THE LETTER OF THE Master of the Lodge

THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE

Dearest Brother,
during the last G.L. National I attended an interesting speech by our Grand Master concerning Religion and the Sacred. The thesis developed, in essence, is that the concept of the sacred is broader than that of religion: this is the relationship with the divine that is declined in the various creeds, the sacred is the superior and absolute plane towards which Man tends necessarily, an attitude which can then materialize in a specific religion.

This approach would make it possible to resolve the apparent contradiction inherent in Freemasonry, which on the one hand claims not to be a religion, and on the other follows a ritual that contains prayers and invocations to the divine: the mason in the lodge would therefore have a sacred experience and not religious. The lodge is then consecrated, to mark the difference with the rest of the space frequented by the mason, defined by profane contrast, and to access this experience an initiation is necessary, which is precisely a sacred, non-religious ceremony.
A brother recently asked, "Why do we do esoteric research?" Declined in the present context: "Why are we attracted to the sacred?".

Plato in the "Symposium" tells the myth about the birth of love between men and women: originally human beings were male and female together and then they separated, so love would be the nostalgia of this primordial union. This little story can make you smile, but it underlies an intuition: we are attracted to what we lack but which belongs to us. Michel Meslin in his "The human experience of the divine", quoted by Venzi, recalls that in traditional cultures there is often no term equivalent to religion, simply because all of Man's existence is sacred, marked by a sacred time. The concept of the profane exists only because a secularization of life has taken place, just as the separation of the original hermaphroditic being has taken place, according to the Platonic myth.

Another historian of religions quoted by Venzi, Mircea Eliade, defines man as homo religiosus, therefore a being who by nature looks towards the sacred and therefore misses it, if he lives in a profane context, as he is now forced . Obviously not in all men this seed matures in the same way, in fact many adhere to an institutional religion, and few instead to spiritual paths such as ours. However, having made these premises, it is clear for Venzi why an atheist should be excluded from this context.
I take the liberty of adding that it is this other sensitivity that makes the difference, and that we, if we are here, have somehow experienced it, and it is what we should look for in a potential knocker. The challenge is interesting: to understand why I am a mason in order to understand why a layman should be suitable for masonry.
Soon!

S&F

W.M. M.B. Master of Lodge