A Refreshing Email from a Brother

Brother Steve Brettell sent me the following email yesterday. I found it to be very thoughtful and interesting to read. I asked his permission to cross-post it here and he said that would be fine. I am encouraged when a public rant of mine can produce such an insightful and detailed response.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Bro. John,

I read you rant on your blog with pleasure, and mild frustration. Formally (master's degree) I studied religion for a lot of my life. Undergraduate, I specialized in Judaism; graduate school, Catholic Monasticism. A problem that comes out of this kind of study is that you find yourself not speaking the same language as most of you friends and acquaintances, or, you speak the same words, and they don't have the same meaning. You read the same stuff, and see it differently.

The story of the OT is much as you see it. Genocide, robbery, rape, murder starvation and all. But the OT wasn't meant to be a mystery story or a story of great spiritual inspiration. It was meant to record the relationship of God and Israel. Not God and you or God and me, but God and Israel. The writers of the OT saw revelation in terms of history, not philosophy or myth. The history of those times was rough. And then you have several efforts at editorializing to make it fit the political desires of the editors. For example, after the Babylonian Captivity, there was a major editing to make everything more neatly fit the cultic demands of the restored nation. This wasn't always a good thing. I did a survey of the word love in the OT and NT. In the OT, it was your duty to love God. Nothing said about God loving you, or demanding that you love one another. In the NT, almost all of the emphasis is on God loving you, and wanting you to reciprocate by loving your neighbors.

But this doesn't address your rant directly. In the religion game, it is said that to be valid, ritual must recapitulate reality. It isn't necessarily a path to enlightenment or a mystical experience, but a remembering of things past present and future. In one of Lomas and Knight's books, I don't remember which, it says that Freemasonry is the last remaining bastion of oral tradition in the west. I think this is an important thing. Folks who work in oral tradition don't always know the meaning or history behind the stuff they are passing down, but it has been proven by anthropologists that this method of passing on history can be very accurate. Often more accurate than written. It isn't as subject to editorializing.

So what reality is Masonic ritual recapitulating? Are we trying to manipulate reality (this is the definition of magic) or are we trying to worship by acting out a cosmic event (religion) or are we memorializing events that otherwise aren't remembered or taught? I know that I have learned a lot about our (the Anglo-American tradition) history that was never presented in history classes. I have learned things about religion that I never was exposed to in college. Unfortunately, I don't know which of these things can be trusted to be true. You can only extract the gems by seeing the whole gestalt, and by your own experience and knowledge, deciding what is true and real.

The frustrating thing is that people talk about religion and magic without knowing what the words really mean. The whole milieu should be considered, of course, but people need to know the basics first. It ain't about pulling rabbits out of hats, which so many want it to be, and it ain't always sweetness and love either.

Sure, there are people who blindly want their religion to be seen as wholly uplifting, and since God himself writ it with his very own finger, it must be, but it just ain't so. It's made up of fallible people recording things they saw as normative and trying to derive meaning from what could have been accident. You have to see the whole picture to begin to decypher the details. You have to understand that history isn't philosophy, which isn't theology, which isn't necessarily even what we today consider to be history. Remember, that there was no one taking dictation when Demosthenes gave his orations, or when Socrates expounded on the stoa. What we have may or may not have been made up and edited. Classical history is like that.

Isaac Newton, the leading light of the English Enlightenment, has been said to be the last sorcerer (White, Michael, Isaac Newton: the Last Sorcerer,) Helix Books). This is because, to the end of his life Newton was pursuing the great work of alchemy. Many of the figures of the day were alchemists first, and many of them were Masons. Does Masonry include elements of this work, or does the memory of these people infuse the Craft? The frustration I see in your rant is that the people who are involved in searching for the esoteric elements are doing it from a point of view of made up stuff: their own hopes blocking their ability to see the big picture. We want simple answers even when the questions are complex.

Enough I guess. I hope I didn't miss step in emailing you directly, but this is something that interests me, and I didn't want to stir the pot on the blog if you didn't want it further stirred.