PHOTO ESSAY

The sky is awash in pink and the sun has not yet tipped over the mountain’s edge from where we stand. To get good photos, we are used to beating the sun to our spot of choice.

This is a metaphor, a celebration of another new temple in the Salt Lake Valley, where four temples dot the landscape, close enough that you can see them all from a high enough vantage in the valley. This is the home of a temple-attending people and their faith has brought them another House of God.

Moroni’s golden trump is lit first in this sunrise, followed quickly by the entire southeast corner of the temple. The southeast cornerstone was the first one laid in Kirtland and Nauvoo, the first one laid in Salt Lake, where Brigham Young told the Saints “we commence by laying the stone on the south-east corner, because there is the most light.”

Then something wonderful happens, as the sky begins to glow behind the Draper Temple. In this spring equinox, the sun is coming up and shining right through the saddle where the temple sits, flowing like a river across the temple while all around it still sleeps in shadow. It catches the first radiance on this side of the valley.

The southeast cornerstone has traditionally been the first one placed, and thus became the chief cornerstone, another name for Christ. He and the plan he made possible through his atonement are the very foundation of the temple.

On this morning when spring is just about here, the once skeletal trees are beginning to hint at new life, tight buds that will become leaf and flower, fulfilment.

Today morning light already fires the golden spire of the yet unfinished Oquirrh Mountain temple across the valley, while the new Draper Temple where we are still stands in a gray dimness, not yet aflame by the sun.

Anyone familiar with Salt Lake Valley, knows how morning works. The dawn touches the western Oquirrh Mountains first, then gradually creeps across the valley, like an irresistible flood, while the eastern benches are still in the “shadows of the everlasting hills,” waiting for the light.

The Jordan River Temple, also easily viewed from our southeast perch in the valley, will soon have light wash over it as well.