"Born-Again" Masonry
        by E. Scott Ryan M.P.S.

    At the invitation of the Allied Masonic Degrees to speak about my personal
Catholic perspectives on Freemasonry, I'd like to freely address you with a 
personal catholic -small c - universal perspective that would include, but not 
be limited to, my Catholic background.
    As most of you may know, I wrote an article entitled, "The Masonic 
Conspiracy,"  which  was  published  in  The Philalethes and will be published 
shortly in the Transactions of the Amencan Lodge of Research, and elsewhere. 
I also know that your gracious invitation to address you, proceeds from what 
I wrote In Defense of Freemasonry in response to the oft-tried and just as 
often untrue conspiratorial aspersions that have historically and are 
currently being directed against Masonry. Today, I'd like to speak in terms of
a challenge to Freemasonry to be free to build in new ways - a challenge that 
I describe in the well-known admonition of Jesus Christ to be born again.
    Some of you may be born-again Christians, but I wish to speak to you and
others, Christian and non-Christian - as to the challenge of becoming Born 
Again Masons.
    I first became personally acquainted with Masonry from a friend whose 
father and grandfather had been Masons and who explained what Masonry was by
simply stating that it stood for "The Fatherhood of God and The Brotherhood
of Man." This particular friend shared a similar  educational  background, in
being Jesuit-educated at Georgetown, but a different religious and ethnic 
background in being German Lutheran. Having been educated by Jesuits, who also 
had Masonic-like problems with religious bureaucracy in having once been
suspended by the Papacy, I felt more drawn to a universal spiritual brother-
hood rather than to any particular religious tradition of others or my own.
    Although most of us like to think of ourselves as atypical in our 
individualism, in this respect, in coming to Masonry from Catholicism, I 
submit to you that I am quite typical of millions like myself who, if they 
knew what Masonry really represents, would likewise feel drawn to Masonry as 
a wise choice that they'd likely choose for themselves.
    In so doing however, Catholics as a group have no desire to become Protes-
tants-no matter how much they might protest specific aspects of their Catholi-
cism-just as some Jews who believe in Jesus and are therefore, Christian, have
no desire to become part of Christianity.
    While that reluctance may be difficult for some Protestants and some 
Christians to understand and accept; as Masons, there is no problem with our 
Masonic understanding, and there should be no difficulty in accepting that 
reluctance in building a spiritual brotherhood. Further, beyond reluctance, 
Masonry allows for a fundamental and universal spiritual closeness not only 
for Protestants and Catholics - as Christians - but for Christians and Jews - 
as Judeo-Christians - to include all varieties of Christians and Jews and 
others who fundamentally include rather than fundamentalistically exclude. 
The only exclusion, as I described in "The Masonic Conspiracy," would be a 
non-Masonic chosen-ness - a sinful choice of excluding others as less chosen - 
as contrasted to the universal spiritual closeness that constitutes the 
spiritual constitution of Masonry: when no man or group is chosen (in the 
sinful choice of perceiving others as less chosen than themselves) when God is 
chosen by and for all men.
    Personally, I would probably qualify for the religious acronym of 
"Cafeteria Catholic" in accepting in Catholicism only what I find acceptable. 
However, in accepting that acronym for myself - and millions of other 
cafeteriates - I question how anyone in any religion can honestly be anything 
other than a cafeteria connoisseur...for surely, to accept everything in any 
one religion makes one prone to spiritual indigestion. Regardless of one's 
palate, God is too big for the smallness of any one religion; and God is 
correctly understood by Freemasonry as freely existing for all free men as
brothers:  reGodless of any religious claim for secular denial to the 
contrary.
    Among Masons, I've encountered a very wide assortment of not only reli-
gious attitudes but attitudes toward religion. At one extreme, I recall being 
introduced to a Mason at this Lodge, a man for whom I have immense intellec-
tual respect, who described his religious background as having been educated 
at a college where no minister, priest or rabbi was allowed to teach; and at 
the other extreme, I've met at least one Protestant minister.
    Rather than being offended by diversity I value it and I value not only 
religious diversity in Masonry but, even more, the opportunity for spiritual
brotherhood with those who have not only different religious attitudes but 
radically different attitudes toward religion. On another personal note, Dr. 
Paul Kerr, who invited me here and who is of a Protestant persuasion, has 
become closer to me spiritually, as a Masonic brother, than any religious 
brother, for the simple reason that our brotherhood in Masonry is freely 
chosen rather than inherited - in the sense of being born again rather than
born into.
    In reflecting Masonry, further, I would state that while one may choose 
to stay put religiously for personal and cultural reasons, to choose to stay 
put spiritually is to choose to be more chosin than chosen in choosing the 
comfort of exclusion over the challenge of inclusion. Lest anyone claim that 
as a Christian I sound less than Christ-centered - as one Christian gentleman 
in good faith has, let me respond in good faith in referring to Jesus Christ 
as to the need to not only bring comfort to the afflicted but to bring af-
fliction to the comfortable...with a spiritual challenge to religious 
assumption.
