SAN DIEGO, CA — Lifelong Latter-day Saint Trevor McBride, 36, has admitted he has never once known what his temple “new name” actually is — a fact that traces back to one very confusing whisper from an exceptionally moist-mouthed elderly man at the San Diego Temple in the summer of 2007.
“It was my first endowment, I was 18, and the temple worker was probably 147 years old,” McBride recounted, visibly sweating. “He leaned in real close and sort of gurgled something like ‘Mmmelph-fhhrabashath,’ and I just nodded like, ‘Yeah, totally got it, sir.’ I was too scared to ask for a repeat.”
Sources confirm that McBride spent the next hour of his first temple session internally panicking, desperately trying to phonetically preserve the word he had just heard through a haze of denture clicks and consecrated saliva.
“It wasn’t English. It wasn’t Hebrew. It was just… wet,” he said. “I remember thinking, ‘This can’t be right. Is my name… Flibbereth?’”
Despite this, McBride made it to the symbolic “veil” at the end of the session — where the initiate is required to repeat their new name — and, in a panic, simply made the exact same sound the old man had made earlier.
To his astonishment, it worked.
“I just mumbled something vaguely consonant-heavy like ‘Mmmblphibblon?’ and the veil worker gave me the nod and pulled me through,” said McBride. “I thought for sure someone would stop me, pull me aside, maybe re-whisper the name. But no. They just let it ride.”
Now, nearly two decades later, McBride is still carrying the weight of that original uncertainty. He’s participated in hundreds of proxy endowments, each time executing perfectly on remembering the name. Unfortunately his weakness has become strength unto him (from the self-help section of the Book of Mormon: Ether 12:23-27), and it’s become a bit of an obsession during every session to repeat the new name that day in his head.
This however hasn’t helped him with his own new name. “I’ve tried to reverse-engineer it by listening for other people’s new names during sessions and seeing if it could be the sound I’ve been remembering all these years,” he admitted. “But it’s always like, ‘Your name today is Hezekiah.’ And I’m like, ‘That’s a real name. Mine was a syllabic sneeze.’”
The Church has declined to comment on whether a celestial audit will be performed for those who bluff their way through sacred ordinances, though one anonymous temple worker noted, “Honestly, as long as the rhythm’s right, most people are fine.”
“At this point, I’ve spiritually committed to this noise,” he said. “If I die and approach the real veil and the angel says, ‘Has he a name?’ I’m just going to clear my throat and say ‘Mmphlaxxx-thobediah?’ and hope for the best.”
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