It has always bothered me a little that when I was
brought into the Craft, I had to do little more than be interviewed once and
show up for my degrees. The committee I now sit on requires candidates to write
personal statement letters and show that they are duly and truly prepared.
While the benefit of hind site will never allow me to write the letter I might
have written in their shoes, I am now able to reflect on the things that
brought me to where I am now, and put some of the pieces together with more
clarity thanks to the limited wisdom that is inherent to the passing of time,
as brief as it may be in my case. And, while I may never be able to elucidate
or even identify all of factors that have brought me to where I am today; given
the inherent shortcomings of self-reflection, I need to give credit where I
know at least some credit is due. Ergo, I must thank Indiana Jones.
Today,
we all know Al Khazneh. Even if you don’t think you do, I can heartily assure
you that you’ve seen it. Literally meaning “the treasury,” it is most famous
for being the entrance to the temple housing the Holy Grail in Indiana Jones
and the Last Crusade. As a child, growing up well before the internet was
in every home and took most of the mystery out of life, I remember watching
Indy ride up to what had to be a model, or a very elaborate set. Of course, in
the years that have passed since my first viewing, childhood naivety has
succumbed to education, but there was an indelible mark that still hasn’t
faded. For reasons that I hope become apparent, years after finding out that it
wasn’t just a set, I was very pleased at the consolation that the origins of Al
Khazneh have become largely lost to history.
From
that moment forward, I had always told myself that one day I would make a great
discovery. I became convinced that somewhere out there, there was something
lost that I could find. Even then I knew that I would not be the one to locate
the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail, or anything of that ilk. As luck would
have it, while I was yet in grade school, explorers conclusively proved that
they found the legendary city of Troy. Hell, as recently as a few years ago,
people seem convinced that the Ark of the Covenant was in a church in Ethiopia.
And, thanks to Dan Brown, in the popular mindset the idea of physically
recovering the Holy Grail seems outdated, laughable even.
So,
life continued, and I began to understand why H. P. Lovecraft devoted so much
of his writing to lamenting the fact that in an industrial and then
post-industrial age, people had forgotten how to dream. There was nothing left
to discover, unless you wanted to leave the planet. With sincere apologies to
any crypto zoologists reading this, Loch Ness and Bigfoot really aren’t worth
my time. The only mysteries I could find within my realm were historical in
nature, but to date I have not resolved any of the questions that have haunted
us ever since we forgot the answers.
None
of this, however, could quench the coals of that fire. The fact remained that I
needed, on an existential level, to explore. So, when a friend joined a local
lodge, I did some research, if only for the purpose of my own education. I had
no idea what a Freemason was, or did, or was supposed to be. The one thing that
I found was that of all the different things I heard, the only aspect that
seemed self-evident was that no one could agree on the where, when, or how,
regarding the origins of the Craft. Even with the overwhelming evidence that
the Craft emerged as operative stone mason guilds fell by the wayside, it
seemed unlikely that anyone could ever flesh out the details.
From
the day I knocked on the door of a lodge, it quickly became apparent that I had
found what I was looking for, at least to some degree. There were allusions in
the ritual that, when I asked for an explanation, none could give me a straight
answer. While I had known going in that the origins were shrouded in mystery, I
would never have guessed that even the functional parts of standard ritual
still held their secrets back from men that had joined before I was born.
So it
was that I started down my path, the adventure of which thrills me more today
than ever. Watching those films again, with a new perspective, I began to piece
together similarities that I hadn’t previously understood. Indy was a treasure
hunter, and throughout the first film little more. However, in Last Crusade,
you can see a different side. While ostensibly he was searching for the Holy
Grail, the film ends without him being able to possess it, yet ends on what is
unquestionably a positive note. He learns to let go, learns that it was the
journey that counted. While the story of a father-son relationship is hardly
unique to that film, it marked a change in the franchise. In what I consider to
be the most remarkable part of the film, Indy seems to have gained more through
his actions than he could have ever gained by possessing the object he was
after. And, while I am no Indiana Jones by any stretch of the imagination, in
trying to satisfy my quest for knowledge, for exploration, for adventure, I
eventually came to find that I was discovering more about myself and what was
truly important, things that had been in front of my face the entire time.
Qualities that I like to think I had always possessed, but did not appreciate
or acknowledge, rendering myself incapable of trying to improve them.
That
was the moment that I realized Freemasonry was an adventure of two parts. The
first adventure is an internal one. An exploration of ourselves, realizing what
we are capable of, improving it, and pushing ourselves beyond our ill-perceived
limits. The other adventure is the Craft itself. Scholars of the last century
have called us the last vestige of an esoteric tradition that goes back beyond
the edges of what historians can recall, but is still deeply engrained in a
part of us that many have forgotten or have chosen to ignore. I, for one, will
not argue with them. Within the ritual there are layers that the wisest among
us may not yet perceive. That which is lost but may one day be found is perhaps
the lynchpin of the entire system. It teaches us allegorical lessons, refers to
actual knowledge that we may well have lost, and even applies to each of us in
our individual search for whatever it is that we are seeking.
Indy,
for being an icon of film, was quite the everyman. His education led him down
perilous paths as he searched for things that had been seemingly content to lay
undiscovered for the rest of time. But he had a drive to rediscover that which
was lost, and that desire bore him past those trials. He understood that if
they were out there, we could find them. Thus it is for every traveling man.
All of us have the tools necessary to dig as deep as we would like. We do so
knowing that we will likely not discover that which has been lost in the most
literal sense of the word, but can rest well in the knowledge that we may find
things that are even more important along the way, hidden treasures that only
the individual can know he is looking for. As far as adventures go, mine may
not be film worthy, no artifacts rest in museums due to my efforts, and my name
is not a byword for epic tales, but it’s an adventure that has led me to
greater treasure thus far than I could have ever expected, in every sense of
the word. And I anticipate that it will continue to do so until the day my own
adventure must necessarily come to its end.
RSB
