I was 19. The early-2000s. I had just taken out my endowments in preparation for my mission, which I was suddenly less sure than ever if I still wanted to go, because of just how strange the entire Temple experience was. Suddenly having to wear garments daily felt less like a religious commitment than a life-sentence; the robes and clothes were unexplained and inexplicable; and the inscrutable series of covenants I’d been asked to make left me utterly bewildered. My family took a trip to the coast shortly thereafter, but all I did was listen to Dark Side of the Moon on my CD-walkman, brooding.

That was a long time ago–long enough ago that I can now cringe a little at the cliché of the white male middle-class college freshman really getting into Dark Side of the Moon, the single most oversold and overplayed Rock album in pop-music history. But sometimes something is a cliché because it really is that good–or perhaps more precisely, really is that necessary. For Dark Side is very much an album that plainly asks just what it is we think we’re doing with our very limited time on this planet, which is a question you feel keenly when you’re an undergrad, trying to pick a major, trying to pick a career, trying to pick a life.

However, unlike all our other adolescent anxieties, the question of just what do we think we’re doing here is the one that actually deepens, not dissipates, the older we get: “Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time/Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines,” Pink Floyd sings on “Time“, in a lyric that gets more under my skin even more now that I’m pushing middle-age (perhaps that is why this album has never left the Billboard charts). So perhaps, in retrospect, it was totally apropos that I turned to Pink Floyd when I was most confused by the Temple, because it turns out that the Temple and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon (celebrating its 50th anniversary this month) are both concerned with the exact same anxieties.

To start with the most obvious yet also most overlooked: Dark Side‘s lead single is “Money,” about the inherently corrupting influence of, well, money. “Money/So they say/Is the root of all evil today,” they bluntly sing, in direct allusion to 1 Timothy 6:10. Call it unsubtle, if you will–but then, the Temple endowment ceremony is no less blunt. “Have you any money?” asks Lucifer himself, “You can buy anything in this world with money.” (“We have sufficient for our needs,” comes the Apostles’ response, in a line that is clearly intended to be our motto as well, but so rarely is.) This same Lucifer also angrily tells God Himself that “with gold and silver I will buy up armies and navies, false priests who oppress, and tyrants who destroy, and reign with blood and horror upon this earth.” If anything, the obviously evil influence of money is even more blatant in the endowment ceremony than on the Pink Floyd song.

And what is the Temple’s solution? Note that the highest and final covenant we make in the endowment ceremony is the Law of Consecration. We have largely watered down that great covenant nowadays to simply mean don’t turn down a church calling or volunteer assignment, but back in the 19th century when it was first formalized, it meant quite literally to form a Zion of perfect social equality, a United Order, wherein “And all that believed were together, and had all things common” (Acts 2:44), where “they had all things common among them; therefore there were not rich and poor, bond and free, but they were all made free, and partakers of the heavenly gift” (4 Nephi 1:3), because “It is not meet that one man should possess that which is above another; wherefore the world lieth in sin” (D&C 49:20).

This was the society that Joseph Smith sought to implement in the American Midwest, and which Brigham Young tried to replicate in the Rocky Mountains. It is one of the supreme ironies of religious history that Utah and Idaho are today such deep-red conservative hotbeds of Reagonomics conservatism, laissez-faire capitalism, Ensign Peak portfolios, McMansions, MLMs, white-collar fraud, and other assorted get-rich-quick schemes, given not only how explicitly anti-capitalist the faith’s founders were, but how anti-capitalist the Temple endowment ceremony remains to this day.

Of course, we can also make merry of the fact that Pink Floyd became one of the richest bands on earth on the back of “Money”–we are all hypocrites, which is why we all need the Atonement–but the doctrine nevertheless remains a true one. “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God,” declared the Savior of the World, and there was no mythical lower gate called the “needle’s eye” in ancient Jerusalem to mitigate the saying, Christ clearly meant what he said literally. The pursuit of wealth is inherently Satanic, and neither the Temple nor Dark Side of the Moon make any excuses for stating so frankly.

Now to bounce back to “Time”: the song is blatantly about how we shouldn’t waste it. “Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day/Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way,” the song opens, clearly establishing that nothing could be worst than to do just that. Or, as our own Book of Mormon declares, “do not procrastinate the day of your repentance until the end; for after this day of life, which is given us to prepare for eternity, behold, if we do not improve our time while in this life, then cometh the night of darkness wherein there can be no labor performed” (Alma 34:33). That same foreboding of death is also present in “Time,” wherein Pink Floyd sings after the bridge, “And you run, and you run to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking/Racing around to come up behind you again/The sun is the same in a relative way but you’re older/Shorter of breath and one day closer to death.” Whatever it is you’re going to do, do it now, says Pink Floyd, because the end always comes faster than you think.

But what has any of this to do with the Temple? Why, it has everything to do with the Temple! As a recent post on this very site said, “Everything about the LDS Temple, you’ll note, is imbricated in denying the final reality of death: from our vicarious baptisms for the dead (itself a symbolic burial and resurrection), to our marriages not ’till death do you part’ but for ‘time and all eternity,’ to the white burial robes we don as we receive instructions on how to pass through the veil and re-enter the presence of God, the totality of our Temple ordinances are centered on overcoming death itself.” Hence, like Moroni of old, both the Temple and Dark Side of the Moon wish us to “Be wise in the days of your probation,” to always have our final end before us, so as to better prepare ourselves for the “Great Gig in the Sky” and all that comes next.

Because all that comes next is all that we are here now: “Whatever principle of intelligence we attain unto in this life, it will rise with us in the resurrection” reads D&C 130:18; or, as the grand finale to Dark Side of the Moon declares:

“All that you touch
And all that you see
All that you taste
All you feel
And all that you love
And all that you hate
All you distrust
All you save
And all that you give
And all that you deal
And all that you buy
Beg, borrow or steal
And all you create
And all you destroy
And all that you do
And all that you say
And all that you eat
And everyone you meet
And all that you slight
And everyone you fight
And all that is now
And all that is gone
And all that’s to come…”

is all that we are, and all that will rise with us in the resurrection. The purpose of the Temple covenants, I’ve slowly come to realize over the years, is to help ensure that we are in the best possible state when the resurrection comes. The sun may at present be eclipsed by the moon, and all appears to be darkness; but the implicit promise is that the blinding light of the sun will be back shining down on us much more swiftly than we realize, and all the hidden things will be revealed from the rooftops, and we will be “brought forth triumphant through the air, to meet you before the pleasing bar of the great Jehovah, the Eternal Judge of both quick and dead” (Moroni 10:34). Or, as Pink Floyd sings, “I’ll meet you on the Dark Side of the Moon”; we all will.