On Temples, Big Love, and Ritual.

Many familiar with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which I will reference as the LDS Church from now on, are familiar with the recent controversy regarding the HBO television show "Big Love." Big Love's producers decided to show, in detail, the LDS Church's temple ceremony, which members of the LDS Church believe is sacred, and not to be shown or discussed outside of the temple setting. Devout members of the church do not even discuss the temple ceremony outside the walls of the temple, and feel it is a slight to them and their religion to parade around their sacred beliefs on a sleazy HBO program.

Being an active member of the LDS Church, I am inclined to agree with the sentiment that this is outside the bounds of decency and respect for a person's beliefs. I do acknowledge HBO's right to publish whatever it feels like will get it more ratings, but I also hold the right to abstain from their and their parent company's (Time Warner) services for slighting what I believe should have been kept sacred.

That having been said, I wanted to address what I think is the underlying problem in all of this controversy. I know how the world views the temple ceremonies that the LDS Church holds to be sacred. They see them as strange, cult-like, weird--take your pick of the adjectives that describe something foreign to your sensibilities. I read a comment on the comment board of the Big Love website, and a person described in detail the temple ceremony and the "shock" it produced in her, and she is by no means alone; I have known many friends that, in moments of candor, express their dismay, and sometimes even distaste or disgust, with their first experience with the temple ceremony.

This comment, and the subsequent recalling of other comments from friends and family, got me thinking--what is it in our culture that has made us so wary of ritual? Why are many of us so reflexively against set patterns of worship, and of symbolism in the form of religious services? I myself had an interesting experience in my first temple visit--during the ceremony, I had words like "cult" and other associated with it pop into my head almost involuntarily. I realize now that this is something that is engrained in many American's way of viewing religion--it was one of the things that the Puritans had much contempt for, the overly ceremonial Catholic ritual and the subsequent Anglican ceremonies that coped the Catholic versions. American religious tradition grew to reject symbolism, ritual, and all things associated therewith (obviously, not all of the American religious tradition went this route, but a great majority did)--and we were left with a strong distaste for whatever we thought was outside the mainstream norms.

This is not the way it always has been. The reason Christ taught in parables so often is that people in his day were familiar with, and accustomed to, symbolism. They dealt with it daily in their own temple worship, and in their religious tradition. There are several websites that go into detail about the Jewish temple worship practices, and their interesting parallels to the modern LDS temple ceremony, but suffice it to say that our generational distaste for the modern temple practices is the exception to an otherwise long rule of accepted practices, practices that date back to ancient times. Once this can be truly realized, and prejudices and stereotypes can be, as much as possible, diminished, then true learning can take place in that wonderful ceremony. The temple ceremony can become a treasure trove of knowledge, poured out from a loving Father that wants us to know as much as possible about our purpose here, our prior identities, and our future destinies. Would to God that we might all find ourselves immersed in the grandeur of His Holy House!