SPIRITUALITY IN FREEMASONRY
by
Julian Rees
Transcript of a lecture
given at CMRC on 13 October 1999
What follows this evening may turn out to be a small act of worship. I am not
a scholarly person. I have no great depths of learning and a relatively shallow
fund of knowledge. I write as I feel. And you, the audience, may be scholarly
and widely-read, or you may be interested in the subject at some other level. I
do not know. So let me start by saying that I speak from personal experience and
observation.
I was born the son of an Anglican Clergyman of high-church persuasion. My
church-going habits from an early age were extreme, to say the least. It was no
unusual occurrence for us as children to go to mass once a day, five or more
days a week. My spiritual imprint, for want of a better word, was therefore deep
and well-defined. Those who have experienced the panoply and majesty of an
Anglo-Catholic Mass in all its splendour will know that a near trance-like state
can be induced by the time it has come to its magnificent and dramatic end. But
after High Mass on Sundays, it was my father’s custom, like many priests, to
hurry to the back of the church to say a few words to the congregation as they
left, and I have an abiding memory of him exchanging pleasantries with them,
sometimes laughing and joking about this and that.
In my artless, childlike innocence, I found this disturbing, sensing that
such flippant and trivial social behaviour interrupted the spiritual flow, the
depth and richness of the spiritual experience to which I had, even as a small
child, just been subjected. Did I say even as a small child? Perhaps I should
say especially as a small child, since we are, as children, far better able to
imbibe these things than we are as prejudiced or jaundiced adults.
Many years later, with my christian faith lying more or less in tatters, I
was initiated into freemasonry in which, I had been led to believe, I could
achieve some measure of spiritual fulfilment in a pantheistic way, within the
bounds of a universal brotherhood but without the constraints of dogma and
institutionalism. My initiation was conferred on me by my proposer who was
Master of the lodge at the time, who was already a close friend, and it was a
uniquely wonderful experience. At the end of the charge after initiation (a
little boring, but not so boring as to mar the initiation itself), the deacon
plonked me down in a seat next to a very well-meaning chap who introduced
himself to me and I settled down. The next item on the summons was to approve
the lodge accounts for the year, a contrast so brutal and banal, I nearly wept,
and I was instantly reminded of the brutal contrast between the Sunday mass and
the light banter at the church door afterwards.
As a freemason, I was quickly to discover how widespread was the flippancy
and triviality with which the words of the ritual were treated. I was quickly to
discover that freemasonry was treated by its members in ways that were far
removed from the spiritual. True, there were great and good bonds of friendship
in place, and I do not wish in any way to belittle these. I had ample evidence
of a deep and real caring spirit that no other mutual benefit association could
rival. But intermingled with it were other less worthy aspirations - the
striving for higher rank, the political in-fighting, the banal sense of humour
that sometimes surrounded speeches at the dinners, and the devotion to
administrative matters which took precedence over the central truths; truth was
sometimes nowhere to be seen.
I have persevered, through more than thirty years, because I have been able,
almost unaided, to extract from freemasonry some elements which I have used for
my own spiritual nourishment. Of the brethren who came into the lodge since my
initiaton and who have ‘fallen off’, I could read in their faces the
disillusionment of those who had given up for want of a spiritual content.
Yet, as I point out in my article Man, Know Thyself in the current issue of
Freemasonry Today, our craft contains many elements of spirituality which we
seem almost wilfully intent on ignoring. Actually I take the title of this
article from the German Schröder second-degree ritual, which I would like to
share with you. The Entered Apprentices, who are usually passed to the second
degree in pairs in Schröder, emphasizing the importance of companionship, are
admitted to the lodge and are treated to a monologue by the Master about the
importance of proceeding with the building of their own inner temple, ending
with the following words:
Therefore, in order to impress ever more deeply on these brother
Apprentices a lesson they learned in the first degree to encourage them to
frequent and strict self-observation, direct their attention, Bro SW, to the
west, and show them the source and the destination of all human wisdom.
