Masonic Pride Day: An Observation

I’m somewhat ambivalent about Masonic Pride Day—it smacks too much of the sort of pernicious identity politics so much in vogue these days, where every group that can muster an identity around it gets its own parade, school assembly presentation, and political lobby. But I strongly agree that we Masons in our current incarnation are letting the anti-Masons dictate the terms in which we are received by the world-at-large, and we must do something to define ourselves based on who we are, where we came from, what we have done, and what we continue to do for ourselves, for our communities, for our nations, and for human consciousness in general. This we must do, not in a political manner, not by engaging in a debate with our enemies, and certainly not with an arrogant tone of triumphalism.

I had a train journey to visit relatives this holiday season. To prepare for the train journey, I visited my Grand Lodge library (as every good Mason should do from time to time), and selected Masonry in Texas: Background, History, and Influence to 1846, by James David Carter (1955), as my reading material on the train.

This might seem like a strange choice, since I am not a Texas Mason. Someday, I would like to write a Masonic Western, and this seemed like good research material for a future book. I was expecting the book to be very narrow in its focus, and of limited interest except to someone well-versed in Texas history. I was wrong; the book was extremely entertaining, and well worth reading by any North American Mason.

Carter begins with a history of Freemasonry, and its early days in Britain, France and Spain. Then he gives the history of Freemasonry in Colonial America. What follows is a detailed examination of the role of Freemasonry in the American Revolution, showing the Masons on both sides of that struggle, and the role of Freemasonry in establishing the government of the United States. He then shows something similar taking place in Mexico, but different due to the undue influence of politics in the Mexican version of Freemasonry.

Two hundred pages into the book, he begins to write about Texas, showing the influence of Freemasonry on the original Anglo-Amerrican colonization of Texas, how the Anglo-American Texas Masons interacted with the Mexican Freemasons, and ultimately what led to Texas’ revolution against the newly-independent Mexican state. He finishes with an analysis of Masonry’s contribution to the Republic of Texas, and how Masons led the delicate process of annexation with the USA.

I am going to offer a long quote from the conclusion of the book, as evidence of an author who takes a deep pride in Freemasonry, and wants very much to give our Fraternity its due as a contributor to living history. As you read this quote, try to imagine any Masonic author of the present day using language like this:

The data accumulated in the foregoing chapters seem to justify the following statements:

Among other definitions, Freemasonry is a corporate school of liberal philosophy erected upon the ruins of craft guild masonry from which it drew its principal thesis that the individual was of supreme worth and capable of perfectibility.

As a broad philosophy, Freemasonry qualifies as a vital sociological force and its lodges provide the essential conditions for the formation of a type that can be relied upon to translate Masonic philosophy into conduct in society.

Freemasonry was the only organized philosophic institution common to all the British colonies in North America which became the United States.

The character of the people in the British North American colonies; the environment of the region; the lack of the ability of English authorities to control thought and action in the New World provided a fertile field for the development of liberal thought as taught by Masonic lodges.

Masonry drew the leading citizens of scores of colonial towns and villages into the bonds of unity and brotherhood thereby establishing the mutual trust and confidence that helped to make colonial cooperation possible in a common cause.

Masons provided the leadership for the events that brought about the conflict between England and America.

Masons led the propaganda campaign which nurtured widespread disorder into revolution.

Masons led in the overthrow of royal government in the colonies and erected revolutionary governments.

Masons led in the erection of a loose confederation of the states for united action in the war.

Masons led the army, navy, and marine corps in the battles of the American Revolution.

Foreign aid for the revolutionary efforts was secured partially through the efforts of Masons.

All of the chief leaders of the French forces and the more important foreign officers in the American Revolution were Masons.

Masonry provided a philosophic basis for the justification of the Revolution, not only in America and in France but also in Britain where Masons influenced the government to accept peace terms more favorable to the Americans than the events of the war would seem to justify.

Many of the most important leaders in the development of a federal union—the organization form of Freemasonry—were Masons.

Many of the men who influenced the writing and who wrote the Constitution of the United States were Masons well informed in Masonic philosophy, practice, and organization.

The fundamental principles laid down for the government of the Masonic fraternity in its oldest surviving documents are found to be present in the Constitution of the United States.

Many Masons fostered the formation of a public free school system supported by the state in the United States.

The policy of admitting new states to the union on a basis of complete equality with the old is a policy parallel to that practiced in the creation of new Masonic lodges.

Masons occupied many influential offices in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the United States government in the period of its greatest plasticity.

Freemasonry was one of the earliest institutions to find lodgement on the successive frontiers as the Anglo-Americans moved westward across North America.

Masons were frequently the first to establish churches, schools, newspapers, and other institutions of public service and convenience in the territories opened to settlement by soldier Masons.

No United States territorial or state government was established in the areas considered in this study without the support and participation of Masons and often they were the prime movers.

Masonry was a civilizing force in the raw, half-wild population that contributed a substantial proportion of the Anglo-American colonists of Texas before 1846, as well as a cultural force in the more highly developed areas of the United States that contributed the additional portion.

Though Masonry was introduced into Mexico and contributed to the revolution which established the liberal Constitution of 1824, it failed to secure enough support to insure the permanent overthrow of privileged oligarchy by 1835.

Anglo-American colonization of Texas was permitted and encouraged by a Mexican government in which Masons occupied influential positions.

The Anglo-American colonists of Texas were led by Masons and Texas became a liberal stronghold in the Mexican nation.

There is no credible evidence that Masons entered Texas for the purpose of dismembering Mexico.

Masons led the conservative forces in Texas that sought to maintain the Constitution of 1824 as the basis of the government of Mexico and were supported by a number of Mexican liberals whose most prominent leaders were Masons.

The reactionary Centralist Party in Mexico was led by men who had seized control of the Mexican government through the prostitution of Masonic lodges into nuclei of political parties and then destroyed the lodges to prevent a resurgence of liberalism through Masonry.

The Texas Revolution was an ideological war—a struggle between liberalism and authoritarianism—caused by the failure of the primary liberal revolution in Mexico.

There was little difference in the physical equipment of the peoples of Spanish and English descent for the development of Texas but they were dominated by diametrically opposing philosophies. Those of Spanish descent failed to make material progress in Texas in over one hundred years of possession while Anglo-Americans, with a strong Masonic heritage, made marked progress in the development of the province in fifteen years.

Of the twelve battles and skirmishes of the Texas Revolution treated in this study, ten were won by the Texans. The percentage of Masons in these winning forces ranged from 6.6 to 27.5 per cent. In the two battles lost, the Alamo and Coleto, the percentage of Masons was 3.1 and 2.5 per cent. In all of the battles, Masons constituted a higher percentage of the Texan force involved than their percentage in the population.

Masons constituted a stabilizing and directing force in the confused condition of Texas following the Revolution.

Masons consistently occupied the most important government offices under the Republic of Texas.

Masons were consistent in defending Texas from Mexican incursions and depredations by the Indians.

Masons were prominent leaders in efforts to establish a public free school system supported by the state in Texas.

Masons supported a complete separation of church and state in Texas.

Masonic lodges exercised a degree of social control which strengthened the rule of law and order in Texas.

These factors in the development of American life were not all exclusive to Masonry. Some existed in one institution and some in another. Many forces, economic, social, environmental, intellectual, hereditary, and others, have made their contribution to the sum total of American culture. It appears, however, that historians and political theorists have overlooked a major influence in American history and government. With due regard for the molding influences heretofore identified by scholars of American history, it is submitted that Freemasonry is one of the most powerful intellectual forces that contributed to the shaping of the history of the United States and Texas between 1750 and 1845.

This book is a great read, if you can get your hands on it. We should all give Freemasonry the credit it deserves in building the USA, Canada and Mexico, and elsewhere around the world where it continues to shine a light of freedom and equality, brotherhood and truth. It should be noted that by liberal, the author is using the word in its 18-19th century meaning, and not in its contemporary meaning.

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Very busy in the quarries

I’ve been out of work now for seventeen days. I’ve interviewed in person for one company, and with one high-powered recruiter, and have been in communication with at least half a dozen other recruiters. While I don’t like being out of work, I’m not discouraged yet. But with all this free time on my hands, my Masonic activity has exploded and I find myself very busy in the quarries. I attended four of the eight Official Visitations of the District Deputy Grand Master to the lodges in my district, and I have since visited two of those lodges in their next Communications, and will most likely visit more.

