*Mehr Licht!*
*More Light!*
Number 280 – May 31,
2010
Dear Masonic Student, Below is something you might
enjoy from the 1984
Intender Handbook of the Grand
Lodge of Michigan.
*What is meant by ‘Travel
In Foreign Countries?’*
Our ancient operative
Brethren desired to become Masters so, when they travelled in
foreign countries, they could still practice their
craft.
Speculative Freemasons
still desire to "travel in foreign countries" and
study their Craft that they may receive such instruction as
will
enable them to do so, and when so travelling, to
receive a Master's Wages.
But the "foreign countries"
do not mean to us the various geographical and political
divisions of the Old World, nor do we use the Word we learn as
a means of identification to enable us to build material
temples and receive coin of the realm for our labor. "Foreign
countries" is to us a symbol.
Like all the rest of the
symbols, it has more than one interpretation, but unlike many,
none of these is very difficult to trace or
understand.
Freemasonry itself is the first "foreign
country" in which the initiate will travel; a world as
different from the familiar workaday world as France is
different from England, or Belgium from Greece. ... Surely such
a land is a "foreign country" to the stranger within
its borders; and the visitor must study it, learn its
language
and its customs, if he is to enjoy it and profit
thereby. ...
Freemasonry has many "foreign countries"
within it, and he is the wise and happy Freemason
who works patiently at the pleasant task of visiting and
studying them. There are the Masonic "foreign countries"
of philosophy, of jurisprudence, of history. No Freemason is
really worthy of the name who does not understand something of
how his new domain is governed, of what it stands for, and why.
And, too, there is the "foreign" country of
Symbolism, of which so much has already been said.
As a
Master Mason, a man has the right to travel in all the "foreign
countries" of Freemasonry. If he will but learn the work
and keep himself in good standing, he may visit where he will.
But it is not within the doors of other Lodges than his own
that he will find the guide posts of those truly Masonic
"foreign countries" to which he has been given the
passport by his Brethren. He will find the gateways to those
lands in the library, in the study club, in books and
magazines, and, most and best of all, in the quiet hour alone,
when what he has read and learned comes back to him to be
pondered over and thought through.
The "foreign
country" of Masonic
symbolism has engaged the thoughtful and serious
consideration of hundreds of able Masonic students, as has that
of the history of our Order. Not to visit them both; aye,
not to make oneself a citizen of them both, is to refuse the
privileges one has sought and labored to obtain. One asks for a
petition, requests one's friend to take it to his Lodge, knocks
on the door, takes obligations, works to learn, and finally
receives the Master's Degree. One receives it, works for
it...why?
That one may travel in far lands and receive the
reward there awaiting. ...
Then why hesitate? Why wait? Why
put off? Why allow others to pass on and gain, while one
stands, the gate open, the new land beckoning, and all the
Masonic world to see?
That is the symbolism of the "foreign
countries" ... that is the meaning of the phrase which
once meant, to Operative Masons, exactly what it says. To
the Freemason today who reads it aright it is a clarion call to
action, to study, to an earnest pressing forward on the new
highway. ...
And at the end of the journey, when the last
"foreign country" of Freemasonry has been travelled
and learned and loved, you shall come to a new gate, above
which there is a new name written ... and when you have read it
you will know the True Word of a Master Mason.
-
Excerpts from "Foreign Countries" by Carl H.
Claudy
*Words to live by:* “The past is a
foreign country; they do things differently there.”
Leslie P. Hartley