That's not a surprising
question. Even though Masons (Freemasons) are members of the largest and oldest
fraternity in the world, and even though almost everyone has a father or
grandfather or uncle who was a Mason, many people aren't quite certain just who
Masons are.
The answer is simple. A Mason
(or Freemason) is a member of a fraternity known as Masonry (or Freemasonry). A
fraternity is a group of men (just as a sorority is a group of women) who join
together because:
(We'll look at some of these
things later.)
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Masonry (or Freemasonry) is the oldest fraternity in the world. No one knows
just how old it is because the actual origins have been lost in time. Probably,
it arose from the guilds of stonemasons who built the castles and cathedrals of
the Middle Ages. Possibly, they were influenced by the
Knights Templar, a group of Christian warrior monks formed in 1118 to help
protect pilgrims making trips to the Holy Land.
In 1717, Masonry created a
formal organization in England when the first Grand Lodge was formed. A Grand
Lodge is the administrative body in charge of Masonry in some geographical
area. In the United States, there is a Grand Lodge in each state and the
District of Columbia. In Canada, there is a Grand Lodge in each province. Local
organizations of Masons are called lodges. There are lodges in most towns, and
large cities usually have several. There are about 13,200 lodges in the United
States.
If Masonry started in Great Britain, how
did it get to America?
In a time when travel was by
horseback and sailing ship, Masonry spread with amazing speed. By 1731, when
Benjamin Franklin joined the fraternity, there were already several lodges in
the Colonies, and Masonry spread rapidly as America expanded west. In addition
to Franklin, many of the Founding Fathers -- men such as George Washington,
Paul Revere, Joseph Warren, and John Hancock -- were Masons. Masons and Masonry
played an important part in the Revolutionary War and an even more important
part in the Constitutional Convention and the debates surrounding the
ratification of the Bill of Rights. Many of those debates were held in Masonic
lodges.
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The word "lodge" means
both a group of Masons meeting in some place and the room or building in which
they meet. Masonic buildings are also sometimes called "temples"
because much of the symbolism Masonry uses to teach its lessons comes from the
building of King Solomon's Temple in the Holy Land. The term "lodge" itself comes from the structures which the stonemasons built
against the sides of the cathedrals during construction. In winter, when
building had to stop, they lived in these lodges and worked at carving stone.
While there is some variation in
detail from state to state and country to country.
If you've ever watched C-SPAN's coverage of the House of Commons in London, you'll
notice that the layout is about the same. Since Masonry came to America from
England, we still use the English floorplan and
English titles for the officers. The Worshipful Master of the Lodge sits in the
East. "Worshipful" is an English term of respect which means the same
thing as "Honorable." He is called the Master of the lodge for the
same reason that the leader of an orchestra is called the "Concert
Master." It's simply an older term for "Leader." In other
organizations, he would be called "President." The Senior and Junior
Wardens are the First and Second Vice-Presidents. The Deacons are messengers,
and the Stewards have charge of refreshments.
Every lodge has an altar holding
a "Volume of the Sacred Law." In the United States and Canada, that
is almost always a Bible.
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This is a good place to repeat
what we said earlier about why men become Masons:
The Lodge is the center of these
activities.
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Masonry does things in the world.
Masonry teaches that each person has a responsibility to make things better in
the world. Most individuals won't be the ones to find a cure for cancer, or
eliminate poverty, or help create world peace, but every man and woman and
child can do something to help others and to make things a little better.
Masonry is deeply involved with helping people -- it spends more than $1.4
million dollars every day in the United States, just to make life a little
easier. And the great majority of that help goes to
people who are not Masons. Some of these charities are vast projects, like the
Crippled Children's Hospitals and Burns Institutes built by the Shriners. Also, Scottish Rite Masons maintain a nationwide
network of over 100 Childhood Language Disorders Clinics, Centers, and
Programs. Each helps children afflicted by such conditions as aphasia,
dyslexia, stuttering, and related learning or speech disorders.
Some services are less
noticeable, like helping a widow pay her electric bill or buying coats and
shoes for disadvantaged children. And there's just about anything you can think
of in-between. But with projects large or small, the Masons of a lodge try to
help make the world a better place. The lodge gives them a way to combine with
others to do even more good.