Saturday, November 14th was Scottish Rite Day for the Northern Masonic Jurisdiction. Every Valley in the NMJ put on the 31st and 32nd Degrees, and communicated the others. I am a member of Boston-Lafayette Lodge of Perfection for the Valley of Boston, but they did not have any work to do for Scottish Rite Day. Instead, they put on a play, but unfortunately, all of the rehearsal days coincided with my Blue Lodge officer’s rehearsals, so I could not participate. Instead, I showed up for the first Massachusetts Consistory rehearsal, intending to be an actor in the degree work. I sat down at the dinner table (all of our rehearsal dinners are catered, most excellently, in fact) with the Consistory Choir. The choir leader asked me if I sang, which I do, and asked me my voice type. I told him I was a baritone. I could tell by his expression that he was pleased with my response. I looked around the table and saw the choir all smiling at me, and knew I wasn’t going to do any acting for the Consistory. Four rehearsals later and I performed the degrees in the choir loft instead of on the stage.

We have a new Worshipful Master at King Solomon’s Lodge, and he, like the rest of the Line, is committed to excellent ritual, so we’ve had a lot of rehearsals. We perform the Entered Apprentice degree for five candidates this Thursday, and I hope the Brethren are pleased with our performance. I’m the Junior Deacon, and I don’t have a lot of lines, so I memorized the three questions for the candidates, and will do something special with the Stewards in their delivery to the candidates.

I sponsored two candidates for the Shrine, which unfortunately had their Ceremonial on Scottish Rite Day. Aleppo Shrine Temple has a rich history (I think we were the 13th Shrine Temple to form) and still has great great Uniformed Units, and exceptional esprit de corps, but we have had membership difficulties. From a peak of 15000 Shriners, we are hovering above 5000. The Potentate has launched a “5K No Way” campaign to form a bulwark against us dropping below 5000 members. That is why it was unfortunate that the Ceremonial was held on Scottish Rite Day, inadvertently forcing Masons to choose between the two Appendant Bodies. Both bodies did not get the number of candidates they wanted, and the Shrine only had about 20 candidates.

Because I was in the Consistory Choir, I spent the morning at The Grand Lodge of Boston’s Gothic Room (the big theater where Scottish Rite degrees are held), ate lunch quickly with a new Scottish Rite Mason from my lodge, and three from a neighbor lodge where I have performed degree work, and then got in the car to drive to Wilmington for the afternoon ceremony at Aleppo Shrine Temple. They had done the closed degree work in the morning, but had an afternoon ceremony called the “Arch Presentation” open to the public. I brought the brother from my lodge to the presentation, donned my fez, and we met my two candidates who were now Shriners. It was really a shame to see how sparsely populated the Shrine Temple was, in comparison with my own Crossing of the Sands. I hope we get a better turn-out in January.

One of my candidates joined the Shrine Clowns, and I am friends with two of the Shrine Clowns who are the Worshipful Master and a Past Master of Somerville Lodge, the other lodge that meets in our lodge building, so we all ended up in the Clown Room after the Ceremonial, enjoying refreshment, and the hospitality of the Clowns. Afterwards, I drove the new AASR brother and one of the candidates home, while the other got a ride from the WM of Somerville Lodge.

I have been doing the Master Craftsman program through the House of the Temple, and I’ve completed 5 of the 6 quizzes. This is an excellent program I would recommend to all Scottish Rite Masons, and not just to those in the Southern Jurisdiction. Although the work is about the Southern degrees and is not always applicable to the Northern Masonic Jurisdiction degrees, it is such a fascinating program that it is worth doing for its own sake. The SJ Monitor is $65, while the Master Craftsman program is $35 and includes the SJ Monitor. What more reason do you need?

I seriously owe the College of the Consistory my paper on the 4th degree, and was hoping to write it in my free time now that I’m out of work. This program, out of the Valley of Guthrie Scottish Rite Temple, is a very in-depth 5-year free program of study of the Scottish Rite degrees, and although quite a commitment, I cannot recommend it strongly enough. If I could persuade 4 other Scottish Rite brothers in the Valley of Boston to join, we could form a campus of the College of the Consistory here in Boston, so please consider it, local Scottish Rite readers.

A masonic magazine has asked me to write a paper for them, and I’ve agreed. The masonic study group I belong to meets in nine days, and I haven’t read “The Way of the Craftsman”, the book for this month. And as Junior Deacon, I have to deliver the Middle Chamber lecture to the WM by the end of the year.

And on top of this, I’m still job hunting. The irony is that I’m a lot busier now than I was when I worked full time.

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Praise vs. Prayer

My rabbi often points out that during the Sabbath, Jews are engaged in praise, not prayer. On the Sabbath, we are not allowed to petition or make a request for ourselves, the most common definition of prayer. Instead we praise the Deity. We sing psalms of praise, and then we have ancient passages we recite, which are commonly called prayers but are actually self-admonishments, affirmations, reminders of past events the Jewish people have endured, visualizations of future peace, and expressions of gratitude to our Creator.

When I first became religious, I really struggled with why we praise the Deity. At first glance, it appears silly to praise an all-powerful Being we can’t see, and it’s the first thing that atheists latch onto when they point out the absurdity of religious devotion. Monty Python has a scene in “The Meaning of Life” where an Anglican vicar looks up to the sky and rattles off about how meaningless and insignificant he and his congregation are, and how mighty God is:

Chaplain: Let us praise God. O Lord…
Congregation: O Lord…
Chaplain: …Ooh, You are so big…
Congregation: …ooh, You are so big…
Chaplain: …So absolutely huge.
Congregation: …So absolutely huge.
Chaplain: Gosh, we’re all really impressed down here, I can tell You.
Congregation: Gosh, we’re all really impressed down here, I can tell You.
Chaplain: Forgive us, O Lord, for this, our dreadful toadying, and…
Congregation: And barefaced flattery.
Chaplain: But You are so strong and, well, just so super.
Congregation: Fantastic.
Chaplain: Amen.
Congregation: Amen.

The idea that the Great Architect of the Universe is susceptible to flattery, and demands such flattery from us is really missing the point. Seriously. The Pythons understand that, and they are having a good laugh at this theological mistake.

We praise a person when they have done something that has pleased us. I tell my dog “Good boy! when he does a trick on command. I tell my girlfriend that she looks pretty. I tell my student that I’m proud of them when they solve a difficult math problem. In each case, I am reinforcing a behavior I like, or tending to another’s self-esteem, or doing something to bring a bit more perfection to an imperfect being.

Why, then do we praise a Perfect Being? What possible need does the Deity have of our praise? How can our praise have any benefit to the Great Architect of the Universe? For a long time, this really bugged me, and I asked a lot of different religious people about why they praise God.

I learned that many of us struggle with this, and many of us feel foolish doing this until we understand why we’re doing it. But singing “Hallelujah”  (literally, “Praise God”) feels really good, deep in the body. I’m a baritone in the Consistory choir, and without revealing the music of the degrees, “Hallelujah” gets sung in some of what we sing. It feels good reverberating in the chest to sing it. There’s a reason that church choirs are ecstatic about praise. Your brain floods with endorphins, your posture improves, you enter an altered, higher state of consciousness when you sing “Hallelujah”.

There’s a section of the Jewish liturgy called Pesukei D’zimra, before the Bar’chu that starts the formal service. In it, we sing a lot of psalms, including a mash-up called Ashrei (literally, “happy”), and then Psalms 146 through 150. The 150th Psalm is a Hallelujah psalm. My rabbi introduces by saying “Psalms 1 through 149 are about trying to praise God, and they all fail to get all of it across. By 150, we use music and dance, beyond words, to do what words cannot.” In our congregation, we stand up in the middle, and really sing, and the whole room soars with song, and it’s very moving. It usually frightens visitors attending some kid’s Bar Mitzvah. But it’s very heart-felt and inspiring to me, especially when I’m feeling low. I understood why we sing this psalm well before I understood why we praise God.

The concept of God is impossible to wrap one’s mind around, and yet God is in our thoughts. We live in a world with a Creator, a Father, a Lord. None of these terms are quite right. Not all who believe in God believe in the Biblical Creation. Not all who believe in God believe that God is male. Not all who believe in God believe that God rules like a monarch over the earth. What is God? We do not all agree on every aspect we ascribe to Deity. Omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, omnibenevolence are all ascribed to Deity, and yet may be mutually contradictory. What is God? Who is listening when we pray? Whom do we address? What is the nature of that who made the oceans, the air, the sky, the planets and stars? What is God?

