On a recent morning on Temple Square, I witnessed something I have not seen in nearly seven years.
Regular folks like me — without hard hats and fluorescent vests — are walking around the Salt Lake Temple. The heavy iron gates of what Latter-day Saints believe to be “the house of the Lord” have swung wide open like the welcoming arms of a loving parent, inviting all to approach and feel its comforting solidity.
Step by step, dozens and dozens spill back onto its new stone pathways.
Is there an innate human impulse to move in circles around sacred spaces? Perhaps. As I and a handful of others wind our way along the temple’s perimeter, I am reminded of the Tawaf — the way Muslim pilgrims circle the Kaaba in Mecca during the Hajj.
Our movement is far less uniform, missing that singular, majestic cadence. Yet the shared instinct remains.
We walk around, this way and that, bringing our modern habits, our deliberate step-counting and quiet conversations, into a sacred space. Eyes crane upward, following the vertical rise of the towering spires pointing pleadingly toward heaven.
Up close, the temple feels both high and tight, bright and immovable. Climbing the sturdy stone steps, I reach out to touch the bronze door handles, cool and polished by history, inscribed with the arresting biblical phrase, “Holiness to the Lord.”
I let my palm drag across the coarse quartz monzonite — thick rock that was quarried from nearby mountains over a century ago.
To feel that rough texture again is to anchor oneself to something permanent in a shifting world.
As I look at those around me, I am reminded that sacred architecture is ultimately about people. In the book “Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes,” authors E. Randolph Richards and Brandon J. O’Brien note that in the original Greek of Paul’s statement to the people of Corinth, “Don’t you realize that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit,” the word “you” is plural while “temple” is singular, effectively saying: “All of you together are a singular temple for the Holy Spirit.”
“Together,” these Christian scholars say, “we make the dwelling for the Spirit.” They cite Peter’s description of believers as “living stones” being built together into a spiritual house.
The physical temple beneath my palm has been retrofitted to endure, but it is this bodily gathering of living stones — stepping onto the plaza together after years apart — that gives this sacred place its true vitality.
Scripture records that the ancient Hebrews wept in exile, longing for Jerusalem and the sacred places that connected them to God. Their Babylonian exile stretched across 70 years. While our separation from this iconic house of God in the desert has been far shorter (to date, nearly seven years of seismic retrofits and meticulous renovation), the weight of the interval feels profound.
In Hebrew tradition, the number seven represents completion, wholeness and spiritual perfection. Perhaps the long, waiting years, punctuated by a pandemic, were necessary to make the return complete.
With the gates open and external construction complete, a six-month celebration is ahead of us in 2027. It is as if we are entering a Sabbath Year for the Salt Lake Temple, a season of gratitude, rejoicing and rest after years of labor.
In the Torah, every seventh year was designated as a rest from work, a release of debts, and a liberation of bondservants. For the next year, we will acknowledge the wholeness that comes through patiently waiting. We will invite the world to join with us as we rejoice in Jesus Christ, whose Atonement offers release from the sorrow of sin and death, while making loving family relationships an eternal possibility.
Anglican priest and author Tish Harrison Warren observes, “When we practice the Sabbath, we not only look back to God’s rest after his work of creation but we look forward to the rest ahead, to the Sabbath to come when God will finish his work of re-creation.”
On this day of rest, she says, “We recall together that we are waiting for the end of the story, for all things to be made new.”
Standing on these renewed stones, that horizon feels close. Walking those pathways, I realize our presence here is a quiet fulfillment of Psalm 84: “Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere.”
Even restricted to the surrounding grounds rather than stepping inside the doors, the truth of the psalm holds fast. Just one day walking around this iconic house, feeling the rough stone beneath our fingers and the open blue sky above the spires, is worth the wait.
