What Defines Us? Freemasonry Moving Forward

It is hard to imagine saying something unique or adding an interesting thought about the Craft that hasn't already been said.  In a sense, history has held a kind villainy for Freemasonry. Remnants of our past have been remembered with a zeal that would make a reconstructionist blush. We relied on the spontaneity of oral history  until fixed works came along in the 19th-20th centuries.  Why is so much attention drawn to  ambivalent beginnings?  The root stock was grown in the enriched soil of philosophy, high art, culture, mathematics and that greatest assault on the unknown- science. Our beginnings are well dated and well documented.

All great thinkers were not masons. But, Freemasonic thought owes much to those who were courageous enough to reveal their findings to the world and face ridicule and worse.  Does the lodge stand amazed at their works? Can we read a piece of ritual without finding links to antiquity?  To say our values are shaped by Freemasonic ethos  is to say we had never lived our life.  We are a product of contemporary thinking in a secular nation confronted always by the pious, devout and zealous.  How then do we don the cloak of reason, without penetrating the subject though our study and dialogue in and outside lodge?  When we accept the knowledge at initiation, we are drawn to our true nature.  Am I authentic to myself? Or was Strass enduring opera The Rosenkavalier written about me? 

MasonicFX's looks forward to connecting.