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Masonry does things "inside" the
individual Mason.
"Grow or die" is a
great law of all nature. Most people feel a need for continued growth as
individuals. They feel they are not as honest or as charitable or as
compassionate or as loving or as trusting or as well-informed as they ought to
be. Masonry reminds its members over and over again of the importance of these
qualities and education. It lets men associate with other men of honor and
integrity who believe that things like honesty, compassion, love, trust, and
knowledge are important. In some ways, Masonry is a support group for men who
are trying to make the right decisions. It's easier to practice these virtues
when you know that those around you think they are important, too, and won't
laugh at you. That's a major reason that Masons enjoy being together.
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Masons enjoy each other's company.
It's good to spend time with people you can trust completely, and most Masons
find that in their lodge. While much of lodge activity is spent in works of
charity or in lessons in self-development, much is also spent in fellowship.
Lodges have picnics, camping trips, and many events for the whole family.
Simply put, a lodge is a place to spend time with friends.
For members only, two basic
kinds of meetings take place in a lodge. The most common is a simple business
meeting. To open and close the meeting, there is a ceremony whose purpose is to
remind us of the virtues by which we are supposed to live. Then there is a
reading of the minutes; voting on petitions (applications of men who want to
join the fraternity); planning for charitable functions, family events, and
other lodge activities; and sharing information about members (called
"Brothers," as in most fraternities) who are ill or have some sort of
need. The other kind of meeting is one in which people join the fraternity --
one at which the "degrees" are performed.
But every lodge serves more than
its own members. Frequently, there are meetings open to the public. Examples
are Ladies' Nights, "Brother Bring a Friend Nights,"
public installations of officers, cornerstone laying ceremonies, and other
special meetings supporting community events and dealing with topics of local
interest.
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A degree is a stage or level of
membership. It's also the ceremony by which a man attains that level of
membership. There are three, called Entered Apprentice, Fellowcraft,
and Master Mason. As you can see, the names are taken from the craft guilds. In
the Middle Ages, when a person wanted to join a craft,
such as the gold smiths or the carpenters or the stonemasons, he was first
apprenticed. As an apprentice, he learned the tools and skills of the trade.
When he had proved his skills, he became a "Fellow of the Craft"
(today we would say "Journeyman"), and when he had exceptional
ability, he was known as a Master of the Craft.
The degrees are plays in which
the candidate participates. Each degree uses symbols to teach, just as plays
did in the Middle Ages and as many theatrical productions do today. (We'll talk
about symbols a little later.)
The Masonic degrees teach the
great lessons of life -- the importance of honor and integrity, of being a
person on whom others can rely, of being both trusting and trustworthy, of
realizing that you have a spiritual nature as well as a physical or animal
nature, of the importance of self-control, of knowing how to love and be loved,
of knowing how to keep confidential what others tell you so that they can
"open up" without fear.
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Why is Masonry so
"secretive"?
It really isn't
"secretive," although it sometimes has that reputation. Masons
certainly don't make a secret of the fact that they are members of the
fraternity. We wear rings, lapel pins, and tie clasps with Masonic emblems like
the Square and Compasses, the best known of Masonic signs which, logically,
recall the fraternity's early symbolic roots in stonemasonry. Masonic buildings
are clearly marked, and are usually listed in the phone book. Lodge activities
are not secret -- picnics and other events are even listed in the newspapers,
especially in smaller towns. Many lodges have answering machines which give the
upcoming lodge activities. But there are some Masonic secrets, and they fall
into two categories.
The first are the ways in which
a man can identify himself as a Mason -- grips and passwords. We keep those
private for obvious reasons. It is not at all unknown for unscrupulous people
to try to pass themselves off as Masons in order to get assistance under false
pretenses.
The second group is harder to
describe, but they are the ones Masons usually mean if we talk about
"Masonic secrets." They are secrets because they literally can't be
talked about, can't be put into words. They are the changes that happen to a man
when he really accepts responsibility for his own life and, at the same time,
truly decides that his real happiness is in helping others.
