On a Masonic Funeral

 

A business associate recently died.  I was not good friends with the man but had cordial dealings with him.  The deceased was a member of a Lutheran Church in my town and his obsequies were scheduled for that place.  However, on the evening before the religious rites, a Masonic funeral ceremony was conducted at a local mortuary.  I attended that ceremony and report on its characteristics.  Freemasonry, at least, in the United States is moribund and, itself, dying.  In another thirty years, the fraternal organization’s lodges across North America will be extinct.  Thus, important traditions in both culture and history will perish.  It behooves us, then, to consider what will be lost when the Freemasons no longer exist.

The deceased was a civic booster, politically connected, and well-liked.  As a young man, he sold suits for a living.  Later, he worked in various family enterprises that were not particularly successful.  When he was about 35, this fellow (I will call him “John Smith”) ran for political office in the State legislature but was badly defeated.  Around that time, he obtained an insurance license and began selling various financial and insurance products, among them annuities and health insurance plans.  His unsuccessful political career, a venture in which he was essentially his party’s sacrificial lamb, created certain obligations in the Republican party owed to my acquaintance.  Once I delivered a speech on insurance issues at his request.  I presented my remarks at a Holiday Inn at a county seat forty miles from my home town.  A very prominent local politician, formerly a Senator in Washington, was present and seemed to be on familiar terms with Mr. Smith.  I recall seeing the two men sitting in the dimly lit Holiday Inn bar, discussing sports.  Mr. Smith owned horses and participated in trail rides, a pursuit that was also enjoyed by the State’s ex-governor.  I am told that Mr. Smith could call the former governor at any time and have his ear with respect to all matters of politics and governance.  

Mr. Smith joined the Fidelity Lodge of Freemasons in Austin, Minnesota in 1990.  By all accounts, he was not a particularly faithful member.  Freemasonry is an inherited avocation.  Mr. Smith’s father had been a 32nd Degree Freemason and, so, he aspired to that honor.  I’m not entirely sure that he succeeded in attaining this goal.  In his last several years, Mr. Smith was disabled as a consequence of a cerebral hemorrhage.  He had always been a very strong man, physically robust and vigorous, and was an optimist as well.  He struggled against his disability, engaged in arduous physical therapy, and, apparently, regained much of his functions that had been impaired.  He needed all of his strength to endure the ill-health of his wife, dying of cancer.  This woman’s passing was expected and, already, mourned to some extent.  But Mr. Smith died before his wife, without warning, on the first warm day of the Spring.  I am told he was found on the floor next to his bed.  As I write, I don’t know the exact cause of his death, something that is really none of my business.

It was also warm on the day of the ceremony.  A gathering for family and friends, that is, a “wake”, was scheduled for 5 to 7 at the mortuary.  After a long winter, spring was, at last, underway.  The sky was clear and the afternoon warm, probably about 84 degrees, unseasonably hot for mid-April in Minnesota.  Fuzzy buds with a vaguely lascivious aspect were bulging from branches and twigs.  A few bumblebees, tipsy with the warmth and the bright sun, hovered between shrubs – it was too early for flowers and nectar and the bees seemed a bit baffled by the onset of good weather.  The trees were leafless, open like scaffolds to the sky.  At the funeral home, the parking lot was full and, of course, some middle-aged men were standing at the door, smoking or wishing that they could smoke.  

Mr. Smith’s corpse was not in evidence.  I suppose the body had been cremated and reposed in an urn somewhere but I didn’t notice it.  Chairs had been set up in rows for the Masonic evening ritual.  I didn’t know anyone except for the wife of my law partner, a member of the lodge since 1990 (he had joined on the same day as the deceased.)  I looked at the video display in which a succession of photographs showing Mr. Smith limped across the screen.  The images were somehow disheartening: they showed Mr. Smith as a bright-eyed, round baby, as a handsome young man with an impish smile – in some photos, he was hawking suits – and, then, as a plump, powerfully built middle-aged business man.  He owned a pontoon boat and several photographs showed Mr. Smith with a cocktail in his big fist enthroned in a regal posture on the boat.  Later, of course, he was afflicted with illness and, in some of the last pictures, wasn’t really recognizable except for a certain cast of his eyes and the shape of his grin.  

A few minutes after 7, the lodge brothers entered in a solemn, very slow-moving procession.  The men wore business suits and their mid-sections were swathed with spotlessly white aprons.  The brethren were very old, most of them in their mid- to late-seventies.  I recognized the retired owner of the downtown Department of Motor Vehicle franchise, another old man who had run a service station near my law office, and several others.  Many of the old men were half-crippled and the Lodge Master moved with a walker that he shoved before him with each step.  The youngest lodge-brother was in his forties, a Hispanic man obviously an immigrant to Austin – I believe that in Mexico and central America, the Freemasons continue to thrive.  Closer to the Hispanic member in age was a gentleman in his fifties with long hair and shaggy beard – he looked like an aging hippy.  (I know that many counter-culture types from my youth were obsessed with the Freemasons, primarily interested in the mystery surrounding the secret society – I recall some drug-fueled conversations about Jacques DeMolay and the Knights Templar, an organization that had some remote and arcane connections to the Shrine.)