I don’t know. I don’t understand the nature of God perfectly. A lot of the realm of the Divine is a gray area for me, an unmapped territory about which I don’t always succeed in gaining knowledge, even when I strive for it. The higher rungs on the Tree of Life are pretty much blank to me. I don’t really get what Christians are talking about when they talk about the Holy Ghost as distinct from God the Father (please don’t be offended by this. I do not question the legitimacy of the theological construct, but I don’t really understand it, even though it is very meaningful for many Christian friends I love and respect). Much of the Bible does not make sense to me. A lot of the details are not filled in, let alone the explanations.

The final line of Psalm 150 is כֹּל הַנְּשָׁמָה תְּהַלֵּל יָהּ. “Kol haNeshamah t’Hallel Yah”. I translate it as “Everything that breathes, by breathing praises God.” Those who study Jewish mysticism will notice that the phrase “Kol haNeshamah” has a deeper meaning. The neshamah is the portion of the soul imbued in us by God, that cannot be corrupted by sin. Because the neshamah is a Divine filament in the inner core of the soul, untainted by sin, the neshamah retains its Divinity. All neshamahs put together form the portion of humanity that retains its Divinity. This is the bridge from the human to the Divine. Because what remains of the human is elevating towards the Highest, it readies itself for that transition by acclimating itself to the region in which it will enter. “T’hallel Yah” is where we get “Hallelujah” from. Overwhelmed, it gushes in praise.

Praise is when the impossible attempt to describe, to understand, to fully know God is overwhelmed and sublimates into something ineffable. The last moment where there are still words are words of praise. We praise God to reach this state, and to rise above it. We praise God to give us the mindset to reunite with our Maker.

Even when we are in the dullest state of consciousness, we can take inventory of the gifts bestowed upon us by a loving God, and find gratitude within us for what we have. We can tap into that thankfulness, and allow a trickle to become a flood. Every breath is a celebration, a prayer. A heart pumps rich, nourishing blood through our veins and into our thirsty brain. We are sustained by food and drink, relieved by loving friends and family, sheltered by the ingenuity of architects and builders, clothed by dressmakers, all of whom are sustained by others, in a great web of generosity leading to the Prime Mover. We see rich colors with eyes we were born with, taste flavors with a tongue that has always been in each of our heads. We feel and smell and hear things with similar gifts. We are the recipients of gifts greater than we can comprehend, and we are given the further gift of mental exertion to gain small victories of comprehension to further appreciate these gifts. By praising God we can elevate ourselves to something higher.

Freemasonry requires belief in a Supreme Being. The immortality of the soul is one of the landmarks of Freemasonry. Masons believe that what happens in the lodge room is our crude attempt to mimic what is happening in the Celestial Lodge. Praise is the bridge between the two.

Today is my last day of work at my current contract job. At 5 PM today, I go back to being unemployed. My wine and oil are very rich, but I’m going to start worrying about corn soon. But my faith is very real, very present. I went to three masonic events this week, my last week of work. How good and pleasant it is for Brethren to dwell together in unity.

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The Error of Antitheism

September 30th was Blasphemy Day, a day chosen by a small subset of the atheist community to challenge the notion of sacredness. To quote one of the organizers, “There must be nothing sacred in a logical world, because for something to be sacred it would have to be left a mystery, and if you don’t want to know, you are not logical.”

The day was chosen to coincide with the anniversary of the Danish cartoons in 2005 that were seen by some as mocking the Islamic religion, and were received with rioting and great anger by many Muslims. People died in these riots. The level of anger astonished many here in the West. Since then, the UN has had discussions about making blasphemy an international crime. As an American, the idea that freedom of speech might be curtailed around the world is chilling. International blasphemy laws also infringe on religious liberties. After all, the Catholic Church regarded the King James Bible as blasphemous when it first came out, and the Church of England regarded the Douay Bible as blasphemous. And plenty of Christians today regard Today’s New International Version as blasphemous. Should these translations, used in religious services throughout the English-speaking world, be outlawed?

The organizers of Blasphemy Day do not merely want to preserve the right to form one’s own opinion on spiritual matters, however. They assert that blasphemy is a moral imperative: “Blaspheming the sacred is an obligation that every logical person must embrace.”

The author of the above quotes does not distinguish between critical analysis and blasphemy, and I find that really disturbing. There is a critical facility missing in the author’s argument that betrays the great error indicative of all hostile antitheism.

Underlying the assumptions of the vast majority of those who are hostile to spirituality is that no higher consciousness exists than everyday waking consciousness; the voice one hears in one’s head pretty much constantly when one is not asleep. In the Kabbalah, this notion is called Malkuth (מלכות), or the Kingdom, and forms the base of the Tree of Life. This is the ordinary state of consciousness we find ourselves in most of the time. The agnostic wonders if this is all there is. The atheist asserts that this is all there is, and the antitheist denies anyone else any other form of consciousness.

How do these three attitudes play out? The agnostic is open to higher forms of consciousness, but in not engaged in any practice to bring them about. The atheist is content never to elevate consciousness beyond the ordinary. The antitheist, however, wants to control the consciousnesses of others, preventing them from experiencing any consciousness other than the ordinary. That is why an enlightened society can leave atheists and agnostics in peace, but cannot allow antitheists to succeed in their objective of eliminating higher consciousness from human existence.

Freemasonry is founded on two principles that are important to this discussion: a belief in a Supreme Being, and tolerance for the religious beliefs of others. While neither are necessary prerequisites for enlightenment, both together ensure that one’s own consciousness can elevate to a higher level, and that other people can do the same in their own way, under their own free will, subject to their own consciences.

Not every mason will agree with me, but I believe that one can assume higher levels of consciousness without recognizing the existence of the Great Architect of the Universe. Not all Buddhists are theists, and yet achieve very high meditative states. There is nothing in meditation as a spiritual practice that demands belief in a Supreme Being. In mathematics, the concept of quantity begins with three numbers: 0, 1 and ∞. None, one, and all. Nothing coalesces into something, the void materializes and thus becomes distinct or material. The one creates, or replicates, and then there are two, three, four, many, uncountably many, all.

In the cosmology of the Kabbalah, there is Ain (אין), or Nothing, which becomes Ain Sof (אין סוף), or No End, No Limit, and then becomes Ain Sof Or (אין סוף אור), or the Limitless Light. The Limitless Light coalesces into Adam Kadmon, the Manifest Absolute, which forms the Tree of Life, enters the Universe in Kether, and cascades down that structure until eventually creating our everyday world in Malkuth. Nothing becomes the One, which becomes the Myriad, which becomes All. Thus one in meditation can devote one’s attention on Nothing, on the One, or on All.

One of my rabbis remarked that “God is the ultimate atheist.” What he meant is that at the level of God, there is nothing higher. On our side of consciousness, we need to merge All into One before finding Nothing, but at the level of the One, there is no other. God only has non-existence when nothing else exists either. How do we merge All into One? By elevating our consciousness one step at a time.

What elevates consciousness? Prayer, meditation, fasting, trauma, ritual, a high fever, hyperventilation, entheogenic drugs, and dancing can do this, but are not guaranteed to. One person in a higher state of consciousness can bring others with him. A ritual can provide a structure for elevation, and if the principals of the ritual elevate themselves, they can bring the others with them. That is why most religions have group prayer. In the Jewish religion, when a Minyan, or ten men pray together (for egalitarians, ten people), they can generate more spiritual energy than one man can. The liturgy has certain prayers that can only be said when a Minyan is present. Similarly, one man cannot open a masonic lodge.

In C. S. Lewis’ book, The Great Divorce, Hell is described as a big city. A fairly bleary, dull place, everyone is unhappy, ranging from ennui to torment. None of them realize that they are in Hell. A bus route goes through the main street of the city, and buses regularly arrive and depart, taking passengers to Heaven. Anyone can get on the bus at any time, but most choose not to. Some wait for a bus, but at the last minute refuse to board, and others board very hesitatingly.

Once on the bus, the passengers get more anxious and alarmed until the bus arrives at the outskirts of Heaven. Nearing Heaven, the passengers realize they are ghosts, and that Heaven is actually substantial. A single blade of grass can cause them great pain, and a single leaf is too heavy to lift. Blessed spirits from Heaven come forth to greet the ghosts, and encourage them to face the pain and ascend, but most of the ghosts refuse.