It's a wonderful feeling, but it's
something you simply can't explain to another person. That's why we sometimes
say that Masonic secrets cannot (rather than "may not") be told. Try
telling someone exactly what you feel when you see a beautiful sunset, or when
you hear music, like the national anthem, which suddenly stirs old memories,
and you'll understand what we mean.
"Secret societies"
became very popular in America in the late 1800s and early 1900s. There were
literally hundreds of them, and most people belonged to two or three. Many of
them were modeled on Masonry, and made a great point of having many
"secrets." Freemasonry got ranked with them. But if Masonry is a
secret society, it's the worst-kept secret in the world.
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Is Masonry a religion?
The answer to that question is simple. No.
We do use ritual in meetings,
and because there is always an altar or table with the Volume of the Sacred Law
open if a lodge is meeting, some people have confused Masonry with a religion,
but it is not. That does not mean that religion plays no part in Masonry -- it
plays a very important part. A person who wants to become a Mason must have a
belief in God. No atheist can ever become a Mason. Meetings open with prayer,
and a Mason is taught, as one of the first lessons of Masonry, that one should
pray for divine counsel and guidance before starting an important undertaking.
But that does not make Masonry a "religion."
Sometimes people confuse Masonry
with a religion because we call some Masonic buildings "temples." But
we use the word in the same sense that Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes called the
Supreme Court a "Temple of Justice" and because a Masonic lodge is a
symbol of the Temple of Solomon. Neither Masonry nor the Supreme Court is a
religion just because its members meet in a "temple."
In some ways, the relationship
between Masonry and religion is like the relationship between the
Parent-Teacher Association (the P.T.A.) and education. Members of the P.T.A.
believe in the importance of education. They support it. They assert that no
man or woman can be a complete and whole individual or live up to his or her full
potential without education. They encourage students to stay in school and
parents to be involved with the education of their children. They may give
scholarships. They encourage their members to get involved with and to support
their individual schools.
But there are some things P.T.A.s do not do. They don't teach. They don't tell people
which school to attend. They don't try to tell people what they should study or
what their major should be.
In much the same way, Masons
believe in the importance of religion. Masonry encourages every Mason to be
active in the religion and church of his own choice. Masonry teaches that
without religion a man is alone and lost, and that without religion, he can
never reach his full potential.
But Freemasonry does not tell a
person which religion he should practice or how he should practice it. That is
between the individual and God. That is the function of his house of worship,
not his fraternity. And Masonry is a fraternity, not a religion.
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Bibles are popular gifts among
Masons, frequently given to a man when he joins the lodge or at other special
events. A Masonic Bible is the same book anyone thinks of as a Bible (it's
usually the King James translation) with a special page in the front on which
to write the name of the person who is receiving it and the occasion on which
it is given. Sometimes there is a special index or information section which
shows the person where in the Bible to find the passages which are quoted in
the Masonic ritual.
If Masonry isn't a
religion, why does it use ritual?
Many of us may think of religion when we think of ritual, but ritual is used in
every aspect of life. It's so much a part of us that we just don't notice it.
Ritual simply means that some things are done more or less the same way each
time.
Almost all school assemblies,
for example, start with the principal or some other official calling for the
attention of the group. Then the group is led in the Pledge of Allegiance. A
school choir or the entire group may sing the school song. That's a ritual.
Almost all business meetings of
every sort call the group to order, have a reading of the minutes of the last
meeting, deal with old business, then with new
business. That's a ritual. Most groups use Robert's Rules of Order to conduct a
meeting. That's probably the best-known book of ritual in the world.
There are social rituals which
tell us how to meet people (we shake hands), how to join a conversation (we
wait for a pause, and then speak), how to buy tickets to a concert (we wait in
line and don't push in ahead of those who were there first). There are
literally hundreds of examples, and they are all rituals.
Masonry uses a ritual because
it's an effective way to teach important ideas -- the values we've talked about
earlier. And it reminds us where we are, just as the ritual of a business
meeting reminds people where they are and what they are supposed to be doing.
