Photos: See the first images from inside the new Orem Utah Temple
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On dark fall nights when Grace Miller emerges from a Utah Valley University business course, the floor-to-ceiling windows of the Keller Building are filled with the gleaming new Orem Utah Temple.
“My econ class is on the fourth floor. When I walk out at 8 o’clock, it’s shining and beautiful,” Miller said Monday when she spoke during a media tour of the temple.
Beginning Friday, the 44,000 students at UVU, which sits kitty-corner to the temple across I-15, are invited to attend a public open house that will run until nearly Christmas to see inside and learn more about the most sacred place of worship in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
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The invitation is also good for the 34,000 students at BYU in neighboring Provo. In fact, everyone is invited to come and see the temple, said Elder Adilson de Paula Parrella, a General Authority Seventy and assistant executive director of the church’s Temple Department.
“We believe each temple is a house of the Lord,” he said. “This is an invitation to come to the Lord’s house. When we’re invited to someone’s house, it can feel like they’re sharing everything with us. That’s how I feel about temples; God is sharing everything with us.”
“Our goal is to have everyone in the community come to see the temple,” he added. “We want them to see the temple and we want them to feel the temple.”
Monday’s media tour was accompanied by the release of the first images from inside the temple. The main design element is the cherry blossom, drawn from Orem’s history as the site of endless fruit orchards.
The open house runs from Oct. 27 through Dec. 16, except on Sundays and Thanksgiving. The temple will be dedicated on Jan. 21, 2024, and closed to the public. Tour admission is free, but reservations are recommended.
Orem resident Chad Lewis, a retired NFL star who helped the Philadelphia Eagles reach the Super Bowl in 2004, joined the media tour.
“The temple for Orem is the Super Bowl for this city,” said Lewis, who is the president of the Orem Hillcrest Stake, a group of 10 Latter-day Saint congregations.
He said those who visit the temple during the open house not only will learn more about the church and its temples but also will experience the opposite of what they see on the news.
“Come to the temple, especially during this open house, and I promise you will feel the peace and the love and the light that Jesus Christ offers,” he said. “That’s what the Savior wants us to feel, is peace.”
The Orem temple differs from the meetinghouses where Latter-day Saints worship on Sundays. Members in good standing visit them to receive ordinances and make covenants with God for themselves and on behalf of ancestors who died without the opportunity to be baptized, confirmed, endowed or sealed.
The endowment is a time of instruction and covenant-making. The sealing ordinance binds a man and woman together for eternity with their children.
“God would not be a just God if he put us together on this earth and separated us when we die,” said Elder Parrella’s wife, Sister Elaine Finholdt Parrella.
The temple includes some original artworks, including one called “Christ Ordaining the Twelve,” by Mary Sauer. Others show scenes on and around nearby Utah Lake, with geese, ducks and pelicans in the sky and on the water.
Stained-glass windows depict colorful cherry blossoms. In one spacious stairwell, the windows show tree branches carrying pink buds in the spring on the ground floor, full pink blossoms on the second floor and, finally, bright red cherries on the top floor.
One journalist suggested that the top floor, with the sealing rooms and Celestial Room, represented the fulness of the temple’s blessings.
“UVU’s slogan is, ‘This is a place for you,’” said Miller, 23, a sophomore finance major from Provo. “The temple is a place for me to know God really does love me.”
Miller noted that the Orem temple will be the third within a 4-mile radius. The Provo Utah Temple, which opened in 1972, will close in January for a major renovation. The Provo City Center Temple opened in 2016 using the shell of the former Provo Tabernacle that was damaged by fire in 2010.
For Latter-day Saints, temple ordinances are the way God and his followers are gathering Israel, the living and the dead, before Christ’s Second Coming.
Miller previously attended BYU-Hawaii, where she heard a student from Asia speak in a church meeting about how her mother took her and two siblings by bus to church each Sunday, a 12-hour trip each way.
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“Her commitment is something that changed me,” said Miller, who served a mission in Yakima, Washington. “At 19, that really struck me: What is the reason behind someone willing to travel 24 hours by bus each week with small children? Her dedication to the Lord, this woman that I didn’t even meet, was so inspiring to me.”
Latter-day Saint leaders have been announcing and building more temples over the past five years to bring temple ordinances closer to church members throughout the world. The Orem temple will be the church’s 188th.
The Bangkok Thailand Temple became the 185th when it was dedicated on Sunday. Dedications have been announced for the following temples:
Okinawa Japan Temple, Nov. 12.
Lima Peru Los Olivos Temple, Jan. 14.
Orem Utah Temple, Jan. 21.
Red Cliffs Utah Temple, March 24.
The St. George Temple will be rededicated Dec. 10 following a major renovation. An open house for that temple is now underway through Nov. 11.
The Orem temple will be the 22nd in Utah and the sixth in Utah County, including the Mount Timpanogos, Payson and Saratoga Springs temples. A seventh, in Lindon, is under construction.
“None of us is perfect,” Elder Parrella said, “but the temple is an invitation to each of us to be better. We come here to learn and go out to practice what we learned, to work to be a little better each day and treat people better, regardless of who they are.”
God and Jesus Christ stand ready to be with us in trials, Elder Parrella said. That is why the church is building more temples, with plans now in place to build a total of 335, bringing more “closer to everyone so that we can come to his house and enjoy his presence and be comforted and receive what we need to receive in the temple,” he said.
The temple is place to feel divine presence, care and concern, said Kylie Woodhouse, 15, a sophomore at Orem’s Mountain View High School.
“It’s such a peaceful place for me,” said Woodhouse, who struggled with social life as a freshman.
She felt prompted to go to the temple but didn’t until her girls camp group went to the Cedar City Utah Temple. While she witnessed baptisms, she felt a sense of peace that while not all of her problems would be solved, she would make it through.
“I felt that as long as I trust in God and Jesus and I put my faith in them and I follow what they want me to do, everything’s going to be OK,” she said. “And this year, it’s been so much easier to make friends.”
