy sit behind the altar, the choir sit in the choir and the commoners jostle in the main seating. In orthodox churches, although the space is large and continuous, there are level changes and gates through which you need higher and higher levels of religious authority. Only the priests may enter the sanctuary- everyone else has to pray at the veil. Buddhist and Shinto temples reflect the same kind of basic idea of areas for the priests and areas for the commoners.

So what does it say when your Temple is a warren of ceremonial rooms? For one, that it is impenetrable. I'm pretty good with direction and spatial memory. I got lost in this place. It's big, but not that big. It felt designed to confuse people unfamiliar with it. It says to me "don't even attempt to parse this thing on your own."

Thinking back on it, we went downstairs to the baptistry. The baptistry suite had a level below. The bronze oxen statues, then, were standing on a floor which is about 24' deep. That's an unbelievable expense in caliche Arizona dirt. It's also creepy to think about it being underground.

At tour end, we exited and another army took the booties off our shoes. Overall, it was a very soft sell on Mormonism. A bit in the video, a bit in the pamphlet, a tent where they would be 'happy to answer questions', but by and large, the organizers seemed to expect the sincerity and dedication of the volunteers and the lavishness of the building to do the heavy lifting.