By R. W. Bro. Rob Elsner
Grand Orator, 2024-2025
In a recent homily at a funeral, I mentioned that at the funeral of our brother Sir Christopher Wren, who designed St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. Wren’s son famously inscribed on his tomb inside that very building: “Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you.” Wren’s legacy was in the beauty he left behind. The cathedral is an outward, visible monument to the glory of God, and is a central theme of Freemasons. We love the tales, substantiated or not, that we descended from the stonemasons who built those amazing edifices. They are among the ultimate expressions of order, of math, of piety. The greatest cathedrals are testaments to dedication and the generational perseverance of our Craft.
Our beloved Grand Master Richard Shultz asked me recently what I thought the purpose of Freemasonry was. I answered that I think the purpose is to serve humanity and improve the world to the glory of God. That is not too far off from what I expect early stonemasons were attempting to do with building cathedrals.
When I lived in France, I worked across the river from Notre Dame cathedral and saw her flying buttresses every day. Living in London I went to St. Paul’s and looked up at the square and compass in the ceiling and laughed with pride. In Cork, Ireland, our brother William Burges designed and built St. Finbarre’s Cathedral, his being the fifth building on the site since the church there was founded in AD606. I travelled to Amiens and Chartres, Armagh and Washington DC, New York and San Francisco, to Munich and Rome, to Venise and Wittenberg, to see the greatest cathedrals. Each was a masterpiece. I loved the order, the lines, the delicacy of stonework that looked like lace. To me, there was nothing that defined the beauty and artistic expression of what we do as masons more than a cathedral. These works glorify God and bring us closer to seeing heaven than anything else created by human hands.
And yet, even the most beautiful cathedral pales in comparison to the work of the Great Architect. Rounding a road on a recent autumn day, the top down on my old project car, I caught sight of a tree, leaves turning. The magnificence of the colored leaves, with the sun just right behind them, gave me insight into what Moses saw with the burning bush. Awe, wonder, and love for the hands that set the foundations of the earth and prepared the dry land overwhelmed me. I pulled over and turned off the car, the beautiful sound of a well-tuned engine falling silent, replaced by the symphonies of wind and birdsong, insects and babbling brook. God was laughing with and at me, letting me in on His jokes. His creation is more than ours. When He created humans in Eden, we were perfectly human. When we fell, we became less so. We did not need cathedrals as we were already in one. We could not confine God to a house, but He let us build temples and cathedrals to help us understand Him.
For the past 40 years, I have visited Barcelona every few years and watched the progress of the Cathedral of Sagrada Familia, Antoni Goudi’s masterpiece imitation of nature. Instead of forms of lines and angles, that building conforms to divine laws of architecture, taking inspiration from tree and flowers, from waterfalls and mountains. It is a work of submission and admitting that we cannot surpass God’s architecture. Goudi was striving to be MORE human in expressing God’s intentions above human’s ideals. Does everyone like that cathedral? No. But is the intention in the right place? Yes.
As we strive to build the greatest temples and cathedrals of our lives, let us think of the examples scripture sets out for us. Let us seek God and our relationship with him that guides us to improvement and humility. Let us consider commandments to love our neighbors as ourselves. Let us try each and every day to be better men, even if we sometimes go backwards on that path, hope continues for us to advance until we come to what Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Act III) called “that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.”
Outside of my door at work here in Birmingham, I have a small bible verse: Micah 6:8 (NIV): “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” Let us find the cathedral of our hearts and hope that we have built them to be good work, square work, delightful in God’s sight. Such an edifice would be the greatest cathedral and the purpose of masonry.