The members of the Fidelity Lodge took places standing at the chairs at the right side of the room.  They remained standing respectfully as the ceremony was called to order.  The Master of the Lodge, a distinguished-looking fellow about eighty years old, assumed a presiding position behind the podium.  He announced that the Freemasons were not a religious faith, but they believed in God with fervor and intensity.  A Bible opened to Ecclesiastes 12 sat on the table, surrounded by big bouquets of flowers.  The Master said that Masons prayed by crossing their hands over their chest, a gesture that he demonstrated.  He explained that at the end of each prayer, the brothers would intone the phrase “So mote it be”, words that I didn’t understand and had to research later.  (So mote it be means “So shall it be” – the phrase is first recorded in a founding document of the York Rite, the so-called Halliwell Manuscript or Regius Poem, a set of couplets in Middle English dating to 1425 to 1450.)

The Master of the Lodge asked an officer to call the roll.  Each lodge-brother was named and responded “Here!”  At the end of the roll-call, the officer said: “John Smith”.  Silence.  “John Smith” was repeated and again silence. And a third time, “John Smith” with no response.

“John Smith does not answer,” the Lodge Master said.

Silence again.

The Lodge Master asked: “So what shall we do?”

“Let us pray,” the officer responded.

A dignified and eloquent prayer followed, something about a Brother Mason having been called home to paradise after his labors on this earth.  The brothers remained standing, each crossing his arms over his chest, with left arm over right and palms placed on each shoulder.

At the end of the prayer, all recited: “So mote it be.”  

The Master, then, read a short homily about how men are called to be builders and that it is the dignity of each of us to work in the temple in the world to make in a better place.  The Master asserted that the order of Masons was ancient and noble and that life is in earnest and that the Brethren, particularly the deceased, had taken their obligations seriously and would go to their reward in a heavenly realm where the great eye of Justice is unsleeping.

There was another prayer.  Then, the Master took up the Bible and read from Ecclesiastes 12 – to everything there is a time appointed for every purpose under heaven, a time to be born and a time to die, a time to rejoice and a time to mourn...

(In the row in front of me, several old ladies were inhaling oxygen through tubes under their noses.  The oxygen tanks hissed and the women made a sound like people loudly slurping soup.)

The Master said the Masonic order expresses its truths in symbolic form.  He explained that the white apron signifies purity and cleanliness of purpose to which each Lodge Brother aspires.  The Master raised before our eyes, an hourglass.  “Like sand through an hour glass, such are the days of our lives...” The phrase, of course, has been appropriated by a day-time soap opera.  “There is only gift that all men are given equally,” the Master said.  “This is the gift of time.”  The Master told us that a sprig of acacia, an evergreen, signifies life eternal.  Then, the Master called the lodge brothers to approach the urn in which the ashes of Mr. Smith reposed.  (The urn was hidden to me behind great fans of flowers.)  In turn, each brother stood for a moment in front of Mr. Smith’s ashes, then lifted the acacia overhead, to show it to the assembled congregation, before setting it in front of the urn.

When the acacia sprigs were all deposited next to Mr. Smith’s remains, the brothers returned to their seats, although they remained standing.  The Master said that Mr. Smith had been a 32nd degree Mason like his father and that he joined the honorable and ancient order in 1990.  

There was another brief prayer: “So mote it be,” the brothers said and, then, the ritual was at an end.

Each lodge brother, in turn, saluted the widow and the dead man’s family members.  The old men shook hands solemnly with the survivors and hugged the women.  The Master said that the lodge brothers stood ready to assist the family in all ways.  

I saw the Master in the parking lot, alone, and inching toward his car within the bright silver cage of his walker.  The breeze stirred in the bare branches overhead and the air was sweet and wiry shadows cast by the naked limbs moved underfoot.

The emphasis of the funeral rite was that men are called to a better world.  In this sublunary realm, temples must be raised, walls constructed, repairs made and the masons perform this labor cheerfully and without surcease.  Their rest is in heaven when they are called home to that “undiscovered country from which no traveler returns” and where God’s temple is not “made by human hands.”  

What’s wrong with this?  Nothing so far as I can see.  I think the world will be a poorer place when the noble and ancient order of the Freemasons has gone the way of the mastodon and the Tasmanian tiger.  Their time has past and they are hastening toward oblivion.  Nothing better has replaced them and, after they have passed, there will be a hole in existence.