A Mason's Work

As free masons were taught not to talk about religion and politics in the lodge.

And there's tons of reasons for this and they all make good sense.

But when it comes time to then explore concepts like the Grand Architect of the Universe, which

sits squarely in the center of the square in compasses, it becomes a difficult thing

as a new mason or even experienced mason to figure out how to have those conversations

and understand really what that means in terms of your masonic practice relative to a religious

one.

So I want to walk through this for folks that maybe haven't given a lot of thought

or again the new guy who may not know yet.

But we'll start with the kind of very beginning.

And free masonry presupposes a belief in spring being of some sort.

There is a reason for this.

There's dozens of reasons for it more like more honestly, but for the important purposes

of this conversation, it makes sense to understand some of the primary reasons.

First, all of the tools of the craft that we have are designed to be applied in the context

of a belief structure that free masonry does not teach.

We are not a religion.

We don't have a path to salvation.

We do not provide a ritual practice that helps you find a divine where you may not have

one already.

Even the sort of meditative reflections of the lodge itself aren't particularly speaking

about getting to a stronger connection with a divine.

They're about understanding essentially the plan by which you're going to work.

So with that kind of in mind, why do we sort of require this and why is the G kind of

all over the place?

And a big part of that is understanding again that all of these tools are designed to be

applied in the context of your relationship with the divine.

Free masonry isin't a spiritual practice.

It's more of a moral framework.

A religion is going to be a path to get to your sort of awakening, your spiritual awakening

for masonry doesn't do that.

So it does require you to have had some of that awakening already, which is really important

in the entire sort of grand scheme of things.

It's not for agnostics, it's not for atheists.

It's for folks that have gotten to some understanding, some direct experience of that sort of the

grand architect of the universe such that that experience can inform the way you operate.

There is no disconnection for a mason who is working with the grand architect of the

universe between what we do and how we're informed by that belief.

That is a kind of a straight line connection if it's working well, right?

It may not work well for everybody.

You may have moments where your connection isn't as strong as you'd like, but they are again

a skillful application of the mason's tools against a sort of operating framework structured

by the grand architect of the universe is a absolutely powerful site to behold.

When you act in accordance with that, you're not just using this square and doing kind

of what's objectively right, you're working against your perception of the way the grand

architect of the universe has designed the place.

It turns the application of these tools from just effective lenses to solve problems and

into sort of a reflection of your own understanding of the grand architect of the universe.

We are all kind of working in service to that perception, that reality.

It's easy to use the symbols or confuse the symbols with because we put a Bible on the

altar in most lodges in the United States, for example.

It's easy to consider us as preferential to one religion, but it's not.

It's really there as a representative sample for folks that need it.

In any jurisdiction, you can swap that out and take your oaths on whatever book you

deemed fit.

But in the context of this, our work here in the podcast and kind of free Masonry at large,

when you are sitting down and reflecting and trying to figure out the application of the

tools as you will find in any of the episodes that we've done so far, you should really bear

in mind kind of that connection that you have, that sitting in the sanctum sanctum as

it were, that sitting in that sacred space, communing with the divine and then applying

the tools with that knowledge in hand is going to create a much more powerful outcome than

sort of just applying them as strictly speaking independent moral apparatus.

Give that a bit of thought and some reflection.

I'd love to hear your perspectives on it.

Reach out to me and we can talk about it and maybe do some more episodes if this is

the kind of stuff you want to talk about.