Templar Edification

I saw a post online the other day, which claimed that 49% of Minnesotans—less than half—say that they believe in God. Now, I don’t put much weight behind such polls, however they gather their data. I remember reading recently that 30% of self-identified atheists also affirm that they believe in God. Try to make that one make sense. But the very notion of “believing in God” is something of a category error, a confusion of terms. Most people who deny belief in God are thinking of a god; that is, of a powerful yet limited supernatural or spiritual creature of some sort, akin to what Jews and Christians might call angels, or even fae. Yet God is not a god. God, in the classical sense—as understood by the great monotheisms, including Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Baháʼí, Zoroastrians, Platonists, and, I would argue, certain strains of Buddhism—is not a part of Creation, not a being within the universe, not even properly an object of belief; because God is not an object, not a th...

In York Rite Masonry, we are introduced to the presence of Cherubim and their importance to our Masonic Ritual. The part of Masonic Ritual where the presence of Cherubim is most prominent is when we do the circumambulations in the Royal Master Degree where the Cherubim (if enough members are present) greet the candidate and the Conductor of the Council as they make their way around the Council. The first mention of Cherubim in York Rite Masonry is during the Super Excellent Master Degree during the dedication of the Temple after the Keystone is lowered into place. The Ark is placed into the completed Temple and upon the Ark are Cherubim indicating the presence of God. When we do the opening of the Royal Arch Degree, the Captain of the Host mentions the Masters of the Veils are guards of the Veils. He mentions that on the veils are representative of the four tribes of Israel, Judah, Ephraim, Ruben and Dan an on each banner is delineated a lion, an ox, a man and an eagle. This is the are...

I have a melancholic disposition. I don’t mean that in the modern sense of sad and vaguely depressing, but in the medieval sense of melancholic as introverted and thoughtful. Rowling readers might term it Ravenclaw. Books have been my portals to worlds of endless learning ever since my youth, and when silence seeps into my bones it provides to me a wondrous rejuvenation. My grandparents’ property abutted an old church and graveyard, ancient by American standards, with headstones dating back to the 1600s. We used to take walks amongst the monuments, deciphering their weathered engravings, some fallen over like loosened teeth. We would read the inscriptions and imagine their stories. My grandparents rest there now too. I’ve always been drawn to liminal spaces, those borderlands betwixt past and present, man and nature, Christian and pagan, life and death. Autumn of course is perfect for that, with holidays like Halloween. I never was much of a hunter myself, but I understand why people l...