    Along with Brother Paul Kerr, I can say the same for Brother Alex 
Bleimann, the Editor of the Transactions of the American Lodge of Research, 
who along with Brother Patti and Dr. Russell Cassell are great humanitarians 
in their tireless service to humanity. I might add that Dr. Kerr and Brother 
Bleimann are respectively twenty and thirty years older than I am and Dr. 
Cassell almost forty years older, but all three gentlemen are younger mentally 
than most of us, myself included.
    In reference to the challenge of being born again, the need to be born 
again has nothing to do with age, as evidenced by the young Dr. Kerr (who as 
a senior citizen still practices medicine along with his duties as 
Pennsylvania District Governor for Rotary International) and the even older 
but always younger Brother Bleimann (who is in his seventies has time not only 
to publish more Masonic historical research in New York, but to assist others, 
such as myself, in publishing their own professional research) and Dr. Cassell 
(who in his eighties administers his own clinic in California); but it has 
everything to do with one's assumptions.
    I'm using the word, assumption, I'd like to break it down to its root 
meaning - in resting more on ass than umption. One's assumptions can be and 
often are the greatest predictors of future in resting on one's past success. 
I've heard more than one Grand Master, most recently Brother Gary Henningsen 
as New York Scottish Rite Grand Master, warn of the danger of Masonry dying 
out, and in reference to his and others' warnings, such as those of 
Pennsylvania York Rite Grand master Brother Edward Fowler, their nay - saying 
to the self-satisfaction of the status quo ante is necessary for a new yea - 
saying to the future. I use the word new because as a new Mason I see too
much of Masonry that is old - irrespective of age - in looking back to a "Born
in Blood" past rather than a "Born Again" future.
    The greatest weakness - seen in every dying empire, good or bad - is to 
become enamored of the past in escaping from the future, when there's a 
present need to go back to the future in being born again in one's spiritual 
essence in new ways.
    Like Masonry, Nicodemus was well-established and well-meaning; but while
he was one of the first to support Jesus, he was, according to Jesus, among 
the last to understand him. It was a revolutionary spiritual call, rather than 
a religious creed that Jesus was calling out to Nicodemus to find for himself, 
in being born again.
    Masonry began with Temple construction and, today, there are many 
beautiful cathedrals, but they are mostly empty. If Masonry is to be born 
again, it needs to reconstruct itself according to the basic foundation of any 
construction in building anew from the bottom up rather than the top down. I 
know of no Temple, Mosque, or Cathedral that was ever built from the top down, 
and Masonry must build itself up again in order to be born again.
    There is an old Russian adage that one can never rise above one's own 
head. Masonry, I submit to you, has to get its own head together if it expects 
to build upward  towards  future  construction rather than gaze upward in the 
futile self-satisfaction of contemplating past construction.
    When I recently commented to an attorney friend from college that I'd be-
come a Mason, he good-naturedly but indifferently responded by asking me why 
I'd bothered to join a nineteenth century organization. While it might be easy 
to dismiss lawyers in general, his comment confirmed what some Grand Masters 
were saying as to the perception of Masonry dying out. While the reports of 
its death might be greatly exaggerated - as Mark Twain stated in responding to
the premature reports of his own death - these reactions cannot be easily dis-
missed. The reasons for these perceptions - be they exaggerated or not - de-
mand a wise response for the benefit of ourselves as well as others; 
otherwise, others as well as ourselves will be less than wise about the born 
again potential of Masonry.
    In building for a spiritual future, the first step is setting the 
theological cornerstone; and in so doing I would refer to a well known Mason, 
well known by non-masons, General Douglas MacArthur. Although General 
MacArthur is 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 and our commanding officer, Colonel Roy 
Sherry had invited his former commander in Korea - in the United Nations
police action in Korea that had nothing to do with policing and everything to 
do with war - to speak to us. As a freshman, I was lucky enough to have my 
question directed to the General in asking him what kind of question did he 
regard as the most important kind of question. He answered by stating that 
every important question is ultimately a question of theology. With all due 
respect to the great French Jesuit theologian, Tiellard de Chardin S.J., and 
the great German Jesuit theologian, Fr. Karl Rahner S.J., 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 is first and foremost a theological fraternity in purporting to 
represent the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man. There may be dif-
ferent ideas - religious and political - as to what that means or should not 
mean; and I shall present my own ideas which you are fraternally free to 
accept or reject in contemplating not only what is true  ....  but 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 
in more practicing of what needs to be preached more, with new human ways to 
reach the ultimate divine destination. If we're true to the timeless truth of 
the Fatherhood of God and 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, and in America, as well, 
Masonry does go about doing good in a quiet way; and this is precisely why 
Masonry is in a bad way...no matter how much good it does.