In the book, a blessed friend of the protagonist comes down to persuade him to remain. He explains that the period of time spent in the gray city was temporary, but only if he chooses to remain in Heaven. From the perspective of Heaven, Hell is miniscule and insignificant, insubstantial and irrelevant, but from the perspective of Hell, Heaven is awful and terrifying, far less comfortable than the soothing banality of Hell.

Using C. S. Lewis’ analogy, there is a bus that runs through Malkuth and takes us to higher realms, but we have to get on the bus. From the perspective of Malkuth, our earthly kingdom, other realms seem insane, irrelevant, irrational, dangerous, foolish, deluded, and wrong. But from a higher perspective, Malkuth itself fades in significance.

Using C. S. Lewis’ analogy, an agnostic either does not know about the bus, or knows about the bus and has formed no opinion about it. An atheist dismisses the bus as irrelevant to his life. An antitheist wants to destroy the bus, the road it drives on, and any traces of its existence.

As Fellows of the Craft, we are deeply devoted to science and reason. “Follow Reason” is the motto of the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts. Reason and Doubt are allies, good allies, and we should approach the objects of our inquiry with healthy skepticism. But Denial is not Doubt, and Denial is the enemy of Reason. Those who assert that religious faith and scientific reason are mutually exclusive follow neither when they do so. We can find this assertion among the godly and the godless, but either way, the assertion is toxic.

Religion, Science and Philosophy are distinct mental disciplines, governed by faith, observation, and reason respectively, asking who, what, and why respectively. I pursue my religion by meditation and prayer, study of sacred texts, and communion with others in my faith. I pursue science by formulating hypotheses, conducting experiments, observing their outcomes, and refining my hypotheses in light of observed outcomes; conferring with others observing the same phenomena, amassing data until a cogent theory can be formulated that predicts the phenomena I observe. I pursue philosophy by asking really hard questions and using logic and reason to derive answers to these questions in a conscious manner. I need all three in my life. My mother is not a scientist. That doesn’t make her a bad person, but science has no appeal to her. My father is not religious. That doesn’t make him a bad person, but religion has no appeal to him. Not everyone is a philosopher, and that doesn’t make them bad people.

But denying another their religion, their science, or their philosophy is dangerous. If my religion demand that I murder children, as the ancient followers of Moloch did, we might have a problem. If my science involves performing vivisection on human beings, as Dr. Josef Mengele’s did, we might have a problem. If my philosophy tells me that other people are worthless animals, as the KKK does, we might have a problem. That is why Freemasonry demands tolerance and compassion of its brothers. We neither deny others their beliefs, nor allow others to deny others. Good religion abhors human sacrifice of its practitioners. Good science seeks to eliminate human suffering. Good philosophy advances the well-being of not only its adherents, but also those affected by the behavior of its adherents.

The Italian philosopher Noberto Bobbio warned us that politics obsesses about who when it should worry about how. Communists want to seize the means of production from the owning classes and deliver them to the working classes for their governance. Communists care about who is in power, but because they don’t worry about how they rule, they invite their adherents to commit atrocities. Nationalist movements are similar. What spared American Patriots from this kind of totalitarianism was a keen interest in how the British ruled America, and a firm resolution that how they would rule when they seized power would be just: under the rule of law, subject to the Bill of Rights.

Antitheists believe that faith is inherently evil, and must be eradicated from human consciousness. The only antitheists who were able to act upon this belief have been Communists, and they have an unbroken record of atrocity in pursuit of eliminating faith. The current crop of antitheists disavow Communism, but do not address how their eradication of faith will be any different from the Communist attempt. None that I have engaged with will address how they will achieve their goals.

Most religions have spread through mass violence. A nation invades another nation, and forces its faith on the conquered. In more enlightened times, religions have used reason and persuasion to spread their faith, some with substantial success. Similarly, the largest atheistic mass movements have been spread through mass violence. The People’s Republic of China and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics have spread atheism more powerfully than Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, Harris and the like have done. That being said, the four authors I have mentioned have used reason and persuasion to spread their lack of faith, and have done so in an entirely peaceful way, and they are to be commended for not using violence to achieve their aims.

But the question remains: how will antitheists eliminate religion, faith, altered states of consciousness? How ethical will they be in the pursuit of their goal? Considering that reason is their rallying cry, it’s not unreasonable for us to ask. Contending that religious fanatics use violence to advance their ends does not absolve the antitheist. I oppose any, religious or atheist, who would seek to keep me from my own connection with the One. Where does Blasphemy Day lead? Are celebrants of Blasphemy Day going to mix pig’s milk into the creamers at Starbucks? Burn a Torah Scroll in my synagogue? Are they going to firebomb a church? Shave a Sikh’s head? What are the boundaries? If antitheists eliminate one tenet of human decency, how safe are the others?

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The Relevancy of Freemasonry Today

Let’s imagine we want to start a new fraternal organization. Interfaith groups are popular these days, and when we look at the Middle East and see religious people fighting each other, we long for a place where people of different faiths can share common ground. We look at our political landscape and see different political groups at each other’s throats and wish we could sit down together and talk to each other, connecting as human beings rather than as advocates of a particular political position. Almost immediately, we begin to worry about how the fragile peace of the group we are creating might be disrupted.

We decide to choose our members really carefully, investigating them to make sure they are people of good character, and we make sure that there is total consensus on choosing new members. We intend to become very close with each other, so we have to trust each other. We are going to open up in this space, so before long. one of us guards the door to make sure that no stranger barges in when we are trying to meet together.

We set a few ground rules. No talking about partisan politics or sectarian religion. What happens with the group stays with the group. No gossiping. If we’re really going to take the fraternalism seriously, we pledge mutual assistance with all the group members. Any fraud or deceit, messing with each other’s spouses or children, or betrayal of what happens inside the group leads to being supended or kicked out of the group. We also worry that the group meetings will turn into a free-for-all, so we decide to elect a leader. We worry that the group will become a dictatorship, so the leadership will change year by year. We allow the leader considerable freedom to lead in their own way, and pledge to honor the current leader, and be compliant with them while they sit in the leader’s chair. We decide that the leader will need assistants, and we create a structure, based on service to the fraternity, of successive leadership positions, enough of them so that everyone feels that they can, if proven worthy, be part of the leadership structure.

Here’s two tough decisions this group is going to make, and they may be misinterpreted and may cause offense, but we are going to make them anyway. First, because we are an interfaith group, we are going to ask members to join only if they are willing to profess to a belief in a Supreme Being. Discussions about whether God exists are interesting in the abstract, but in our group seem to drag us too far afield. This will almost certainly offend our friends who are atheists and agnostics, and ethical humanists, and we regret the pain this choice is going to cause these friends, but we need some kind of common base to start an interfaith group, and belief in a Supreme Being is that base.

Second, searching our hearts, and having had experiences in other groups in the past, we decide that the dynamic between men and women interferes with the way we want the group to work for us. Because the initial members are men, we decide to be a male-only group. We want to work on what it means to be men, with other men in a supportive group, and we fear that work may not be done in a mixed-sex group. We ask our female friends, our spouses and girlfriends to forgive us for excluding them from this particular group, but we have manhood issues to work out in a non-competitive environment. We have healthy connections with the women in our lives, and we cherish the women in our lives, but in this one group, we want to work with other men to explore the mysteries of masculinity in a supportive setting. Testing the idea out, we find that outsiders sometimes snicker when we bring up the idea of Brotherly Love, or αγάπη, so we decide to close the group to those who mock this idea.

We want the group to explore some deep issues of spirituality, gender identity, leadership, fraternity, connection. We know that not everyone is comfortable diving into these issues and tackling them head-on, so we decide to use ritual and symbolism to help the newer members get to the deep levels of the more experienced members of the group. We find a rich tapestry of symbols to reflect upon. We use these rituals and symbols to get at a deeper truth.

It works. Our group is highly cherished by its members, who bring in more good men to join us. Eventually it gets too big to stay cohesive, and other groups are formed under the same principles, using the same ritual and symbolism, upholding the same values, customs, and usages. We come up with simple ways to show members of other such groups that we belong to such a group. We visit other groups to show our support.

Ultimately, other groups form based on ours, to explore the ritual and symbolism in greater depth, or just to get together and be silly. Some require membership in our group as a prerequisite. Some are open to the women in our lives. Others imitate what we do, but come up with different themes, different symbols and different rituals. A challenge presents itself in that there are groups that have spun off from our group but no longer require belief in a Supreme Being and talk about religion and politics inside their group, and groups that allow women or are composed of women only. Both of these new groups call themselves by our name, use our symbols, and use ritual based on ours, but modified to handle their changes.  There is some concern that these new groups will be confused with ours, and that people will think we adhere to their principles or structure. Some members of our group are vehemently angry at these new groups, and make strong statements disavowing and delegitimatizing them, while others seem content to let them be as long as the distinction between them and us is clear enough.

