Building and Light

Bro Orlando R. Murgado MM

3^rd March 2021

So building is a big idea in Freemasonry. Our symbols, allusions allegories and lore are full of ideas related to building. Our organization is structured after the construction site. Our shared striving is to build- to build a better order. A better world. Better men of ourselves. That said we are all aware that as an order we have gone through a transition from being Operative to Speculative Masons, meaning that, an organization that was once reserved to members of guilds of builders has since opened to include men of all backgrounds. Yet we still refer to what we do as a Craft. There is still an inherently active posture to our work and our thought about that work. Some would say that this is all vestigial of Freemasonry’s past. That just as we strive to preserve our Work and Degrees in painstaking detail and attention to rectify any drift or variance, we have preserved these old forms of nomenclature and structure. We are reverant and we preserve our way, and that’s all there is to it. In fact this could not be further from the truth.

In today’s highly secularized world it is very easy to look at things and take them at face value. When you see a car it’s a vehicle. A toothbrush is an implement of hygiene. A building is a structure that provides shelter and facilitates specific activities. Very little of our vernacular reality contains anything beyond that. What begins to throw this worldview into question are the exceptions to this dynamic. Art. Sacred buildings and spaces. Monuments. Even things like the difference between a bus and a Tesla Model S. We don’t see these kinds of things nearly as often as the purely functional ones, but when we do something happens: we are confronted with the idea that building is not just about making literal functional objects. You can experience the result of human acts of making, the purpose of which it is to yield something that is more than its form or function. Transcendent structures. Objects that speak to the human soul or to God. Modes of conveyance that also embody an intent towards a better future, even to voyage to other worlds.

Humans are not only capable of conceiving of objects in transcendent or abstract terms- we are hard-wired to do so. Abstraction is the key to creation, as well as to adaptation. The ability to make a metaphor out of an object is what makes us human, and what enables us to transcend the state of nature of animals and plants. This all would have been fairly obvious to the Operative Masons of yore. These men built the cathedrals, palaces and universities of nation states that were the bones of the edifice of Christendom. They would not have batted an eyelash at the idea that their work was creating the structures that held and safeguarded the souls and strivings of the societies that commissioned their services.

Time went on, the structures the Operative Masons built being loci of thought and communion. Places where ideas and faith germinated together, blended, strengthened each other and gave birth to new ideas and ways of thinking. The Enlightenment, built on the stones those brothers wrought, created generations who marveled in their great work and whose eyes were opened to the breadth of the purview of Man’s creative gift through the Divine. These men would become the first Speculative Masons- the first brothers to see the act of building as transcending the form of the structure and encompassing all of creation.

Our Operative brethren knew they were the heirs of a lot more than trade secrets when they formed their Lodges. The wisdom of building that was their stock in trade was a lot more than statistics, cutting techniques, leverage and so forth. Beneath those things are systems, invisible but as real as any piece of stone. Canons of proportion. Calculation of shear forces. Sacred Geometry. Acoustics. Mathematics. Principles of Art. This wisdom was as old as the profession of building.

We have recently discovered that the Sumerians had calculated the Pythagorean Theorem. They employed this knowledge, along with knowledge of the stars and calendar to build temples meant to temporally synchronize with celestial and planetary phenomena. The Egyptians used hydraulics, surveying, shear force calculations and astronomy as well as the principles the Sumerians employed to build temples and pyramids whose purpose it was to not only do as the Sumerians did but to go further- to create structures that could transport human souls to the afterlife. The Hebrews, captive to both of these cultures in different eras, upon founding their own kingdom, built a temple to their one, unnameable God, to house an artifact built to divine specifications. This temple, the artifact, and many other things, were built scaffolding the building technology and wisdom of both of Egypt and Sumer. Their kingdom not only became the foundation of one of the longest-lived peoples of the earth but would become foundational to the West. Through history and archeology one can follow the streams of transmission of those ideas and technologies to our Operative ancestors.

That knowledge comes down to Americans through the Liberal Arts and Sciences. The Humanities and Physics, subsets thereof, give us the philosophical, spiritual and temporal links. Building is a function of creation, in the divine sense. The divine light, emanation, the big bang. Life. Man. Thought. Knowledge. Scripture. Revelation. Light. Life. Logos. Reality transmuted, life created though the Word, which is the mediator of the Light and Life of creation. We can see that building through the comprehension and enunciation of the concepts that underpin reality is not only the most human of activities but the talent built into our nature and the sign of the divine spark within ourselves, beings constructed from Divine light and life.

Of all men we Speculative brothers are the ones best situated to see that Light and contemplate that Word thanks to the Craft we have inherited from those brethren of old. All of the practice and the attention to detail, guarding against deviation, is to preserve that ancient wisdom imparted to us not by written words or images alone but through the Work itself. Like life, it can only be understood through experience and participation.

I imagine the old Operative brethren dusty. Covered not only in the silicate dust of their labors but the dust of ancient wisdom they transmitted, as we do, every time we carry out the Work. So Mote it Be.