Masonry's ritual is very rich
because it is so old. It has developed over centuries to contain some beautiful
language and ideas expressed in symbols. But there's nothing unusual in using
ritual. All of us do it every day.
Everyone uses symbols every day,
just as we do ritual. We use them because they communicate quickly. When you
see a stop sign , you know what it means, even if you
can't read the word "stop." The circle and line mean
"don't" or "not allowed." In fact, using symbols is
probably the oldest way of communication and the oldest way of teaching.
Masonry uses symbols for the
same reason. Some form of the "Square and Compasses" is the most
widely used and known symbol of Masonry. In one way, this symbol is a kind of
trademark for the fraternity, as the "golden arches" are for
McDonald's. When you see the Square and Compasses on a building, you know that
Masons meet there.
And like all symbols, they have
a meaning.
The Square symbolizes things of
the earth, and it also symbolizes honor, integrity, truthfulness, and the other
ways we should relate to this world and the people in it. The Compasses
symbolize things of the spirit, and the importance of a well-developed
spiritual life, and also the importance of self-control -- of keeping ourselves
within bounds. The G stands for Geometry, the science which the ancients
believed most revealed the glory of God and His works in the heavens, and it
also stands for God, Who must be at the center of all our thoughts and of all
our efforts.
The meanings of most of the
other Masonic symbols are obvious. For example, the gavel teaches the
importance of self-control and self-discipline. The hour-glass teaches us that
time is always passing, and we should not put off important decisions.
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Yes. In a very real sense,
education is at the center of Masonry. We have stressed its importance for a
very long time. Back in the Middle Ages, schools were held in the lodges of
stonemasons. You have to know a lot to build a cathedral -- geometry, and
structural engineering, and mathematics, just for a start. And that education
was not very widely available. All the formal schools and colleges trained
people for careers in the church, or in law or medicine. And you had to be a
member of the social upper classes to go to those schools. Stonemasons did not
come from the aristocracy. And so the lodges had to teach the necessary skills
and information. Freemasonry's dedication to education started there.
It has continued. Masons started
some of the first public schools in both Europe and America. We supported
legislation to make education universal. In the 1800s Masons as a group lobbied
for the establishment of state-supported education and federal land-grant
colleges. Today we give millions of dollars in scholarships each year. We
encourage our members to give volunteer time to their local schools, buy
classroom supplies for teachers, help with literacy programs, and do everything
they can to help assure that each person, adult or child, has the best
educational opportunities possible.
And Masonry supports continuing
education and intellectual growth for its members, insisting that learning more
about many things is important for anyone who wants to keep mentally alert and
young.
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So, is Masonry education?
Masonry teaches some
important principles. There's nothing very surprising in the list. Masonry
teaches that:
Since God is the Creator, all
men and women are the children of God. Because of that, all men and women are
brothers and sisters, entitled to dignity, respect for their opinions, and
consideration of their feelings.
Each person must take
responsibility for his/her own life and actions. Neither
wealth nor poverty, education nor ignorance, health nor sickness excuses
any person from doing the best he or she can do or being the best person
possible under the circumstances.
No one has the right to tell
another person what he or she must think or believe. Each man and woman has an
absolute right to intellectual, spiritual, economic, and political freedom.
This is a right given by God, not by man. All tyranny, in every form, is
illegitimate.
Each person must learn and
practice self-control. Each person must make sure his spiritual nature triumphs
over his animal nature. Another way to say the same thing is that even when we
are tempted to anger, we must not be violent. Even when we are tempted to
selfishness, we must be charitable. Even when we want to "write someone off,"
we must remember that he or she is a human and entitled to our respect. Even
when we want to give up, we must go on. Even when we are hated, we must return
love, or, at a minimum, we must not hate back. It isn't easy!
Faith must be in the center of
our lives. We find that faith in our houses of worship, not in Freemasonry, but
Masonry constantly teaches that a person's faith, whatever it may be, is
central to a good life.
Each person has a responsibly to
be a good citizen, obeying the law. That doesn't mean we can't try to change
things, but change must take place in legal ways.
