Although when I was younger I would just find a nice quite outdoor spot for my individual sacred space and that worked fine. Now I find it harder to get away to a private space for a moment and it would be nice to have a designated place. I can see my husband and I creating a meditation space, probably not enough space for a room, in our own home someday and that might serve this need nicely.

I agree, Seraphine. I actual wish we had a lot more ritual in our worship.

“Does anything more than chance and circumstance account for the distribution of visual representations in Mormon praxis, or is there some overarching theological model for making sense of this apparent hodgepodge?”

One aspect to the lack of Christian symbols, ritual, shrines, etc. within the church probably rests in the Masonic origins of Mormonism. Some of the main Mormon symbols (e.g., cornerstones, key stones, beehives) and rituals (e.g., washing and anointing, endowment ceremony) originated with Free Masonry, which is not a religion and thus does not have Christian/religious overtones to its buildings and rituals (though there are some spiritual overtones).

I think the sense of “hodgepodge” comes, at least in part, from the unique merging of Christianity and Masonry that constitutes Mormonism, which makes it unlike any other Christian religion in terms of symbolism and ritual.

Heh, Jessawhy, I have no secret meaning! I just think I would (maybe) find a ritual appealing if it were extraordinarily strange, atmospheric, and difficult to process linearly. If the divine is unimaginable, why not try to push the limits of imagination in constructing our ritual conception of it? Why not really make it an-out-of-the ordinary experience in some way? This seems to be partly what the cherubim get at.

Oddly, in Mormonism, we like to say our ritual is entirely “symbolic.” But of all Christians, it seems like we should have the least need to find recourse in symbols in exploring the divine! We think God is a man living on a planet on our ontological plan (or something of that nature).

This is the blasphemous part (and I’m sorry if this is offensive–I don’t mean to imply even that this feeling is defensible): (a) I’d like to fashion my own ritual instead of accepting the one God provided (for more reasons than one), and (b) I thought the temple was (besides being offensive and problematic), well, boring. To be honest, I expected something more exciting and imaginative. For years I was taught it would be difficult to process and incomprehensible. I felt on my first visit that I’d comprehended quite a bit more than I wanted to.

I’m about to say something vaguely blasphemous, so please scroll down if you have a weak stomach. Several things shocked me about the temple–the gender problems were only the most excruciating of them. But I didn’t find the ritual shocking at all. In fact, if anything, I wish it were considerably more unusual.

I’m really not very good at reading between the lines. (or send me an email if you prefer)

I suppose we do court a middle ground with other religious imagery in the sense that we use it to invoke religious feeling. However, the objects themselves are traditionally believed to contain no independent spiritual power.

That said, I like the direction of your analysis and the ideas brought out in the comments. I hope you take the time to flesh out the subject in a later post.