A Mason's Work

In free masonry we talk, depending on the jurisdiction about the ideas of faith, hope, and charity,

in other jurisdictions the kind of triumvirate of core values change and evolve.

And in some cases they're not even distinctly different.

There's seven or eight different sort of tenets or principles in free masonry that become

core to their function or the function of the craft as a way to teach these moral education.

So for our purposes today though I want to talk about faith, hope, and charity.

And understanding that those concepts from a traditional perspective are designed to

help inspire certain behavior sets.

And I want to take those older ideas and develop them a little bit further for perhaps

a modern audience.

So when we talk about faith we're really talking about the understanding of the divine mechanic

right so that there is an order to things in the way the world works and that order is

dictated by your understanding of the Supreme Being.

You can see it in concepts in the hermetic traditions like as well so below you can

see it in concepts like you should go study astronomy because the way the less the celestial

heavens work is reflected in your own interior.

There's a ton of mechanics for the concept of faith but that understanding has to move

past a kind of an intellectual take on the idea like guess I understand a sort of conceptual

principle and more to an internal true knowing.

And so we have to talk some briefly from a epistemological perspective about the difference

between understanding a concept and knowing a concept.

And faith is really the knowing of that conceptual truth.

What does it mean to know a thing internally deeply versus to understand its principles?

You need to have one.

You need to understand the principles in order to get to knowing knowing is a deeper sort

of epistemological collection with a concept.

Now that said we start to very quickly get into things like you know understanding turns

to knowing and knowing turns into belief that whole mechanic starts to become a little

bit out into the bleeding edge of the study of all of these things.

So and I don't claim to know exactly what's going on in those technical spaces right now

in terms of the current research.

But suffice it to say faith is the internalized understanding of the mechanics of the universe

working in a certain way.

Hope on the other hand is probably less useful to a modern Mason which I know sounds weird.

Hope is probably better contextualized as optimism because there's a lot of people that

will sit around and hope.

One thing is different but not doing anything to change them.

And we are workmen.

We are folks that take control.

So hope is the bastion in my headspace of someone who doesn't have the ability to take action

and we certainly do.

With that in mind a better surrogate for hope as a concept for us is more of an optimism.

Like you know this specific course of action may not pay off but in general we're getting

in the right direction.

It doesn't necessarily kind of neuter your ability to take action in the same way that

just kind of sitting around hoping does or implies.

So with that so you have faith and you have hope and now you have charity.

And I've done a couple episodes on this in the past.

Charity is really about that.

From a traditional context it's about taking care of others in a meaningful way.

Like you're going to feed them or you're going to give them money when they need it or

you're going to take care of them in some capacity.

And that's also true with sort of a more modern interpretation.

If you recontact a charity as compassion it's about really caring for others and respecting

their take on life and their place in the world and what's going on.

But what's hard from a charitable context in the traditional take is to understand that

also applies to you internally in your own headspace.

So compassion might be a little more of a useful interpretive lens on that old concept

of charity.

It doesn't eliminate the obligation to take care of others in a tangible context.

But it does help perhaps to use some sort of intellectual language about this for how

does charity really meaningfully apply out in the world.

And so you can ask yourself, you know, it might be part of your natural sort of language

your internal process to ask questions like, am I being charitable in this context?

For me, I find it a little more productive to ask, am I being compassionate in this context?

It's similar, similar outcomes, but compassion just kind of resonates with me a little bit

differently, a little bit more strongly in that knowing space.

So with that, those are some modern takes on the traditional faith-hoping charity that

are built into the Masonic sort of set.

When you go out into your lodge and you have a different set, let us know what they are.

And we'll do an episode on the, we'll do a sort of a modern interpretation of those concepts

as well.