The entered apprentices are then turned to face the west where stands an
object concealed by a cloth. The Deacon unveils the object which is revealed as
a mirror over which are inscribed the words Mensch Erkenne Dich, Man Know
Thyself. Self-knowledge is, they are then told in a little lecture, the
beginning and the end of all human wisdom.
Paradoxically perhaps, German society, which we have come to regard as overly
materialistic, recognizes (at least their freemasons do) the need to ‘penetrate
the mystery of human nature’ to discover themselves. When we talk in FM about
‘the hidden mysteries of nature and science’ I would wager that most FM’s
reading that would define nature in terms of flowers, trees, changes in the
seasons, the structure of our small galaxy perhaps, and so on, not realizing
that we attempt to plumb the depths of our own nature, of who I am, where I come
from, the purpose of my existence.
If I may digress for a moment, I once knew a priest who often greeted you
with the words ‘Where are you?’ (not, please note, ‘how are you?’). I asked him
why, and he reminded me that in Genesis, God looked for Adam, hiding in the
Garden of Eden, with the words ‘where are you?’. The interesting thing for me
was that he asked ‘where are you?’ whereas most of us, reading the bible aloud,
would have said ‘where are you?’. He might instead have said ‘who are you?’ Do
we know our true nature? Do we sometimes need to hide our true nature, and why?
The ancient mysteries, on which I am convinced the true principles of
freemasonry are founded, were a way of seeing the world in a quite different way
from that of scientific materialism. For the ancients, the world in which we
lived was composed of all the material elements of which we are aware with our
senses, but contained in addition, and for them more importantly, non-material
realms which were not accessible to ordinary perception. I may be forgiven for
quoting W. Kirk MacNulty:-
Events occurring within these non-material domains were considered to be
governed by an extension of the same body of natural law which gave
consistency to the world of ordinary experience, and those events were thought
to have an important influence on the daily activity of human life . . . the
content of the mysteries, that is the symbolic material which was used to
convey their instruction, includes tales of men and women with remarkable
powers [involving] astonishing adventures which are governed by arbitrary
rules and occur in unlikely locations. All this sounds very abstract, more
than a little superstitious, and quite irrelevant to our contemporary
experience until we recognize that . . . the closest and most immediately
available of these domains is the psyche. Each of us has similar adventures
every time we dream, since the boundary of that inaccessible part is the
threshold of our own consciousness.
And I might add, we all suspend our disbelief every time we read a novel,
watch Midsummer Night’s Dream on the stage, or watch Star Trek on television.
How does modern English freemasonry stack up against the concept of a
non-material domain? Well, Mr Pat Streams, alias Bro Leo Zanelli, has written an
article recently in which he says:
I am getting bored by the incessant suggestions . . . that freemasonry has
some great message or meaning for us all . . . freemasons are not waiting for
some great light to suddenly illuminate their life . . . they enjoy their
masonry without any blinding revelations, in fact they don’t need any . . .
[nobody] is prepared to consider that freemasonry could have evolved purely as
a social/insurance fraternity and the ritual just happened to grow in
haphazard fashion as it went along.
Then again, a brother recently gave a talk in a lodge room in Gt. Queen
Street, to which we were invited to bring our partners and wives. It was
entitled Masonic Symbolism so he then talked about the organisation of Grand
Lodge, the role of the officers in the lodge and the difference between the
regalia of a grand officer and that of a provincial grand officer and that of an
ordinary Non-Commissioned Officer. When at the end he was asked by one of the
wives why we had a rough and a perfect ashlar in the lodge, and what was the
symbolism of that, there were mutterings from the East that ‘we don’t really
have time for all that’.