A group like I describe has its appeal to men. In a world troubled by a false dichotomy between science and religion, it’s nice to find a group that believes that science and religion can be allies. In a country disturbed by partisan conflicts, it’s reassuring to call a man “brother” regardless of his politics. In a cultural climate where a striving for equality between the sexes has degenerated into shaming and denigrating men, it’s nice to be somewhere where every man present has dignity as a man, whether rich or poor, regardless or race, ethnicity or religious creed.

Ultimately, who knows? A man may lower his rifle on the battlefield, or turn his bayonet thrust away after seeing a fraternal pin on the enemy’s uniform. Someone might demonstrate he belongs to the group and thereby save his family farm from looting in an invasion. Men at war might cross enemy lines to bury an enemy soldier they didn’t know, with customary honors because he belongs to their group.

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Now imagine someone formed this group so long ago that none can agree on when, but certainly more than four centuries ago. Imagine it has spread throughout the world in places where free men gather. Imagine that the ideas of Brotherly Love, Relief and Truth remain, that brothers feast together and share ritual with each other in buildings erected for this purpose. Imagine that all you had to do to join was to make known to a group member your intent to become a member, and if after suitable investigation every member of the group agreed, you’d be welcomed to start the process of joining the group, work your way to full membership by three degrees, after which you would be greeted as a brother by millions of other men. Would such a group have any appeal to you?

If so, find a Freemason and talk to him. Ask him whatever questions you want, and understand that he alone might not have all the answers. Visit a Masonic Lodge, or contact the lodge secretary. If you can, visit the Grand Lodge building in your state. But remember, the group you join is only as good as the men who comprise it. The building might be not be in full repair, the tables and chairs might be scratched and cracked, and it might not look like you imagined it would, but if the bond between the brothers is close, none of that will seem important.

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How to find a masonic lodge in New York City

Since Dan Brown’s new book has come out, many men are deciding to knock on the West Gate, and the fraternity is mobilized to receive those among these men who prove themselves worthy of our Ancient Craft.

Websites spring up everywhere, some sponsored by Grand Lodges or masonic districts, some by individual lodges or individual masons, and some by interested outsiders, teaching the curious how to choose a lodge. Most of the advice is fairly sound: find the website for the Grand Lodge of your state/country, and locate a lodge near you. Visit several if you can, but if not, visit at least one. Speak to the lodge secretary and/or Worshipful Master, and he will answer whatever questions you have, give you an application if he feels you’d make a good mason, and if you pass your investigation and are elected unanimously into the lodge, you will be contacted about performing your degree work.

Sounds fairly simple, for the most part. But what if you live in New York City? Step one, you go to the website for the Grand Lodge of New York. You are given an example of an application that you will submit to the lodge you choose to join. You are given the option to choose a lodge or have Grand Lodge choose a lodge for you. What if you decide to choose your own lodge?

You click on New York City, and are given a list of lodges in New York City. Some of them have links to lodge websites, but most do not. 76 lodges meet at the same address, the Grand Lodge of New York building in Manhattan, on West 23rd Street. How do you know which of the 76 lodges to choose? 39 of them have websites, or at least contact information, and it would take days to read all of the lodge websites. You could pick the top one on the list, Independent Royal Arch #2, or the first one on the list with contact information, Washington Lodge #21. You aren’t a mason, you don’t know that you know any masons, and now you’re getting really confused.

You have the presence of mind to think about your schedule, and you realize that you are free on Thursday nights. You look at the Lodge Locator page, and you find that nine of the Manhattan lodges list that they meet on Thursday, but most lodges don’t list their meeting night, so there are probably more.

At this point, most men will give up. Maybe a few years later, a friend will casually mention that he is a mason, and the seeker will leap up and ask him to sponsor him in his lodge, but otherwise, this seeker will not knock on the West Gate of a lodge in New York City.

I’m picking on you, New York City, city of my birth, one of the greatest cities in the history of the world, not because you are worse that the median, but because it’s illustrative of a very important point. To an outsider, this structure doesn’t welcome a newcomer in. We don’t want everyone in. We want to guard our West Gates, and only let fine men in. Understood. But are we attracting fine men with the current structure?

A man who actually sets foot in your beautiful Grand Lodge building will be astonished and impressed and will feel even more motivated to join our great fraternity, but if he tries to join through your website, what impression will he receive?

I have two friends in New York City right now who are highly motivated to join our fraternity. They asked me to recommend a lodge for them. I’m the Junior Deacon of my lodge in Massachusetts and a regular visitor to two others, a lecturer and instructor at the Lodge of Instruction in my district, a member of the Lodge of Perfection in my local Scottish Rite Valley, and a Noble of the Mystic Shrine in my local Shrine Temple. And I’m privileged enough to write for one of the best masonic websites on the Internet. I know a lot of masons. Nobody seems to be able to recommend to me a particular New York City masonic lodge over the others, based on an experience of several, and choosing one based on a list of required qualities for that lodge. I want my friends to experience good ritual, solid masonic education, a rich calendar of activities and communal feasts, and a lodge with a great history, filled with men from a variety of different backgrounds, enjoying the entire spectrum of career successes and interests. These are fine men who would be a credit to whichever lodge they chose. They are busy professional men, who travel too much to commit to a Traditional Observance Lodge, but want a rigorous experience and a strong sense of fraternity out of Freemasonry. What do I tell them?

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The Philosophy of Masonry

Ill. Bro. Roscoe Pound, 33° (1870-1964), was one of the founders of the Harvard Lodge, in Boston, MA. He was Past Master of Lancaster Lodge #54, AF & AM, in Lincoln Nebraska, and made an honorary Past Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Nebraska. In 1898, he earned the first Ph.D. in Botany given by the University of Nebraska. Later, he studied law, and became Dean of Harvard Law School. In Bro. Pound, we find an illustrious masonic career wedded to an illustrious career outside of the lodge. Similarly, Sovereign Commander Albert Pike was also an Arkansas Supreme Court Justice and a Brigadier General in the CSA Army. I bring this up because Pound emerged in Freemasonry fairly soon after Pike’s death, and in their days, great men were attracted to the fraternity, and greatness within was mirrored by greatness without, and even outsiders understood this correlation.

Pound wrote a book of Masonic Jurisprudence, written with all the seriousness of a book on civil or criminal jurisprudence, written by the Dean of Harvard Law School. Why did he take masonic jurisprudence so seriously? In civil law, fortunes can be won or lost, and in criminal law people can be put to death or permanently deprived of their liberty. What are the direst consequences of a masonic legal decision? That a man be expelled from the fraternity? That one Grand Lodge should choose not to recognize another? What is it about masonic law that would require study of equal depth, by one of the eminent legal scholars of his day? Seriously, ask yourself this question. I’ll wait.

Imagine if the current Dean of Harvard Law School wrote a book on masonic jurisprudence. How would it be received? Would she have to use an ironic tone in order to preserve her reputation? Would her colleagues doubt the soundness of her judgment? We no longer live in a world where the fraternity is sufficiently respected by outsiders. The contemporary Dean’s colleagues would probably be considerably less gentle than J.R.R. Tolkien’s colleagues at Oxford were to him for creating a fictional mythology and a dozen artificial languages while a Fellow in English eighty years ago.

In Plato’s Republic, Glaucon points out that the republic Plato describes does not exist anywhere in the world, and Socrates replies that if a man behave as if he were a citizen of that republic, here in a present, inferior regime, he will improve the character of the regime he finds himself in, and if everyone were to do it, the regime would be elevated to the high level of the republic Socrates describes. At their best, Freemasons are men striving to live in a better Republic than the one they inhabit, and thereby improve the inferior republic until it matches the superior. To this end, an examination of masonic jurisprudence is a means of examining more profane jurisprudence.

When I was first raised, I had the fortune to discover Pound’s excellent 1915 five-part essay, The Philosophy of Masonry (part one linked here, and from there you can find the subsequent four parts). Although I do not entirely agree with Pound’s conclusions, I think it is important for masons to be familiar with the work and ideas of William Preston, Karl Christian Friedrich Krause, George Oliver and Albert Pike. Pound’s essay examines the work of each man, and asks three questions of him:

1. What is the nature and purpose of Masonry as an institution? For what does it exist? What does it seek to do? Of course for the philosopher this involves also and chiefly the questions, what ought Masonry to be? For what ought it to exist? What ought it to seek as its end?
2. What is- and this involves what should be-the relation of Masonry to other human institutions, especially to those directed toward similar ends? What is its place in a rational scheme of human activities?
3. What are the fundamental principles by which Masonry is governed in attaining the end it seeks? This again, to the philosopher, involves the question what those principles ought to be.

