The Crusades and Freemasonry

This past weekend, I took several of the degrees in The Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry. It's a tad off topic for this blog (I'm focusing more on the Blue Lodge), but I distilled something from it on Facebook earlier today and I wanted to share that here.

The topic of discussion was actually the York Rite where a Facebook friend of mine was talking about how blood-stained crusader avatars on Facebook (apparently something to do with Veteran's day that the Knights Templar are doing?) really rubbed him the wrong way. His family was on the receiving end of some of the more unfortunate parts of the Crusades so it's not a happy thought for him.

I shared these thoughts about Scottish Rite in return:

I was very concerned about some of the degrees I took this weekend, going in. They weren't KT degrees, and I understand that those are steeped in the lore of the Crusades to a deeper extent, but here's my takeaway for what it's worth: Freemasonry gets the dark periods of human history. We've experienced crusades and purges, pogroms and slavery, ghettos and persecution. We're an old organization (how old can be debated, but for my purposes, "long enough" suffices) and we've seen the darkness of man's heart, but we continue to assert the light of his soul, and even with the evidence of our brutality--even with the evidence of the actions of a very few within the Fraternity itself who have failed to uphold its ideals--we find the transformative experience repeated over and over again.

You can look at the SS officer who decides that he must save as many human beings from extermination as possible, or you can look at the slave owner who decides to free and provide for his slaves as his brothers and sisters, not property. Throughout history, the crucible of great waves of evil deeds have brought forth the light upon which all men agree in their hearts.

To summarize: the blood-soaked crusader is more ideally placed than any of us to receive the lessons of a Freemason, so perhaps it is something to commemorate. Freemasonry is many things, but one of its core reasons for being is to help good men find the light of truth and reason and by so doing, subvert the darkest impulses of mankind: fear, hatred, intolerance and selfishness. Is the warrior monk of the Knights Templar all of that? Not always, but when they were, they were a beacon that shined so brightly that we continue to follow that light, today.

Perhaps, then, we can celebrate those times because of the few good men who carried us out of the darkness and into the light. Also, the funny hats are cool.