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                 "Born Again" Masonry - II

                   by E. Scott Ryan, MPS

A Theological Question

In building a spiritual future, the first step is setting the theological
cornerstone; and in so doing, I would refer to a well-known Mason, one
well-known by non-Masons: General Douglas MacArthur. Best known for his
statement that "Old Soldiers never die, they just fade away," he said
something to me that is, for me, far more significant.

In 1962 I was an Army ROTC cadet. Our commanding officer, Colonel Roy
Shelley, invited General MacArthur, his former commander in Korea, to
speak to us. As a freshman, I was lucky enough to have my question
directed to him. I asked him what kind of question he regarded as the most
important. He answered by stating that every important question is
ultimately a question of theology. With all due respect to the Jesuit
theologians, Fr. Tiellard de Chardin and Fr. Karl Rahner, which all Jesuit
students like myself were required to study, I regard Douglas MacArthur as
the greatest theologian of them all in answering my question the way he
did.

             Masonry a Theological Fraternity

Masonry is first and foremost a theological fraternity in purporting to
represent the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man. There may be
different ideas--religious and political--regarding what that does or does
not mean. I shall present my own ideas, which you are fraternally free to
accept or reject, in contemplating what is true--and what should be true.
However, the theological premise and truth of Freemasonry is the
cornerstone from which all building must proceed and be founded upon in
finding itself for the future.

In this respect, the direction of our contemplation--in this Temple of
Truth-- needs to be futuristic in considering new ways to implement that
truth by more practicing of what needs to be preached more, with new human
ways to reach the ultimate divine destination. If we are true to the
timeless truth of the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man
according to the needs of our time, then Masonry will be perceived
correctly as a growing twenty-first century organization, rather than
continuing to be misperceived as a nineteenth-century or older regal
remnant of the past.

In reference to the regal, the Duke of Kent has been quoted as saying that
Masonry should go about doing good in a quiet way. This is precisely why
Masonry is in a bad way, no matter how much good it does.

I am sure the Duke is a fine man and an outstanding Mason, but in all due
respect to him as a man and a Mason, I have no respect for unearned
titles-- regal or otherwise--for a title by birth is the antithesis of
being born again.

Every culture has a problem, and God knows that the lack of true culture
in our American culture has produced immense problems; but English culture
has a royal problem in that the ideal of nobility is the idea of no-
ability. Masonry owes everything to God and nothing to royalty, lest it
burden itself with furthering a regal position of further irrelevance
rather than furthering what's good for itself and others.

Accordingly, I welcome the opportunity to come to an accord with all Ma-
sons--to include the Premier English Lodge--in outlining what I think we
should be doing while leaving the specifics of how to do it to a
future--but not too future--date.

                    Ecumenical Freedom

First, I reveal what may sound like an English prejudice, but what is
actually an English "postjudice" of mine in observing that the English are
more ecumenically free than we, as Americans and Masons, would like to
think we are.

In order to dispel the impression that Masonry is anti- religious or anti-
any particular religion, English Masons in a recent issue of Transactions
of Quatuor Coronati express their concern that disaffected Christians,
particularly nonpracticing Catholics, should reestablish their religious
foundation in order to strengthen their belief in God.

It is quite acceptable and even logical for individual Masons to express
suspicion of religion as man has made it to be rather than as God meant it
to be. However, any particular differentiation as to one religious
orthodoxy's being more orthodox than another is unmasonic. This
constitutes the greatest unorthodoxy according to the ecumenical orthodoxy
of Masonry. On this matter, I feel comfortable in referring to the premier
English Lodge for being premier in an ecumenical sense rather than in any
regal nonsense. The English have made it quite clear that Protestant
Masons who are anti- Catholic are not Masons; Christian Masons who are
anti- Semitic are not Masons; and Jewish and Christian Masons who are
anti-Muslim in a fundamentalist Judeo-Christianity are not fundamentally
Masons--for the future.

                   A Masonic "Sindrome"

Second, in referring to proper morality and to what I would describe as
the saint/sinner syndrome of a Masonic "Sindrome," puritanism produces
more self-righteous deviance than truly righteous purity. A number of
years ago, a prominent American politician and Mason had a drinking
problem and had the private and public misfortune of being photographed
upon falling into a water fountain in Washington, D.C., after drinking
more champagne than was "politique." When the opposition newspaper
published the picture of his unfortunate predicament, he was expelled,
unfortunately, from Masonry.

Masonry is somewhat similar to Catholicism in according saint-like degreed
status to its "holy" representatives, but wholly puritanical in dealing
with its sinners, particularly its public sinners. In dealing with the
inevitability of sins and sinners, the Book of James tells us that any man
who says he is without sin is a liar--sin is inevitable for all but a few
dead saints. Masonry should be more indulgent (while heeding Martin Luther
about indulgences) in allowing for confessional-type mechanisms for repen-
tance via service. When expulsion is used, in another analogy to
Catholicism, as a sacrilege in banishing someone from the community of the
faithful (fraternity of the brotherhood), it should be reserved only for
the most serious Masonic sinners--those who imbibe too much bigotry rather
than too much alcohol.

