THE AESTHETICS OF MASONRY

It is difficult to compare Upper Canada to the old cultures that gave birth to us. History teaches us of a convention that injects ancient references into contemporary developments to borrow on the gravitas of time. It brings legitimacy, answering as it does, a question before it has been asked. It appeals to sentimental familiarity. Unless people are aware of the convention, it sways opinion. Branding. Creating markets. Filling a need. Simply peace of mind by targeted advertising. Tell us something we want to hear so we can accept a  product. In Upper Canada, the engine of Freemasonry gave us legitimacy but little else.   If we settle for good enough, we should probably stop using superlatives to describe our goals.  We don't have cultural monuments in our towns. No boards show where a King slept on a given night. No ancient battlefields. No evidence of Roman occupation.  Westminster, St. Pauls, the Ashmolean, the Victoria and Albert are way over there, out of sight. Not a henge in sight. Our aesthetics are not urbane. Public displays of art often come from the can of a graffiti artist than the hands of a sculptor or landscape architect.  If we assme in our mind, that Lodges are where we find expressions of mediavel aesthetics mergingn with modernism, we've fallen short a little. If we held our lodges in monuments to architectural genius, one would want to think the performance of ritual would be spellbinding. We would expect to sit with men who are have a scholars grasp of masonry with the humility and dignity of a gentleman.  We are in a weakened state if we hold to the notion that the zenith of Freemasonry is behind us. We become at best, a reinactment, a pastiche that confounds the honest moments of our progress.  It will never be any better until we strive as a fraternity to achieve better, not because it is better and that is worse but because it is antithetical to do any less.