Masonic Harmony by MW Reynato S. Puno, PGM

*Keynote Address, delivered at the 92nd Annual Communication (of the MW Grand Lodge of the Philippines), April 24, 2008, Bacolod City.

"I have been requested by MW Jaime Gonzales to talk about harmony.

I can well understand the rationale of his request, for human history irrefutably demonstrates that one of the greatest human tragedies has been our continuous failure to overcome disharmony. I stress our nonstop failure, for disharmony has victimized pre-historic humans when their intelligence was no higher than that of the apes during the Stone Age until today, when human super-intelligence is about to enable us to clone ourselves.

I emphasize tragedy, because disharmony has resulted in the greatest loss of human lives, greater than the loss we have suffered from the most devastating earthquakes, typhoons, tornadoes, tsunamis and epidemics in the world.

It is not my intent to overwhelm you with a niagara of information. Let me just cite the number of people who violently died in various wars in the last century as a result of human disharmony. The famous British historian Hobsbrawn in his best-selling book entitled Age of Extremes wrote:

x x x

Local, regional or global, the wars of the 20th century were to be on an altogether vaster scale than anything previously experienced. Among 74 international wars between 1816 and 1964, xxx the four occurred in the two world wars, the Japanese war against China in 1937-39 and the Korean war. They killed upwards of 1 million persons in battle.

In 1993, Brezinski, estimated the number of people who died in the last century as 187 million. It is no wonder that when asked about his thoughts on the 20th century, William Golding, writer and Nobel laureate, said: "I cannot help thinking that this has been the most violent century in human history."

The end of the Cold War between the U.S. and Russia fueled the hope that we had stepped into a new and higher threshold of harmony, where peace would finally cease to elude us. That universal dream, however, was dashed to pieces by a new war that greeted the millennium, the war on terrorism. Tomes and tomes of literature have been written about the frightening direction that this war on terrorism would take, but I like to believe that the observations of Prof. Samuel Huntington from Harvard University and author of the classic book End of Civilization are most enlightening:

x x x

In the wake of the Cold War, the increasing intensity of this historical antagonism has been widely recognized by members of both communities. In 1991, for instance, Barry Buzan saw many reasons why a societal cold war was emerging "between the West and Islam, in which Europe would be on the frontline."

This development is partly to do with secular versus religious values, partly to do with the historical rivalry between Christendom and Islam, partly to do with resentments over Western domination of the post-colonial political structuring of the Middle East, and partly to do with the bitterness and humiliation of the invidious comparison between the accomplishments of Islamic and Western civilizations in the last two centuries.

xxx

Similar observations came from the Islamic community. There are unmistakable signs, argued a leading Egyptian journalist, Mohammed Sid Ahmed, x x x "of a growing clash between the Judeo-Christian Western ethic and the Islamic revival movement which is now stretching from the Atlantic in the west to China in the east." Another prominent Indian Muslim also predicted that the West’s "next confrontation is definitely going to come from the Muslim world. It is in the sweep of the Islamic nations from the Maghreb to Pakistan that the struggle for a new world order will begin."

The exclamation point is that violence and death due to lack of harmony will continue to hound humankind in this millennium.

To be sure, the best and the brightest among men have exhausted their cerebrums to address this problem of lack of harmony. The monument to this effort is the organization of the United Nations, composed of sovereign nations all over the world. Given the fact, however, that these nations will not surrender their respective sovereignties, the United Nations (UN) from its inception was hobbled in its goal of achieving a lasting international peace.

The member countries of the UN were too diverse; their political agendas were hopelessly irreconcilable; their finances were too meager; their correct decisions could be vetoed by the big powers -- all these and more prevented the UN from establishing harmony among nations in the world.

The UN experience teaches us two lessons: first, harmony is peace but it is peace, that means more than the lack of war; and second, harmony, cannot be expected from states that are no more than artificial persons. Unlike natural persons, artificial persons are without souls; hence, they are bereft of ethics, and they do not exist to satisfy the divine design of serving out of selflessness.

The inconvenient question is whether masonic harmony is the panacea to this problem of disunity, a problem that has torn humans asunder since time immemorial. I have no reservations in making the submission that masonic harmony holds the key to the human problem of disunity. I start with the proposition that to plumb the dizzying depth and breadth of the problem of disunity, we must know its causes.

Theologians theorize that the cause is our decision to control our own destiny, to be the captains of our own fate. Some economic pundits peddle the idea that disunity is caused by the pursuit of profit, for which greed is the driving force. Some political scientists opine that disunity is caused by the overriding agenda of states to rule the world regardless of consequence.

As one of the ancient depositories of human knowledge, masonry has its own postulates on why lack of harmony has always hounded us in our journey to the East. Bereft of its esoterics, our 3rd Degree informs us of the three principal evils that mangle human harmony. We are all familiar with the life and legend of Hiram Abiff, the widow’s son. Masonic scholars describe him as an inspired master, the most skillful worker who ever lived. His abilities were not confined to just construction, but extended to all kinds of work -- whether on gold, silver, brass or iron; whether on linen, tapestry or embroidery. The inerrant Good Book tells us he was personally chosen by King Solomon to build the Lord’s temple. Day in and day out, he supervised about 200,000 artisans and laborers without any discordance or confusion.