Pound reaches his conclusions based on the information he had available to him, and we in the present day have different information, more of some and less of others. While more of Preston is available to us, less of Krause is available to us, at least here in the USA. In the last part of the essay, he posits how the mason of the twentieth century would answer these questions. It is fairly clear that the twentieth century voice is his own, even though he finds points to disagree with. We might do one better by voicing the opinion of the twenty-first century, and we may find a plurality of voices there.

For the moment, my objective is to get my brothers to read Pound’s essay, but when I have enough readers who have studied this important essay, I would very much like to discuss it with them.

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Welcome to Elul

Last night was Erev Rosh Ḥodesh Elul, or the night of the new moon that inaugurates the month of אֱלוּל, or Elul, in the Hebrew Calendar. This is the last month of the year, and ends with Rosh HaShanah, the Jewish New Year, and the start of the High Holy Days (please, not High Holidays, which trivializes the sacredness of this time for us). Elul is a month for תְּשׁוּבָה (teshuvah), or introspection and repentance, where Jews settle their accounts with their Creator before the year ends, and their names are written either in the Book of Life (in which case they live for another year) or the Book of Death (in which case they die some time in the upcoming year). Most want to live another year, so they engage in a campaign over the course of the month of Elul to be the kind of people the GAOTU want to keep on the planet for another year, rather than the ones He’d rather get rid of.

To that end, we blow the shofar every morning during our morning prayers, and recite the 27th Psalm. Why blow the shofar?

The sound of the shofar is meant to resemble the sound that emanated from Mount Sinai when Moses received his Revelation there. There is a midrash that every future Jew’s soul was there at that moment, heeding the Revelation, and consenting to live by the laws that Moses revealed there. We all heard the blast of the shofar, and whenever we hear it again, we are reminded of that day, and our consent to that Law. Medieval depictions of angels show them with long brass trumpets, but if you read the original Hebrew, angels are depicted blowing shofars.

(Aside: there’s a dating service for traditional Jews called “Saw You At Sinai“. Among Ashkenazi Jews, the Yiddish term בּאשערט, or basherte, refers to what is contemporarily called a “soulmate”. The idea of a basherte is that the two souls met at Mount Sinai as Moses was receiving his revelation, and fell in love, and planned to be born in the same era into different genders so that they could meet and fall in love and marry.)

I have a small shofar that I blow each morning this month, and I’m not that great at getting a solid sound out of it, but I do my best. I don’t want to wake up my landlady (who lives upstairs) with my morning prayers, so I blow it until I get a clear tone, and then I stop. There’s no mouthpiece on the end like a trumpet has, only a small hole. The embouchure is challenging, especially for a small shofar.

The 27th Psalm is very lovely, and I greatly enjoy reciting it. It speaks in David’s voice, clearly before he became King, when he was fighting for his life, beset by enemies on all sides. In such a precarious state, he puts his faith in the Lord, knowing that the violence visited upon him will only land on his attackers.

In the next verse, he humbly asks the Lord for one small privilege, but in truth that privilege is enormous: he asks to dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of his life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord, and to frequent His palace.

This request is so extraordinary that the Hebrew text has been put to music, and is sung as part of the Liturgy during the month of Elul:

ד אַחַת ׀ שָׁאַלְתִּי מֵאֵת־יְיָ

Aḥat sha’alti mei’eit-Adonai

4. One thing I ask of the Lord,

אוֹתָהּ׃אֲבַקֵּשׁ

otah avakeish

that I will seek after:

שִׁבְתִּי בְּבֵית־יְיָ

shiv’ti b’veit-Adonai

to live in the house of the Lord

כׇּל־יְמֵי חַיַּי

kol y’mei ḥayyai

all the days of my life;

לַחֲזוֹת בְּנֹעַם־יְיָ

laḥazot b’no’am-Adonai

to behold the beauty of the Lord,

וּלְבַקֵּר בְּהֵיכָלוֹ׃

ul’vakeir b’heiḥalo.

to frequent His palace.

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I couldn’t find a copy of the tune, but it’s very pretty. It stays with you, and you find yourself repeating the words to yourself long after you’ve stopped singing, which is I guess the point. It’s a lovely sentiment to have floating in your head.

After a bit of triumphalism, David gets melancholy again. He remembers God’s commandment to “Seek My face,” and begs God not to hide His face from him, and never to forsake him, even though David’s mother and father have abandoned him. He speculates what his life would have been like if he never had the assurance that he would enjoy the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living, and the poem breaks off in dread.

The final verse, Psalm 27:14, resolves his confusion with an admonition:

יד קַוֵּה אֶל־יְיָ׃

Kavvei el-Adonai

14. Look to the Lord;

חֲזַק וְיַאֲמֵץ לִבֶּךָ׃

ḥazak v’ya’ameits libeḥa

be strong and of good courage!

וְקַוֵּה אֶל־יְיָ׃

v’kavveh el-Adonai!

O look to the Lord!

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This is also sung, but I can’t remember the tune right now.

It seems to me that there is nothing in this psalm that any believer in the Grand Architect of the Universe can object to, which is why I share this psalm on a forum with other masons. I write a lot about the Jewish perspective, because it’s the only one I have direct experience of, but as a mason I feel that all who worship the GAOTU worship the same being (if there’s only one God, there’s only one God). I certainly have no wish to persuade anyone not Jewish that the Jewish perspective is superior to their own. Judaism is not an evangelical religion, and conversion to Judaism is nearly as complicated as gender reassignment. No traditional rabbi will perform a conversion unless he is convinced you were one of the souls at Mount Sinai, and somehow born into the womb of a non-Jew. Most traditional rabbis will beg you not to convert if you ask them, but you can break their resistance in a year or two of persistent effort.

I search my heart, and I’m not sure the Book of Life and Book of Death function the way traditional Jews describe. That’s OK. The Jewish faith is about deeds rather than beliefs, and if one obeys the commandments, how one is motivated to do so is a personal matter. But everyone, Jew or otherwise, can benefit from a month of personal introspection. Christians have Lent, Muslims have Ramadan, and I’m sure other traditions have their own extended period of self-reflection and re-commitment to be good. If you notice your Jewish brothers are a bit more quiet and thoughtful for the next month and a half, now you’ll know why.

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The Boundaries of Peace and Prosperity

Updated 8/18/09

My brother just returned from Iraq this weekend. He is not in the Armed Forces, nor is he a contractor. He’s the lead singer and songwriter for a rock and roll band, and they were invited to go there to entertain the troops. I don’t talk about my brother much in public. It’s not that I’m not incredibly proud of him; its that he’s famous, and during a decade of the peak of his popularity, I found myself living in his shadow, whether I wanted to or not. I’m my own man, and in comparison to living under his umbrella, being my own man gives me a higher self-worth as a man. There are many people who only know me as my brother’s brother (some who would address me as his brother, rather than by my own name), and I’d rather be judged on my own merits.

Stewart Brand wrote that every American should go somewhere where real poverty exists, and see it firsthand, to better understand how good we have it in the USA. While there is some poverty in our cities, and in the Appalachian Mountains, and elsewhere, you are unlikely to find much real squalor here in the USA. We think we have real poverty, but truly poor people don’t have cars, TV sets, X Boxes, or household electricity, running water and food for that matter. I saw some real poverty in Jamaica, but the worst desolation I ever saw was in Africa.

I was touring South Africa with my brother’s rock band in 1996. We had a 16 day tour with only one performance on the second night, in Johannesburg. We spent the rest of the time touring various parts of the country, sightseeing. We had one night in Sun City, a casino resort in the middle of the bush. Two hours of driving from Johannesburg took out of the city and suburbs, and through townships, to a pretty remote area. At one point, I was looking out the window, and I saw an unforgettable sight.