I'm sure the Duke is a fine man and an outstanding Mason, but in all due re-
spect for 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. In reference to the Duke's statement, I recall the statement of a 
recently deceased American  Professor and Graduate  School Dean who'd taught 
at Cambridge, when I asked him to evaluate his English graduate school's 
university experience. His response was that the English were very good at 
what they did, but most of what they did was mostly irrelevant.
    Every culture has a problem - and God knows the lack of 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 irrelevancy rather than furthering 
what's good for itself.. .and others.
    Accordingly, I welcome the opportunity to come to an accord with all 
Masons - to include the premier English Lodge - in outlining what I think we 
should be doing while leaving the specifics of how to do it for a future date
...but not too future date.
    First, after revealing what may sound like an English prejudice but what 
is actually an English postjudice, in judging after rather than before the 
facts, I would like to present another English postjustice of mine in 
observing that the English are more ecumenically free than we, as Americans 
and Masons, would like to think we are, in our land of the free.
    In order to dispel the impression that Masonry is anti-religious or anti 
any particular religion, English Masons, as I recently read in the 
Transactions of Quatuor Coronati, express their concern that disaffected 
Christians - particularly non-practicing Catholics - should reestablish their 
church affiliation in order to strengthen their religious foundation in order 
to strengthen their belief in God.
    While it is quite acceptable and even logical for individual Masons to 
express suspicion of religion in general - as man has made it to be rather 
than as God meant it to be - any particular differentiation as to one 
religious orthodoxy being more orthodox than another is unMasonic, and 
constitutes the greatest unorthodoxy according to the ecumenical orthodoxy of 
Masonry. On this matter, feel comfortable in referring to the premier English 
Lodge for being premier in an ecumenical sense rather than in any regal 
nonsense. Quite dearly, as the English have made it quite clear, Protestant
Masons who are anti-Catholic are not Masons, Christian Masons who are ani-
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.
    Second, in referring to proper morality and to what I'd describe as the 
saint-sinner syndrome of a Masonic "sindrome," puritanism produces more self-
righteous deviance than truly righteous purity. I recall the highly publicized 
case a number of years ago, of a prominent American politician and Mason who 
had a drinking problem, and one who had the private and public misfortune to 
being photographed upon falling into a water fountain in Washington D.C. after 
imbibing  more  champagne  than  was politique. When the opposition newspaper 
published the picture of his unfortunate predicament, he was expelled, unfor-
tunately, from the 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 - we know from James that any man who says 
he is without sin is a liar and, therefore, sin while undesirable 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 repentance 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.
    Third, theology, in my opinion, will globalize in the direction of Masonry 
in reaction to the horrors of religious, and ethno-centricity, such that 
ecumenism may eventually bring more rather than less members. However, this 
can and will only occur when Masonry learns to be more futuristic and less 
regal, in being more common in being less quiet about about itself in new 
ways.
    Conor Cruise O'Brien once described Irish-Catholics as Presbyterians who 
go to Mass. As one Irish-Catholic to another, I would respond to Conor that
while he may not be incorrect, it would be more correct from my expenence to
describe Irish-Catholics,  when  they move next door, are more likely to be-
come Episcopalians than Anglicans. I know that from my cousin who told me
his own Canterbury Tale in becoming an Anglican priest after his divorce...and
everyone knows the Archbishop of Canterbury bears an Irish Carey last name.
The Irish diplomat, O'Brien, and my cousin, the Anglican priest, Fr. Ryan,
along with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Carey, show how the future of
ecumenism can confound all those who rest on assumption - defined again by
resting more on religious ass than 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 the
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 and ignoble 
paristocractic (parasitic aristocracy) nobility who belong in the back of any 
class for no ability, I must admit that the British have more class - 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, albeit quite successful, are successful in the mass market by 
reaching the lowest possible common denominator. I say "possible" with 
trepidation for I haven't seen the latest Arnoldesque "I'll be back" or 
Clintese "Make my day" cultural success. I'm concerned about how low we can 
go on 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's 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 notable among crippled children. However, that very common 
strength, 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.
    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 its 
priority 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 
religious means to its own unifying purpose (one recent example of which was 
reported upon 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 to you 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 fully practicing the full 
implications of what it preaches.
    I know that what I've 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 to the 
Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood on 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 one's 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're "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 Principal should not be limited by these procedural limits. 
Procedures are meant to be means to an end, but the problem with any tradition 
is not growing old with when bureaucratic means replace substantive ends. 
Sometimes, in the short run, caution is the better part of valor and it's 
better to be safe than sorry; but, in the long run, to be safe is to be sorry.
Masonry can be Born Again when we, as Masons, find new ways to put the divine
in human action in such ways as to unite rather than divide not only our 
selves but, more importantly, divide 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.
    Hopefully, Masonry will rise to its own opportunity and not step back into 
selfimposed regal irrelevance or common denominator  relativity.  If  Masonry
doesn't 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're just safe and sorry...
and just still-born rather than Born Again.

The Philalethes, April 1994                                                                                          47


