There is a revolution going on in Freemasonry. All over the country, in lodge forums and in intimate conversation, the focus of discussion is shifting from internal obsession with rank and entrenched and stultifying attitudes, towards a simple question, expressed in many different ways: What are we doing being Freemasons? What does the Craft mean today? What have we to offer the 21st century? How can we grow?
    As we ourselves grow in confidence in the new era of openness and plain speaking, we move on to other far-reaching questions, with the courage to answer them. For example, it is no longer enough to ask, defensively, ‘Why do we become masons?’ – but to ask: Why should people become masons? We want the better and improving part of the world to enter the fraternity – not so they can become lost within its traditional forms and procedures, but so they can walk out into the world with mind and conduct enhanced, ennobled: ‘freed-up’ for every manner of creative endeavour. So when we invite guests and potential brethren to our house – which is their house if we can but make it so – we want a clean, clear, attractive, vibrant, fascinating, stimulating house. The Temple must glow; it must radiate goodness, intelligence and warmth. In this work, the Great Architect is there with us as True Measure, Light and Guide. What can we not achieve on such a Foundation?
    Let us never forget that masons are made to be the spiritual stones for the construction of a divine Temple, built in the midst of the world: invisible to the unworthy (“who seeing, see not”), but the beacon of a veritable New Jerusalem to the faithful Brother: a life’s work and journey.
    Much of the media, fed on and dishing out the tedious manna of sensational ‘revelations’ in the frantic and insecure discourse of the ‘exposé’, is hung-up on the notion of ‘secrets’: ersatz magic for the masses. We know that the secret of Freemasonry is discovered through living out its precepts.
    The lodge exists to perform rituals or ‘plays’ for the purpose of fitting members for a more noble existence: chipping away at the rough ashlar of the ‘old Adam’, the unregenerated man. We are tolerant because we know we are not perfect. This we learn by degrees: idealists we are, but our feet stand firm on the ground. Freemasonry, when it is permitted to operate in proper form, unhindered by pettiness, enables us to know what it is to be truly alive. So the ‘secret’ can never be more than knowledge of yourself: cogite ipsum – the perfect ashlar lies within. When uncovered, it shines. That light is the light of Art and Science, activities which in some way or other (as our Second Degree makes clear) all brethren are duty-bound to engage in. We must re-forge our historic links with Art, Architecture, Science and the universal spiritual philosophy which underpins these activities. We die that we may be reborn: youthful and energetic in spirit – fit for labour, fit for life. We can yet be the mortar and stone of a new humanity, a new century!
    Thirty years ago, a great film-maker reached a point, after making many films, when he thought he had done everything. He had reached the bottom of himself – and despaired. Then, after facing an ‘inner zero’, he realised that he had done nothing: everything remained to be done. So also with us in 1999: a New Year to unveil the allegory, to penetrate the symbol. Be upstanding Brethren!
    Tobias Churton