The Craft Transforms Our Perspectives

The Grand Master, Deputy Grand Master, and Senior Grand Warden.

The Grand Master, Deputy Grand Master, and Master of Italia enjoying fellowship following the Lodge’s meeting.

The Grand Master presents WB Marco Fiorante with his certificate naming him the Grand Lodge’s Representative to the Grand Orient of Italy. The Grand Master and the Master of Italia Lodge.

Shawn Eyer The Lodge of the Nine Muses No. 1776

W.B. Shawn Eyer, PM

Secrecy. To many people, both inside and outside of our Fraternity, this word is one of the primary associations with what Masonry is about. Masons take solemn oaths to protect the secrets of the Craft and the entrusted secrets of their worthy brothers. Try as we might to pretend there are no secrets in Masonry—and some have really bent over backwards trying to make that sound true—really, the Craft is an institution that recognizes that there are mysteries in life. There are some things that are hard to understand: things that, even once you know something about them, take time to grasp. Our world is not simplistic, and few things are truly cut and dry. Masonry acknowledges that by framing its teachings in sacred privacy and encouraging due reflection upon them.

One of Masonry’s very best secrets—which is not a secret at all, but just something that we rarely seem to acknowledge—is how effective it can be at opening our minds to new ways of self-improvement.

The method of Masonic instruction, as we all know, is symbolic ritual. Ceremonies, placed one after the other, framed in beautiful language and brought further to life by careful performance and striking visual images, are the way our Order moves the world, one mind at a time. And it really is the mind we seek to transform.

As H.L. Haywood put it, “the power of symbolism,” is how it sticks with us, and continues to affect us over time. “Its method,” he said, “is to set before the candidate a symbol, and then to leave it to him to think out afterwards what that symbol represents—and it is something the candidate can keep on thinking out for the rest of his days.”1

For a generation, Masons have tended to share the rather circular description that our Craft “makes good men better.” That certainly can be and ought to be true. But what makes it work is all of the valuable tools that Masonry can draw upon. And it still takes the new Mason himself to take up those symbolic tools and actually do the work.

Part of the explicit aims of Masonic initiation is to take a man—who is already a good and proper man by normal standards— and give him tools that will help him to further improve himself. Fundamental to any pursuit of Freemasonry is the establishment of a Masonic perspective on life. The Craft’s admission process is intended to assure that a candidate is moral according to the common understanding. But Freemasonry aims to elevate the moral perspective of man beyond the merely worldly values that we take for granted. In the ethical sphere, this is accomplished in part by the intensification of values. The feeling of charity or sympathy one has for others, for example, is intensified into a positive duty to aid and assist a distressed worthy brother. In other cases, ideals are put forward that ask us to reevaluate commonplace values. One way to describe this process is transvaluation.

Transvaluation takes place when we “evaluate by a new standard or principle, especially by one that varies from conventional standards.”2 Many of the lessons found in our degrees direct us t¬oward improving and refining our concepts of virtue. Here, we will consider just one of those lessons: one that may be basic, but nevertheless one that we struggle to hear, understand and live by.

OVERCOMING MATERIALISM In our basic makeup, men are little different today than when the fraternity started. We value excellence and hard work, and the competition and excitement that comes from pursuing these things. But the first degree highlights a few lessons that the profane world can encourage men to neglect. The most basic of these is our teaching of human equality; or, more specifically, that whatever real nobility exists is based not on wealth or power, but the exercise of virtue.

This is not a lesson that comes easily to us today. Men are encouraged to be dedicated to, if not obsessed with, the attainment of status. Our tradition confronts this problem immediately by teaching the Apprentice that “Masonry regards no man on account of his worldly wealth or honors; and that it looks not to his outward clothing, but to his internal qualifications.”3

This attitude is important for two reasons. First, recognizing that the Lodge represents the Temple of Solomon, a place considered holy ground, means that we ought to transcend worldly concerns within it. As Mackey teaches us:

In the divestiture of metals as a preliminary to initiation, we are symbolically taught that Masonry regards no man on account

of his wealth. The Talmudical treatise ‘Beracoth,’ with a like spirit of symbolism, directs in the Temple service that no man shall go into the mountain of the house, that is, into the Holy Temple, “with money tied up in his purse.”4

While only the candidate is made to literally participate in the Rite of Divestiture, symbolically all brethren are intended to maintain that spirit in the Lodge perpetually. It is not the literal coin that matters. Indeed, money is necessary in order for the Lodge to function. But it is the materialistic attitude that Freemasonry works to counteract.

Second, observance of the tenet of brotherly love requires something more from us than what profane culture expects. This is closely connected to Freemasonry’s critique of social class, considerations of which are to be completely set aside within the boundaries of the Lodge. As we are taught:

“By the exercise of brotherly love, we are taught to regard the whole human species as one family, the high and low, the rich