Jim Tresner, 33°
P.O. Box 1019, Guthrie, Oklahoma 73044-1019

One of our tasks as Masons is to open ourselves to a sense of the sacred.

Photo: Temple Room, House of the Temple

There are some places which simply are special, even though it's hard to explain exactly why. The Garden Café, my favorite place to eat in Guthrie, is an example. It's a tiny place; only 20 people can be seated at one time. It's spotlessly clean, but the décor runs more to steel and Formica than to leather and mahogany. Also, the food is neither as elaborate or as varied as on a cruise ship, although there are some unusual items and everything is good. Charlie, the owner, is a great guy with a sense of humor and a love of palindromes.* That's probably a large part of it, but somehow, the experience is more than the sum of its parts. There's an integrity to the café you can almost see. It's a special place.

The park across the street from my grandmother's house in Oklahoma City was a special place, too. In bygone halcyon days, kids played in that park with no thought of danger. The neighborhood has changed over the last 50 years, and now I think one would be wise to be heavily armed before entering the park at night. Still, it remains a special place to me.

Similarly, the family cabin in the Colorado Rockies is a special place. Part of it is because of memories, of course. In 60 years, I've missed only two summers spending at least a little time there. But it's more than memories. I have memories of other areas as well, but they are not "special places." The top of the mountain near the cabin is more than a special place; it is a sacred space, especially to the Ute Indians who lived in the area. That sacredness was made real for me by our neighbor, a man who taught history but who was trained as a cultural anthropologist. He helped me "see" the Ute people for whom he had such a profound respect.

All of us have such places, places we simply know are special, or sacred, or both. Certainly I have had that feeling in most churches and in almost every Scottish Rite Temple I have ever visited.

I've never been able to decide if that sense of the special, the sacred, is primarily in the place or in the person. The rationalist in me suggests that it has to be the person, that we respond to unconscious cues in a location and create the sense of the sacred in our own minds. But somehow that seems an insufficient answer.

Certainly this sense of the special, the sacred, is not just a function of formal religion. That could explain why a church or other place of worship felt sacred-we're taught that such spaces are set apart. But what about other sacred places?

Why do I have that feeling at the Korean War and Viet Nam Memorials, or when standing by that great and childlike statue of Albert Einstein in Washington, D.C.? Or at the Memorial in Oklahoma City to the victims of the Murrah Building bombing? Why do others report it at the site of the World Trade Center? I think those theologians must be right who insist that there is an inherent need in the human mind to connect with the special and sacred.

The question is important, because it is fundamental to Freemasonry. It seems to me that one of the unspoken things a man must bring to Masonry is a willingness to experience the sacred in its broadest sense. Many Masons will tell you that a Lodge Room simply "feels different" when the Lodge is open than when it is closed-even if it is at refreshment, and there is no Brother in the Lodge Room. They can not define it, any more than I can. But nonetheless the difference is there to be felt.

Korean War Memorial, Washington, D.C.

It's important to underline that this sense of the sacred is not to suggest that Freemasonry is equated with religion; it is not. But the sacred is not limited to churches and temples. You will find the sacred in many things. Consider the words to "America, the Beautiful." Or a sunset so beautiful that it almost hurts to look at it. Or the sound of a baby's laughter.

Perhaps one of our tasks as Masons is to open ourselves to a sense of the sacred. Albert Pike certainly thought so. He wrote: "Are you sure that you have truly learned the lessons of the 32 degrees through which you have passed? Are you sure that you have not lost the Master key which would have opened to you every door; that you do not wander with perplexed heart up and down this stately palace which contains the treasures of the wisdom of all the ages, but of which every goodlier room is closed against you, and that you do not therefore complain unto yourself that it is no such peerless palace after all, but only as other and more modern works which man's intellect had reared? If so, the oracles of truth are incoherent to you, and you are only in name a Master of the Royal Secret."

This sense of the special place, the sacred space within us, runs through-out the ceremonies of the Blue Lodge. It is a fundamental of Masonic symbolism that the Lodge Room represents the universe as well as of Solomon's Temple. But the Lodge Room also symbolizes the individual Mason and his life. The Fellowcraft and Master Mason Degree rituals make it very clear that at the center of each man and woman is that sacred space, the Holy of Holies, by which we connect with the Deity. One of my friends in the clergy calls it "the window through which the power of the universe flows into us."

In the above passage, Pike warns us that we can lose the sense of the sacred. We can become so involved with surfaces that we forget the depths, if we choose. For Masonry is choice. Some Brothers choose to make Masonry a social club, a retreat from the world, where they can play dominoes, drink coffee, eat doughnuts, and talk about the fish that got away. Others choose to make it a charitable institution, finding ways to help those in the community who are in need. Others choose to make Freemasonry a voyage of personal discovery into themselves and the universe. All of these choices are equally valid, and they are not mutually exclusive.

But it is good, when you enter a Lodge or go to a Reunion, to remember that these are special places and, in their way, sacred spaces. We hear and see much more when we approach the door of the sanctum with the key of open awareness. It is then that we realize it truly is, in Pike's words, a "peerless palace."

*A palindrome is a word (such as eye) or sentence (such as "I am able" or "Able was I ere I saw Elba") or a number (as 1881) that reads the same backward or forward.

Jim Tresner is Director of the Masonic Leadership Institute and Editor of The Oklahoma Mason. A frequent contributor to the Scottish Rite Journal and its book review editor, Ill. Bro. Tresner is also a volunteer writer for The Oklahoma Scottish Rite Mason and a video script consultant for the National Masonic Renewal Committee. He is the Director of the Thirty-third Degree Conferral Team and Director of Work at the Guthrie Scottish Rite Temple in Guthrie, Oklahoma, as well as a Life Member of the Scottish Rite Research Society, author of Albert Pike, The Man Beyond the Monument, and Vested in Glory. A member of the steering committee of the Masonic Information Center, Ill. Tresner was awarded the Grand Cross, the Scottish Rite's highest honor, during the Supreme Council's October 1997 Biennial Session.