Imagine a shack hastily erected with two-by-fours, pieces of corrugated tin, tarpaulin and sheet plastic, held together with nails, staples and duct tape. Now imagine a city of them. At least a mile of these shacks flanked the road, and spread back away from the road for about half a mile at least. The whole city was teeming with people, and yet I saw no running water, nor any sign of electricity. There was a cloud of flies hovering over the entire complex, and the people there looked utterly miserable. I couldn’t imagine how these people were able to live in such squalor, but I imagine they didn’t have much choice. Our tour guides seemed to regard such misery as commonplace and insignificant, but I will never forget it. “These aren’t our Blacks,” one of them said, “They’re migrant workers from Botswana. We’d never treat our Blacks this way.” He didn’t understand that whomever else these miserable people belonged to, they belonged to God, and were made in His image. If I saw such misery every day, I wonder how long it would take me to forget that.

Half an hour later, we arrived at what looked like a toll booth, except that our car was immediately surrounded by soldiers with assault rifles trained upon each of us in the car. The man in the booth asked us for our passports, and upon checking them against a list and returning them to us, waved our car in as the gate was lifted. On the other side were exquisitely landscaped gardens, with drunken German tourists staggering around bemusedly. Sun City has four hotels and two 18-hole golf courses. The amount of water needed to keep the place running is unimaginable. The whole place, deep in the African bush, is themed “Darkest Africa”, like a later Tarzan movie where Tarzan finds a lost city, and cavorts with Jane and Boy and Cheetah among its ruins. Except this place had bars, casinos, movie theaters, restaurants, and luxury hotels with big swimming pools. The contrast between inside and outside could not be more drastic.

Whatever gates exist throughout the world, we Americans live inside of them, so much so that we are not even conscious these gates exist.

We masons work inside a tyled lodge, with a brother outside the door, armed with the proper implement of his office. It has to be that way, because if the squalor of the outside were to intrude upon our business, we couldn’t function as we do. We have been doing this since that squalor was the uniform existence of mankind. Indeed, anything other than that squalor is an indication that the mission of Freemasonry has been successful. I’m not saying that repelling squalor has been the work only of Freemasons, merely that it is our mission to create something better.

Strife is poverty of a different kind, and my brother got to witness, if not the immediate violence of strife, a place where the boundaries keeping strife away from important work can be seen, a place where these boundaries are not impenetrable. Outside of the gates are men who are drunk on murder and fanaticism, who gladly relinquish their time on earth in order to take out as many of their enemies as possible.

Speaking as a mason, I will not speculate upon whatever justice compels us to be in their land. I will not offend my brothers who have a wide spectrum of opinion about this conflict by stating one particular perspective as the right opinion about what we are doing there. But, again speaking as a mason, I would be remiss were I not to point out that there is a barrier within which we live in peace, and outside of which people live in strife and misery. And that committed men and women give their lives to shield the inside from the outside, to the best of their abilities. These are our tylers, tyling the lodge that is our everyday lives. And that someone with an earnest and sincere heart, who wishes to live in peace, can knock on the West Gate, and with the consent of those inside, can join us if they are willing to do the work necessary to earn their place inside. This is not the place to say whether our foreign policy has increased or decreased the amount of strife in the world. But I will say that Freemasonry has ever sought to cultivate the gentler arts that are only possible when strife has been kept at bay.

When I first became a mason, I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to be a tyler. They miss a lot of what happens inside a lodge. It must be lonely. And a real lodge in the USA today does not have cowans and eavesdroppers just waiting for the tyler to lose focus to sneak by him the moment his sword is no longer at the ready.

The tyler is there to remind us that not all of the world is like the inside of our lodge, and until it is, we need a guard.

Freemasonry developed in a world torn apart with strife and ruined by misery and squalor. The idea that there could be peace, plenty, good humor, health and cleanliness is a masonic idea. Freedom requires peace, otherwise we are at the mercy of whoever is the most brutal. A good portion of humanity lives in a world where brutes make all the rules, and good men starve and die. It has ever been our mission as Freemasons to create safe places where good men can persist in their goodness, and ultimately to make the whole world that way.

A man has to know what the outside is like to appreciate the inside. A man has to tire of the darkness before he will seek the Light.

My brother talked to soldiers from private to general, both American and Iraqi. One Iraqi soldier had never seen a rock concert before, and my brother got to talk to him afterwards. My brother offered to take a photo with him, but the Iraqi soldier blanched with horror at the prospect. Afterwards, an intelligence officer told my brother that if anyone from Al-Qaeda in Iraq were to see the photo, the soldier along with his entire family would be murdered, to warn others not to collaborate with the Americans. That the soldier would continue to work with the Americans nonetheless shows incredible bravery.

Here is what Americans fail to grasp: the whole country sits on a large percentage of the world’s petroleum. In Kuwait, every citizen gets a large check from their government for their share of petroleum sales, and as a result, they are the richest citizenry on earth. There is so much oil in Iraq that something similar could take place there, if the citizenry there were to form a consensus that they wanted the money. Most of them don’t want the money. They are not motivated by wealth. They are not motivated by peace or safety or the opportunity to build. Those with any power are motivated by grudges against other tribes or ethnicities or religious sects. Those without power are motivated by sheer terror and immediate self-preservation.

Patches of ground, neighborhoods, small regions are controlled by men with assault rifles and improvised explosive devices. They would rather keep the Sunnis, or the Yazidis, or the Kurds, or the Shiites down than lift themselves up knowing their enemies would be lifted as well. When Saddam Hussein was in power, he lifted the Sunnis up and crushed the others, murdering anyone who challenged his status quo. He kept the minorities at each other’s throats until they were too busy hating each other to hate him enough to depose him. In a sick way, it worked. By having the market cornered on violence and terror, the state was able to get things done, albeit slowly and inequitably. Today, nobody is strong enough to dominate the rest, and peace cannot gain a foothold when mutual cooperation is too fragile to persist. Men with the ability to enforce peace are instead enforcing the domination of their group at the expense not only of all the others, but of themselves as well. When everybody loses, nobody wins.

The US military personnel that my brother spoke to talked in terms of acceptable levels of violence rather than of peace. If there are say 50 incidents of violence that take at least one life per day, that is horrible, but much less horrible than two years ago, when there were say 150 such incidents. I’m making up these figures, but the concept is there. The Iraqis have asked us to leave so that they can sort out their future for themselves. Time will tell how a lasting peace will form, and in the meantime, the military is more concerned with the immediate goal of reducing acceptable levels of violence. I read the police blotter in my town, and murders, rapes and robberies occur here, but very infrequently. We live with an acceptable level of violence. The question in Iraq is how much the violence has to be reduced for any nation-building to occur, and the answer is beyond my ability to reckon.

Again, this stresses why Freemasonry is so important, and why its goals are the goals of a world that wants to live in peace. Saddam Hussein outlawed Freemasonry, and today many of the religious fanatics in Iraq are hysterical anti-Masons. Imagine if the principles of Freemasonry had general support over there. Imagine if Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds, Yazidis and minority Christians and Jews lived in benign tolerance of each other, respecting each other’s beliefs and sitting in lodge together in Brotherly Love, spreading Relief and Truth. Imagine if the virtue of voting for one’s leaders had widespread support. Imagine if men there thought of themselves as builders, working on the great edifice of their nation, working diligently on shaping their rough ashlars into smooth ashlars, meeting on the level, living upright by the plumb, and trying themselves by the square. Imagine if men there lived by the 24-inch gauge, working so hard on perfecting themselves that there would be no time to worry about judging their neighbors.

Now imagine if a tiny fraction of Iraqi men meet in secret, in shops after hours, or in someone’s apartment. Imagine they set a guard by the door to keep out those who would destroy them and their cause, and shared ritual and fellowship together regardless of religious sect, political bent or social class. Imagine them eating a meal together, and pledging to remain brothers, and supporting the widows and orphans of their departed brethren. Imagine a small group of such men, committed to peace, and dedicated to rebuilding their ruined country. How bad would that be?

If you wonder why masons conduct their business in secret, it is because Freemasonry was born in conditions similar to the one I have described. I write these words in Charlestown, MA, in the shadow of the Bunker Hill Monument, originally built by the brethren of my lodge, King Solomon’s Lodge, in memory of those who sat in lodge at a time where the tyler was not a mere ornament, with men who included those who faced fire at the Boston Massacre, who dumped tea into Boston Harbor, who fought in the Battles of Lexington and Concord, and Bunker Hill, putting their lives on the line for what they believed in. We should not forget that the Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts, General Joseph Warren, gave his life on those slopes in the hope that his sacrifice would lead to our freedom. How do you think an effective resistance to British rule was organized, if not by men experienced at keeping silent about the work they were engaged in, no matter how noble that work was?