               Religion and ethno-centricity

Third, theology, in my opinion will globalize in the direction of Masonry
in reaction to the horrors or religion and ethno-centricity, such that
ecumenism may eventually bring more rather than fewer numbers. However,
this can and will only occur when Masonry learns to be more futuristic and
less regal, in being more common by being less quiet about itself in new
ways. The future of ecumenism can confound all those who rest on
assumption--defined again by resting more on religious "ass" than on
spiritual "umption."

Without waiting for the future, we observe English Anglican Masons sending
English would-be Masons back to the Catholic Church, while the supposedly
anti-English Irish Catholics are going to the Anglican Church. What does
that Canterbury Tale tell us about old assumptions?

In moving on to another assumption in reference to being common, the
British have a lower House of Commons, where being common for the English
is to be lower-class, while Americans strive to be common in being all-
American, in being common to all Americans--without which there is no
success in America. While I dislike any class system, and particularly the
English upper class as aristocratic-class parasites in their nobility of
an ignoble parasitic, aristocratic "no-ability" who belong to in the back
of any class for no ability, I must admit that the British have more
class--in both a good and bad sense--than do Americans. We have to admit
to ourselves that American entertainment and our books that try to pass
(but fail) as literature, are quite successful in the mass market by
reaching the lowest possible common denominator. I say "lowest-possible"
with trepidation for I have not seen the latest Arnoldesque "I'll be back"
or Clintese "Make my day" cultural success. I am concerned about how low
we can go in congratulating ourselves on having the world's largest gross
national product when critics such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for example,
correctly critique our "gross" cultural products as so much "liquid
manure."

American Masonry is also a product of what is common to America, but with
a different similarity and in a similarly different manner. Masonry is
commonly regarded as doing good in the American highest common denominator
of charity--most notably among crippled children. However, that very
common denominator, in my opinion constitutes an uncommon weakness, for it
relegates Masonry to a charity. Further, such charity could be replaced
and has been replaced by decent health-care systems in Europe and
elsewhere, that provide for the full needs of crippled children as a
societal responsibility instead of a charitable option. Very frankly, the
limits of American society should not be synonymous with limiting Masonry,
no matter how appealing the charity.

                   Politics and Religion

In facing the limits of society without being limited by them (whether
they be in England, America or elsewhere), Masonry has to ask itself if
it's prior prohibition against discussing politics and religion as a
unifying, procedural means to a non-divisive substantive end, has not
become a de facto end policy that ends by prohibiting a wide and wise
variety of new political and religious means to its own unifying purpose
(one recent example of which was reported by Brother Allen Roberts as
being the initiative of Brother Leon Zeldis, editor of The Israel
Freemason, of promoting joint meetings of lodges composed of Jews and
Arabs).

I submit that unless and until Masonry applies its unifying spiritual
principle of brotherhood to the divisions of men precisely in those areas
where men are most divided--in the myriad of re-emerging old-new religious
and political conflicts--Masonry is not practicing the full implications
of what it preaches.

I know that what I have said is far easier to say than to do; but I also
know that what I propose is in full concordance with the full meaning of
the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man. There will be problems
and mistakes, but the biggest mistake is to define the problems of the
past without redefining ways to meet the problems of the future. To be
immobilized by the past is to lose the opportunity to be born again--such
that one becomes a legend in his own mind rather than in his own time in
being irrelevant to what means most--to one's essential meaning.

Just as God is too important to be left to religion, politics is too
important to be left to politicians. The Masonic freedoms that were "Born
in Blood" will not remain free, for the price of freedom is never free
unless we are born again in our freedom. A fixation on the past is a born-
in-blood miscarriage that is a bloody, awful abortion of a future in being
born again.

There is no infallible expert on Freemasonry, thank God, except an
infallible God, who can only be found in freedom in finding truth.
Therefore, I propose that while the prohibition against discussing
religion and politics at lodge meetings remain for the time being in order
to maintain the procedural principle of Masonic unity, the substantive
policy of the Masonic principle should not be limited by these procedural
limits. Procedures are meant to be means to ends; but the problem with any
tradition is not growing old with age, but becoming irrelevant and old
when bureaucratic means replace substantive ends. Sometimes, in the short
run, caution is the better part of valor, and it is better to be safe than
sorry. But in the long run, to be safe is to be sorry.

                     A Reborn Masonry

Masonry can be born again when we as Masons, find new ways to put the
divine into human action in such ways as to unite rather than to divide
not only ourselves, but more importantly, divided mankind. It can be done,
such that the only Masonic sacrilege should be the lack of faith in the
sin of saying it cannot be done.

Jesus said His kingdom was not of this world, but he came with God's name,
as Masonry purports to come to the world in the name of God, to have an
effect in changing the world.

God's work has yet to be done, and now, more than ever, it needs to be
done. All of us together, Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others who
ascribe to the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man can be Born
Again as Masons.

Hopefully, Masonry will rise to its own opportunity and not step back into
self-imposed regal irrelevance or common denominator relativity. If
Masonry does not act, others, hopefully, will; and Masonry will have
missed its opportunity to be true to itself in being born again to itself.
Let's do it and let's not just be safe before we are just safe and sorry:
just still-born rather than born again.