At my raising I was invited to ‘lift my eyes to that bright morning star,
whose rising brings peace and salvation to the faithful and obedient of the
human race’. I ask you to tell me, what more potently promising invitation could
have been made? It is overwhelming, even without its christian overtones. Let me
ask you another question; why is it that we very seldom hear the first degree
tracing board lecture worked in regular lodges? Could it be that it is simply
too rich in spirituality, is unsettling, that we are afraid of it? Some of the
passages it contains may illustrate the point;
. . . the lodge is in length from east to west, in width between north and
south, in depth from the surface of the earth to its centre, and even as high
as the heavens [in other words, the lodge is a representation of the universe]
. . . our lodges stand on holy ground - why? - because the first lodge was
consecrated - why was it consecrated? - on account of three grand offerings
thereon made, which met with divine approbation [which are then specified] . .
. our lodges are situated due east and west - why? - because all places of
divine worship are, or ought to be, so situated . . . our lodges are supported
by three great pillars - they are called wisdom, strength and beauty - why? -
wisdom to contrive, strength to support and beauty to adorn . . . the universe
is the temple of the Deity whom we serve [we have already worked that out from
the foregoing] - wisdom, strength and beauty are about His throne as pillars
of His works, for His wisdom is infinite, His strength omnipotent and beauty
shines through the whole of the creation in symmetry and order. The heavens He
has stretched forth as a canopy; the earth He has planted as a footstool; He
crowns his temple with stars, as with a diadem, and with his hand he extends
the power and glory. The sun and moon are messengers of His will, and all His
law is concord. The three great pillars supporting a freemasons’ lodge are
emblematic of those divine attributes . . . the covering of a freemasons’
lodge is a celestial canopy of divers colours, even the heavens . . . . in all
regular, well-formed, constituted lodges there is a point within a circle
round which the brethren cannot err; this circle is bounded between north and
south by two grand parallel lines, one representing Moses, [who received the
wisdom from God on high] the other King Solomon [who dispensed it downwards to
mankind, a nice point of symmetry]; on the upper part of this circle rests the
Volume of the Sacred Law, supporting Jacob’s ladder, the top of which reaches
to the heavens . . . in going round this circle, we must necessarily touch on
both those parallel lines, likewise on the Sacred Volume; and while a mason
keeps himself thus circumscribed, he cannot err . . .
I believe we have strayed too far from this, the true eighteenth century
principles of freemasonry and we have little or no chance of returning within
the structure of our present organisation. We do seem sometimes to offer the
outer form, but without the content. I gladly acknowledge that there are
exceptions to this in England - I have visited lodges who understood the
importance of self-knowledge, but they themselves would agree that they are
exceptions. My own two craft lodges are full of wonderful chaps who do
understand these things, but outside them the only horizon consistently offered
to me was a horizon filled with the prospect of climbing a ladder of office
without knowing what those offices meant, the horizon of a dark blue collar and
a lot of gongs.
But let me give you this thought - people often join organizations because of
the companionship it offers. It follows that freemasonry, for instance, will
attract those who may be in need of companionship. Sometimes, the need for
companionship reveals a sense of loneliness or a lack in their lives, and (I
tread carefully here) this may be engendered by low self-esteem. They may be
seeking approbation, love even. A need to be loved may be present because they
do not properly know themselves, know their own self-worth, their own uniqueness
as God’s special creation. Classical mysticism distinguished between the
once-born and the twice-born; once born into the material world we only know
ourselves as a material being in a material world, but if we have the good
fortune to be twice-born we will know our own nature beyond the material, we
will be spiritually awakened, we will know, esteem, and love ourselves, not in
any narcisisstic or egotistical way, but know ourselves as a part of the whole,
thereby enabling us to love others, and to love God, in ourselves. I do not
believe it is fanciful to say that FM can enable us in that endeavour, indeed I
believe that freemasonry is uniquely placed to deliver on such a promise. I will
end with a quote from a letter I received from an acquaintance in Germany who
had just returned from a visit to the Grand Temple in London, who wrote to me :
That evening, Mr Rees, was one of those days in one’s life that one doesn’t
forget. I had the good fortune to stand, quite alone, in the middle of the
Grand Temple, and it was as though I was standing at the centre of my own
being - a very special feeling.
In my view, by accident or design, she had discovered herself, answered the
question in the third degree, knew her true being, was at peace. I believe we
all need to follow her example.
back to top |