It is important to work to make
this world better for all who live in it. Masonry teaches the importance of
doing good, not because it assures a person's entrance
into heaven -- that's a question for a religion, not a fraternity -- but
because we have a duty to all other men and women to make their lives as
fulfilling as they can be.
Honor and integrity are
essential to life. Life without honor and integrity is without meaning.
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What are the
requirements for membership?
The person who wants to join
Masonry must be a man (it's a fraternity), sound in body and mind, who believes
in God, is at least the minimum age required by Masonry in his state, and has a
good reputation. (Incidentally, the "sound in body" requirement --
which comes from the stonemasons of the Middle Ages --
doesn't mean that a physically challenged man cannot be a Mason; many are).
Those are the only
"formal" requirements. But there are others, not so formal. He should
believe in helping others. He should believe there is more to life than
pleasure and money. He should be willing to respect the opinions of others. And
he should want to grow and develop as a human being.
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How does a man become a
Mason?
Some men are surprised that no one has ever asked them to become a Mason. They
may even feel that the Masons in their town don't think they are "good
enough" to join. But it doesn't work that way. For hundreds of years,
Masons have been forbidden to ask others to join the fraternity. We can talk to
friends about Masonry. We can tell them about what Masonry does. We can tell
them why we enjoy it. But we can't ask, much less pressure, anyone to join.
There's a good reason for that.
It isn't that we're trying to be exclusive. But becoming a Mason is a very
serious thing. Joining Masonry is making a permanent life commitment to live in
certain ways. We've listed most of them above -- to live with honor and
integrity, to be willing to share with and care about others, to trust each
other, and to place ultimate trust in God. No one should be "talked
into" making such a decision.
So, when a man decides he wants
to be a Mason, he asks a Mason for a petition or application. He fills it out
and gives it to the Mason, and that Mason takes it to the local lodge. The
Master of the lodge will appoint a committee to visit with the man and his
family, find out a little about him and why he wants to be a Mason, tell him
and his family about Masonry, and answer their questions. The committee reports
to the lodge, and the lodge votes on the petition. If the vote is affirmative
-- and it usually is -- the lodge will contact the man to set the date for the
Entered Apprentice Degree. When the person has completed all three degrees, he
is a Master Mason and a full member of the fraternity.
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A Mason is a man who has decided
that he likes to feel good about himself and others. He cares about the future
as well as the past, and does what he can, both alone and with others, to make
the future good for everyone.
Many men over many generations
have answered the question, "What is a Mason?" One of the most
eloquent was written by the Reverend Joseph Fort Newton, an internationally
honored minister of the first half of the 20th Century and Grand Chaplain,
Grand Lodge of Iowa, 1911-1913.
When is a man a Mason?
When he can look out over the
rivers, the hills, and the far horizon with a profound sense of his own
littleness in the vast scheme of things, and yet have faith, hope, and courage
-- which is the root of every virtue.
When he knows that down in his
heart every man is as noble, as vile, as divine, as diabolic, and as lonely as
himself, and seeks to know, to forgive, and to love his fellowman.
When he knows how to sympathize
with men in their sorrows, yea, even in their sins -- knowing that each man
fights a hard fight against many odds.
When he has
learned how to make friends and to keep them, and above all how to keep friends
with himself.
When he loves flowers, can hunt
birds without a gun, and feels the thrill of an old forgotten joy when he hears
the laugh of a little child.
When he can be
happy and high-minded amid the meaner drudgeries of life.
When star-crowned trees and the
glint of sunlight on flowing waters subdue him like the thought of one much
loved and long dead.
When no voice of distress
reaches his ears in vain, and no hand seeks his aid without response.
When he finds good in every
faith that helps any man to lay hold of divine things and sees majestic
meanings in life, whatever the name of that faith may be.
When he can look into a wayside
puddle and see something beyond mud, and into the face of the most forlorn
fellow mortal and see something beyond sin.
When he knows
how to pray, how to love, how to hope.
When he has kept faith with
himself, with his fellowman, and with his God; in his hand a sword for evil, in
his heart a bit of a song -- glad to live, but not afraid to die!
Such a man has found the only real secret of
Masonry, and the one which it is trying to give to all the
world.