Anti-masons in the USA talk about how too many of the authors of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitutions were masons, as if these two documents were bad things. They talk about how the Presidency and the Supreme Court had too many masons in their ranks, as if the history of these officers has been an endless string of disasters. I don’t believe that masons dominate our history the way that they do, but if you look at how masons have influenced the development of the USA, it looks like those who share our values have done a pretty good job. Masonic values are American values, and when we look at the misery of countries overwhelmed with anti-masons, I happily compare a nation that holds our craft in high regard with a nation that despises us. We should not thump our chests and point to the work we have done. Such boasting is unseemly. Most of the work has been done by non-masons who, if they behave like masons, only do so because they have discovered our virtues on their own without knowing that we exist, or what we stand for. However, every once in a while, we need to point out what happens in a region where masonic virtue is absent.

My brother had to wear a bulletproof vest and helmet whenever he went outside, and got to see bullet holes and barbed wire and other remnants of violent conflict. He was rudimentarily trained to respond if the armored vehicle he traveled in was ambushed. He is not a soldier, and neither am I, but he got a good glimpse of the commitment and professionalism of these men and women who face peril because their duty demands it of them. He came away awestruck by their service.

To those of you reading this blog from overseas, from a conflict zone, I want to thank you for tyling our lodge. Thank you for devoting yourselves, facing horrors I cannot imagine to do your part to ensure that I never have to face these horrors myself. Every mason should be mindful that the peace under which he lives exists because men and women have labored for centuries to make it so, and a generation’s carelessness can make it disappear. He should pity those who through no fault of their own live on the outside of the peaceful region in which we dwell, and we should strive to extend the interior of that region until it covers the globe. We owe a debt of gratitude to the current generation of people maintaining the barrier keeping peace within its borders, and we should shoulder whatever portion of that duty of which we are capable, each of us striving for a world of peace.

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The Foreskin of the Heart

Please forgive me for the unpleasant mental images that spring from the title of this post. Jews around the world are approaching the second Shabbat of Consolation after Tisha B’Av, the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple. Yesterday was Tu B’Av, the Jewish St. Valentine’s Day, and so it is not inappropriate to consider matters of the heart.

The weekly Torah portion for this coming Shabbat is Eikev, the third piece of Deuteronomy, or D’varim, the last book of the Pentateuch. Moses stands on Mount Pisgah, and can see the Promised Land he may never reach. His six-score years of life on this earth are over, and his last mission before he dies is to give his people the final portion of his take on God’s wisdom before they cross the Jordan River and enter the land without him.

In Eikev, Moses lays out the virtues of obedience to Deity, the rules for entering the Promised Land, an entry that will come with a swath of blood in the book of Joshua, reminds the Israelites of their sin of the Golden Calf and to warn them about idolatry in the new land, and exhorts them to serve their God in their new home.

We find the following line, standing on its own, outside the context of what comes before or after it, in Deuteronomy 10:16:

וּמַלְתֶּם אֵת עָרְלַת לְבַבְכֶם; וְעָרְפְּכֶם–לֹא תַקְשׁוּ עוֹד

The King James Bible translates this as: “Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no more stiffnecked.”

That’s pretty much the literal translation. If you want to cringe at this metaphor, go right ahead. But don’t end there. There is something beautiful in this ugly metaphor.

What was circumcision to the Israelites? It is described as a b’rit milah, or covenant of circumcision, colloquially called a bris by the Ashkenazi Jews. The word milah refers to the circumcision, as the first word (umal’tem) in the passage above, and the b’rit refers to a covenant, specifically the Covenant between the Lord and Abraham. The whole nature of the relationship between God and the descendants of Abraham is described by the word b’rit. This is the basic agreement to have a God-people relationship, and the nature of the mutual benefits such an agreement will have. Among Jews and Muslims, male circumcision is a de facto standard, so much so that outsiders are routinely referred to as the “uncircumcised”.

So what could a circumcision of the heart entail? While it is not obvious whether a man is circumcised or not without a high level of familiarity with him, it is impossible to tell if a person has circumcised his heart. Why is Moses asking us to do this?

Throughout the Torah, Moses talks about the sin of hardening one’s heart. Pharaoh’s heart is hardened against the Israelites, which ends up ruining his country when plague after plague hardens rather than softens his heart. The rebellious Israelites are described as stiff-necked and hard-hearted. It is almost as if a thick layer of calluses has grown over the heart and blocks out all empathy.

What if, with a sharp scalpel, all of the calluses and gunk could be stripped away, leaving the heart soft, pliable, and available? It would hurt, but afterwards, the heart would be free to feel its full range of emotions.

Later, in Deuteronomy 30:6: “And the LORD thy God will circumcise thine heart, and the heart of thy seed, to love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, that thou mayest live.” This time we’re not asked to do it ourselves– God will do this to us whether we want Him to or not.

And in Jeremiah 4:4: “Circumcise yourselves to the LORD, and take away the foreskins of your heart, ye men of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem: lest my fury come forth like fire, and burn that none can quench it, because of the evil of your doings.”

Here’s the important part: wickedness hardens the heart, and a hardened heart is able to be more wicked without conscience intervening. A mason is obligated to remain virtuous, and his conscience should prod him into doing what is right. We know that if we stray too grievously from the right, we will fall into tragedy, and in the midst of tragedy, the buffers around the heart get stripped away, and we suffer heartache. In that heartache, we feel emotions we’ve prevented ourselves from feeling for a long time, and in the suffering we feel, there is opportunity not only for genuine contrition, but for the heartache we feel to teach us compassion for others in similar straits, and to make us better men.

In sudden tragedy, the GAOTU circumcises the foreskins of our hearts, but it is less painful if we do it ourselves, at our own speed. Most of us can remember a dead friend or family member who never found out how much we loved them, and it stings the eyes with tears to know this. How much less painful is it to remember a dead friend or family member who lived fully aware of how much we cherished them. It takes a bare, softened heart to love another, and it is better that we should keep our hearts so conditioned than for fate and the GAOTU to suddenly rip the outer layers off of our hearts in sudden tragedy. It is also wise to know that most of us are carrying such griefs, with varying levels of capability. Where one man sees another’s anger, a different man sees another’s grief, and this man is better equipped to alleviate the distress of his brother.

Think of the event in your life that has hurt you the most deeply, and understand that almost everyone else has been wounded that deeply some time in their life. Let your circumcised heart teach you compassion for the sufferings of others, even those sufferings that are invisible to you.

As masons, we are called upon to embody the Masonic Virtues of Brotherly Love, Relief, and Truth. How often do we ask ourselves if we are treating our brothers with the Brotherly Love they deserve? How often do we ask ourselves if we have contributed liberally enough to the relief of a distressed brother mason, his widow and orphans? With a circumcised heart, one is better able to see where he can be of service to others. Circumcision is a sign of a Covenant with our Creator. The circumcision of the heart ends up being vastly more important than the lower circumcision.

In the martial art of aikido, the practitioner engages in physical combat with his heart wide open to the emotions of his attacker. This is terrifying, but ultimately more powerful, and all the most profound examples of the art of aikido show a practitioner able to connect his heart to his assailant’s heart, and thereby to turn an attacker into a brother. One of my old senseis used to say, “Aikido is the art of turning your attacker into your friend, whether he likes it or not.”

Terry Dobson Sensei was a student of the Founder of aikido, Morihei Ueshiba O-Sensei. He writes:

I hate the samurai. I think the samurai suck, and you can quote me. It’s not that they were without virtue, or nobleness. But they didn’t have a lot of heartfulness. One of the first steps to being a samurai was to get beyond love and grief. All this romance about samurai life ignores the fundamental truth that it was a very heartless existence. Japan gave us this wonderful art of Aikido. It gave me my life. But you have to be judicious about it. You have to include the heart stuff. Realize that what you’re dealing with is a warm. live human being whose body and spirit may be easily hurt, easily crushed. You must throw another person in the context of love. This is hard to do, especially when you’ve had a lousy day or when you owe back taxes. So you must continually come back to the fact that there is no separation between you and the other person.

There’s nothing cool about this, because a cool heart is a numb heart. Contemporary culture tells us to be cool, but the heart tells us that there’s something more important than being cool, something realer than cool. Brotherly love isn’t cool. Loving your Creator isn’t cool. Love isn’t cool. That’s why Freemasonry will probably never be cool. The grips and tokens and passwords and rings and such may look cool, and our buildings may look cool on the outside, but the heart of Freemasonry is warm, not cool.

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