Mt. Timpanogos Temple welcomes public Saturday

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    By TEONEI SALWA

    Eight hundred children’s choirs will greet more than 1 million visitors to the Mount Timpanogos Utah Temple open house beginning Saturday morning, said Elder M. Russell Ballard of the Council of the Twelve.

    Each Primary children’s choir will sing for about half an hour at some point in the six-week open house, which runs through Sept. 21, he said.

    The tours will include a video, an exhibit and a guided tour inside the temple. The tours will take 45-60 minutes, and facilities are available for those with disabilities. Free open house tickets can be reserved at (801) 763-4570.

    “We’re very anxious to have the public walk through the temple before it is dedicated,” Elder Ballard said. The open house is to help people understand the purpose of temples for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

    The temple will be dedicated Oct. 13-19 in 27 sessions.

    This is the 49th LDS temple, and others are under construction.

    “Brigham Young said there’d be hundreds of temples upon the face of the earth, and we believe that,” Elder Ballard said.

    “You have to have a congregation — a membership base — sufficiently large to operate a temple,” he said. “Utah is our largest membership base. The busiest temple by far is the Provo temple. It was very important that we have this temple in this location to balance out the needs of this area.”

    BYU and the Missionary Training Center have put a lot of pressure on the Provo and Jordan River temples.

    The Mount Timpanogos Temple is one of the larger ones, Elder Ballard said. This temple, on a 17-acre site, is the same size as the Bountiful Temple at 104,000 square feet, and the architecture is the same for both.

    “The decor of this temple is quite different, (though),” he said.

    The Mount Timpanogos Temple contains about 10 original works of art as well as some reproductions. Many walls are left empty or decorated with woodwork, mirrors and lights.

    Elder Ballard told journalists on a tour of the temple Wednesday that the lack of more paintings is partly because of a “desire to keep things simple and plain and beautiful,” so people go to the temple not to admire the art but the simplicity of the ordinances.

    Light plays a big role in the architecture of the temple. An art glass designer from California is responsible for the windows having prisms of glass in them, said Keith Stepan, project architect. As the sun reflects through the prisms, various colors of light move around the room, “to give a dynamic impression of the influence of God upon man,” Stepan said.

    Many people who go through the open house in the next month and a half will not be LDS, and Elder Ballard said he hopes they will be touched by the light there.

    President Robert J. Matthews, the Mount Timpanogos Temple president, used to teach at BYU. He has been on campus since 1964. He worked in the Abraham O. Smoot Building, taught religion and was the dean of Religious Education before his retirement from the university.

    “It’s pretty hard to get better than BYU,” President Matthews said, “but I think even President Bateman would agree this is at least as good.

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