Editor’s Note: For more on Freemasonry from this blog, see the Freemasonry category.
By popular demand from the followers of my Twitter stream, I’m cataloging my journey into Freemasonry. At this point, I have a vantage point of being involved for a few years, and so I have a bit of perspective on the events. From that perspective, I’ll say that all in all it has undoubtedly been worth it, although not in all the way I expected.
After leaving college, I hit the real world and discovered it to be a cold and lonely place. In college, I had been active in the ΒΚ chapter of ΘΧ, and for all the ups and downs that fraternity life offered, it was an excellent sense of community. I had something that I could work for and with: an organization whose ideals I admired and where people were in the same place as life as me, but where people had very different ideas and engaged in a dialog in those ideas. Furthermore, my brothers in ΘΧ really helped me grow up and become a better man — they held me accountable when I was being an idiot, and the opportunity to be their recruitment chair was one of the key formative experiences in my self-identity as a leader.
It didn’t take me too long after leaving college to realize that I wasn’t going to work well in the role of “alumnus who always hangs out at the house”. So I started looking for another organization which was similar in character, and it didn’t take too long for me to find Freemasonry. I didn’t know much about it — at the time, I didn’t know my great-grandfather was a Mason, and I didn’t know anything about the mythology that it is based on. I simply saw it as a fraternity like ΘΧ but for grown ups. I contacted Minneapolis #19 because they were close to my work, and was put in contact with a guy who was really stellar, and who I deeply admire. His enthusiasm for the organization sold me almost immediately. He talked about how Freemasonry was an organization of peers who were interested in religious ideas and charitable works, as well as the Freemasonic ideological basis of the United States. That was the kind of organization I wanted to be a part of: rich and accomplished. The post-Vietnam struggling of a traditional organization, which he also told me about, was nothing new or intimidating — I had just come off of driving recruitment for a ΘΧ chapter that was damn near closing up.
So I signed up. As I progressed through initiation, I had a voracious appetite for Masonic knowledge. I wanted to know everything. I showed up early to lodge meetings just to talk to the old guys about the history of the lodge and the Grand Lodge of Minnesota. I took the initiation in three consecutive months, and during those months the memorization work given to me was hard — memorization has always been my weak suit. Even so, if I had wanted I could have gotten all the memorization down in about five hours a week of work. However, I spent the entire month leading up to the next degree trying to ring every piece of knowledge out of the oath and the experience that I just had. It was exhilarating — like moving to a foreign country, but without leaving your home.
Each degree of initiation opened up a new take on things. The first degree began the initiatory process by introducing the odd words and customs of the organization, in particular emphasizing the overarching theme of the organization as life and death. The second degree began introducing concepts of duty and really drove home the drive for self-improvement and self-education as a personal responsibility. Yet despite being “in the flow” of initiation, I was completely blindsided when the meat of the third degree hit. The mythology aspect of it was totally new to me, and I didn’t know what was happening. The experience was all the greater for my lack of expectation, and by the end of it, I was totally blown away. I simply didn’t know what to make of it all.
I went from there directly into the Scottish Rite. I was warned against doing that, but there was more information in the Scottish Rite and I wanted to have at it. Plus, the best Masons of my lodge were Scottish Rite Masons, regularly talking about what was going on up there, and it sounded interesting. The Scottish Rite also has one of the most awesome mission and creeds I’ve ever encountered.
Moving through the Scottish Rite was fascinating. The Minneapolis Valley of the Scottish Rite performed each of the degrees, and did a pretty good job of it. For those that don’t know, the degree work of the Southern Jurisdiction of the Scottish Rite is divided into four parts: the “Lodge of Perfection“, the “Chapter of Rose Croix“, the “Council of Kadosh“, and the “Consistory“. Moving through each of those degrees really drove home lessons that were sidebars or consequences of other degrees. I took particularly well to the “Lodge of Perfection” degrees, which are focused so much on governance and a continuation of the mythos: I still remember those degrees clearly and think about their lessons daily. The “Consistory” degrees were also excellent, but they’re effectively the capstone to and climax of the Scottish Rite, so they’ve got lots of energy to work with.
After moving through all those degrees, and having lived with them for a while, I’ve discovered that the Masonic symbols and degree work provided a kind of bridge between my religious symbols and understanding and the real world. The symbol of Christ and Abraham and the messages of Christianity are hard for me to connect to the day-to-day life. I found the Masonic symbols to be a lot more practical than the Christian symbols, while still connecting to the truths that the Christian symbols represent. Unlike some of those Christian symbols, the Masonic lessons have really direct and obvious application to my day-to-day practicalities . And there’s a message I’m still struggling with about the basic nature of all religions — something that’s been curiously picked up in the stuff I’ve been reading about A.’.A.’..
Since my degree work, I went to a “Traditional Observence” lodge, and a bit of a dark spot in terms of my Masonic involvement, and now I’m in Durham, NC. Haven’t started looking around lodges here (need to decide on a church first), but I am certainly looking forward to it..
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