In short, Hiram Abiff was the perfect practitioner of harmony. But we all know the tragedy that struck this symbol of harmony, this icon of unity. The three evils attacked and killed him and caused confusion in the temple. The 3 J’s representing different kinds of evil represent the three principal causes that destroy the harmony of men.

The first cause is the virus of ignorance. Ignorance, especially organized ignorance, has divided men by keeping them in the dungeons of darkness. Galileo who ushered the scientific revolution, is a notorious victim of the reign of ignorance. During his career, he invented the hydrostatic balance, the first practical thermometer, the geometric and military compass and the astronomical telescope. He was the first person to see the mountains on the moon, to discover the rings of Saturn, to know that the sun revolved, and that the earth and the planets revolved around the sun. For proclaiming the truth of nature, he was charged with heresy, tried by the Inquisition and, needless to say, convicted by the dumb.

The second cause of man’s lack of harmony is love of the material and doubt of the spiritual. Truly, it is self-evident that the battle between the denizens of the world of spirit and the world of matter, the war between the God of Grace and the God of Gold has ripped human harmony apart.

The life of Jesus Christ tells us of this raging battle of life. He taught about the Kingdom of God, but those who suffered from a severe deficit of spiritual enlightenment crucified Him on the Cross. Yet, no other person has changed history as much as Jesus of Nazareth did. He wrote no poetry, but Milton, Dante and the world’s finest poets were inspired by Him. He composed no music, but Handel, Beethoven, Bach and Mendelssohn reached their highest perfection when composing hymns and symphonies to His praise. He painted no pictures, but Raphael, Michelangelo and Da Vinci were inspired to greatness in painting His life and ministry.

Today, those who are slaves ofthe God of Gold rule the world; this is the worst variety of atheism the world has ever known.

The third cause of the lack of human harmony is prejudice. The word "prejudice" comes from the Latin prae, meaning "before"; and judicium, meaning judgment. It is a prejudgment often driven by passion, hatred, lust, and the like.

Perhaps the most disruptive kind of prejudice, is racial prejudice especially that provoked by the color of skin. Millions have been dehumanized because of this prejudice, in which one’s value as a human being depends on the fairness of one’s skin, the shape of one’s eyes and the elevation of one’s nose.

We remember those who have fought against this prejudice that disturbs human harmony. One of them is Nelson Mandela, who dismantled apartheid in South Africa. Apartheid called for the separate and unequal treatment of the white and the black races. Mandela led the long and difficult fight against apartheid. He was in and out of prison for 27 years. Life imprisonment was meted out to him; but the South African whites knew that while they could chain the body of Mandela, they could not capture his soul. When his life sentence was read to him, he replied, and I quote:

"During my lifetime, I have dedicated myself to the struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die."

They locked in Mandela, but they could not lock out his message.

Time is precious, and nobody has the privilege to delay it by the sorcery of semantics. Let me just conclude by underscoring in neon that harmony is not a masonic teaching that is yet in its fetal stage. It has long been the life of masonry, and every mason should continuously give it the breath of life. Now and not later, it is our bounden duty to demonstrate to the world the validity of our concept of harmony. The cacophony of circumstances calls us to prove once again that masonry is still a powerful difference, and we can do that only if we let our talk and walk coincide with each other.

We cannot bleach reality. Everywhere we cast our sight, our eyeballs are grabbed by ugly influences that threaten the threads of harmony among our people. We behold the thickening fog of ignorance that hides from the people the unacceptable inequities of life. Our masonic duty to spread harmony calls for us to dissolve the mist that blurs the difference between truth and falsehood. Masons unequivocably stand for truth, and we should never seek truce with falsehoods. Indeed, we should not be satisfied with half-truths, for half-truths are complete lies in disguise.

We also behold the merciless march of materialism, the seemingly unending rule of the God of Gold and the rejection of the God of Love. Our masonic duty to spread harmony calls for us to help shape a society where the reign of greed cannot endure; where the number of hands with begging bowls should be less; where the clenched fists of protests should be lesser, because humans should be dictated more by their values than by their valuables.

We also behold the prejudices that drive so much dissension into the various strata of our society -- especially the prejudices fueled by religious bigotry and the prejudices fanned by racial superiority.

Our duty as masons to spread harmony is to demolish these strongholds of prejudice, for if there is a vice that blinds, it is the scales of prejudice that cover the eyes of the prejudiced. Our duty to spread harmony is one we cannot avoid. It is a duty we have to discharge not onlybecause it is right, but more because it is righteous. And when we rise to fight for righteousness, we should not be daunted by the fear that sometimes we may lack the strength of number; we should not tremble even if we are alone; we should not worry if our voice momentarily sounds as the voice from the wilderness.

Let us not forget even for a moment that masons fight for the sovereignty of eternal virtues, and that their eternal validity cannot be surrendered to any earthly power -- not to the scepter of kings, not to the strength of the elite, neither to the muscle of the majority. For, what is right and what is wrong can never be resolved by autocracy or by mobocracy. And like Hiram Abiff, masons must not allow death to terrorize them, for the finish line of the battle between good and evil is set in another kingdom -- the Kingdom of God, where victory will belong to the Lamb and not to the Lions.

Good day to all."