50 "SHUDDERING BEFORE THE BEAUTIFUL” |^ JAMIE ZVIRZDIN
from this priesthood—as a female—did not
consciously bother me. But I did long for knowl-
edge, for understanding, and yes, even for power:
the power to heal the sick, to baptize the living, to
raise the dead.
I was also excited to find out what exactly
happened in the upper echelons of our temples,
where many of my faith’s most sacred ordinances
and rituals are held. Before they go on full-time
church missions or marry in the temple, Mormons
are expected to attend a ceremony called the
Endowment, where they receive additional spiritual
instruction and make covenants with God. Church
leaders forbid members to disclose the details of
this ceremony outside the temple, so I didn’t know
what covenants I was expected to make. However,
we were encouraged to learn about the temples, so
to prepare, I consumed Hugh Nibley’s 1992 tome
Temple and Cosmos. Nibley taught at Brigham Young
University and was highly respected in Mormon
circles as both a scholar of ancient cultures and a
prolific—if esoteric—apologist for Mormonism.
In Temple and Cosmos, I learned that templum
originally referred to any consecrated space. A
Roman augur, or prophet, would find an open
space and, with his staff, scratch an encircled cross
into the ground, the urbs quadrata: With this
earthy compass, the prophet could establish the
precise direction in which prophetic birds flew.
He’d wait at the point of origin between the cardo
(N/S line) and the decumanus (E/W line), and he’d
record when these winged messengers came, or
failed to come. He’d then use these signs from
heaven to understand the universe and his place in
it. Nibley saw this practice as a parallel for modern
temple worship, and I was enchanted with the idea.
The temple was the faithful Mormon’s urbs quadrata,
a place to get my bearings, the ultimate spiritual
coordinate system.
Brigham Young, second prophet of the Mormon
Church after Joseph Smith, also knew a thing or
two about coordinates. An inspired planner, he
oriented entire cities around the Salt Lake Temple.
One block north of the temple was 100 North, one
block east 100 East, and so on. I always knew how
far away the temple was. My home in Sandy, Utah,
was about 11 blocks east and 110 blocks south, at
the foot of Lone Peak. Looking westward across
the valley, I could see the Jordan River Temple,the temple where eventually I would promise to
give myself to my husband and he would promise
to receive me. At night the white glow from its one
massive spire acted as a beacon of peace and hope—
and a literal beacon for airplanes flying toward the
Salt Lake airport.
My best friend, Brent, lived up the street. On
Sundays, he made the clock tick a little faster and
the hard beige chair seem a little softer as we talked
and laughed—quietly—and on weekday mornings
he forced me to listen to Counting Crows and
Third Eye Blind as we drove to high school. We
competed fiercely for the top grades in our classes,
and he usually beat me. I especially appreciated his
friendship because it was difficult for me to connect
with other girls in my neighborhood/church/
school, whose primary focus seemed to be attract-
ing boys and preparing for marriage and families.
But who wanted to talk cosmetics when you could
talk about the cosmos? What are boys to black
holes? If only God could tell me what lay beyond
the event horizon! As I studied The Book of
Abraham, a text Joseph Smith said he had translated
from ancient Egyptian papyri, I grew wistful. Why
couldn’t the Almighty give me a vision like he’d
given Abraham, a glorious revelation of all God’s
creations—including the prophesied existence of
a planet named Kolob, a planet “nigh unto the
throne of God”? Wasn’t I, like Abraham, a seeker of
greater happiness, righteousness, and knowledge?
How long would it take before I proved myself
worthy? It didn’t seem right that I had to wait so
much longer than my male friends and leaders for
heavenly power, knowledge, and connection, just
because I was female.
I wrote page after page—hundreds of pages—in
my scripture journals. I often copied scriptures like
the monks of old, as if doing so would cause new
meaning to spring from the words. At the same
time, I read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of
Time and other science books whose vocabulary
captivated me: accretion disk, Schwarzschild radius,
singularity. In class, a friend called me a “space
dork” for passionately describing this new
information about the universe; after that, I tried
to curb my enthusiasm in public. But privately,
as Mark Twain once wrote in a letter, I yelped
astronomy like a sun dog and pawed Ursa Major
and other constellations. My neighborhood seemed