what is a temple?
You climb a narrow flight of stairs bolted to the outside of the building.
Cold air. A metal rail. The smell of old grease and new disinfectant drifts down anyway. Inside, the walls are scuffed. The paint has given up in places. Nothing matches or pretends.
Inside, the building hums with a tired kind of life.
The main room is large, and holds rows of plastic chairs. Earlier, there was a church service. Loud preaching. Earnest prayers. Volunteers spooning food from a commissary kitchen that has fed more men than it can remember. The kind of kitchen where the floor never quite comes clean.
After dinner service the volunteers leave. The chairs are stacked and dragged away, replaced by rows and rows of sleeping pads. Thin. Worn. More than fifty men lie shoulder to shoulder on the floor, in the dark.
You hear coughs that scrape the lungs. Wheezing breaths. Someone crying out, half asleep, half awake, his body rebelling against him, craving.
This is not a place you’d photograph.
Teeth are broken. Smells are sour. Men are gruff and short-tempered. Some are chipper, almost too bright, clinging to repeatedly told jokes. Most are locals. Some just passing through. One looks like your high school science teacher. Another looks like a man you cross the street to avoid.
It is ugly.
Outside, the cold presses in. Across the street, a Maverik glows clean and bright. Cars pull in and out fast. Doors lock quickly. Heads turn. Men gather on the corner anyway. To smoke. To pace. To feel air on their faces.
If you drive by, you could miss the building entirely. The unremarkable facade and worn down sign. Music up. Windows closed. Another block closer to the heart of Salt Lake City.
But inside those walls, on all three stories, men are trying to leave something behind. They are trying to be stripped down. Cleaned out. Rebuilt or reborn or whatever they believe.
Someone who works here once called it a dirty sanctuary. That feels right.
Nothing about it shines. And yet, something holy is happening in that building. But not in the sermons. In the choosing. Again and again. To stay. To lie still in the night.
It is not pretty. But it is beautiful.