In 1717, Masonry created a formal organization in England when the first Grand Lodge was formed.  A Grand Lodge is the administrative body in charge of Masonry in some geographical area.  In the United States, there is a Grand Lodge in each state and the District of Columbia.  In Canada, there is a Grand Lodge in each province.  Local organizations of Masons are called lodges.  There are lodges in most towns, and large cities usually have several.  There are about 13,200 lodges in the United States.  In a time when travel was by horseback and sailing ship, Masonry spread with amazing speed.  By 1731, when Benjamin Franklin joined the fraternity, there were already several lodges in the Colonies, and Masonry spread rapidly as America expanded west.  In addition to Franklin, many of the Founding Fathers -- men such as George Washington, Paul Revere, Joseph Warren, and John Hancock -- were Masons.  Masons and Masonry played an important part in the Revolutionary War and an even more important part in the Constitutional Convention and the debates surrounding the ratification of the Bill of Rights.  Many of those debates were held in Masonic lodges.

While there is some variation in detail from state to state and country to country.

If you’ve ever watched C-SPAN’s coverage of the House of Commons in London, you'll notice that the layout is about the same.  Since Masonry came to America from England, we still use the English floor plan and English titles for the officers.  The Worshipful Master of the Lodge sits in the East.  "Worshipful" is an English term of respect which means the same thing as "Honorable."  He is called the Master of the lodge for the same reason that the leader of an orchestra is called the "Concert Master."  It is simply an older term for "Leader."  In other organizations, he would be called "President."  The Senior and Junior Wardens are the First and Second Vice-Presidents.  The Deacons are messengers, and the Stewards have charge of refreshments.

Every lodge has an altar holding a "Volume of the Sacred Law."  In the United States and Canada, that is almost always a Bible.

Some services are less noticeable, like helping a widow pay her electric bill or buying coats and shoes for disadvantaged children.  And there is just about anything you can think of in-between, but with projects large or small, the Masons of a lodge try to help make the world a better place.  The lodge gives them a way to combine with others to do even more good.

Masonry does things "inside" the individual Mason.  "Grow or die" is a great law of all nature.  Most people feel a need for continued growth as individuals.  They feel they are not as honest or as charitable or as compassionate or as loving or as trusting or as well-informed as they ought to be.  Masonry reminds its members over and over again of the importance of these qualities and education.  It lets men associate with other men of honor and integrity who believe that things like honesty, compassion, love, trust, and knowledge are important.  In some ways, Masonry is a support group for men who are trying to make the right decisions.  It is easier to practice these virtues when you know that those around you think they are important, too, and will not laugh at you.  That is a major reason that Masons enjoy being together.

Masons enjoy each others company.  It is good to spend time with people you can trust completely, and most Masons find that in their lodge.  While much of lodge activity is spent in works of charity or in lessons in self-development, much is also spent in fellowship.  Lodges have picnics, camping trips, and many events for the whole family.  Simply put, a lodge is a place to spend time with friends.

For members only, two basic kinds of meetings take place in a lodge.  The most common is a simple business meeting.  To open and close the meeting, there is a ceremony whose purpose is to remind us of the virtues by which we are supposed to live.  Then there is a reading of the minutes; voting on petitions (applications of men who want to join the fraternity); planning for charitable functions, family events, and other lodge activities; and sharing information about members (called "Brothers," as in most fraternities) who are ill or have some sort of need.  The other kind of meeting is one in which people join the fraternity -- one at which the "degrees" are performed.

But every lodge serves more than its own members.  Frequently, there are meetings open to the public.  Examples are Ladies Nights, "Brother Bring a Friend Nights," public installations of officers, cornerstone laying ceremonies, and other special meetings supporting community events and dealing with topics of local interest.

The degrees are plays in which the candidate participates.  Each degree uses symbols to teach, just as plays did in the Middle Ages and as many theatrical productions do today.  (We will talk about symbols a little later.)

The Masonic degrees teach the great lessons of life -- the importance of honor and integrity, of being a person on whom others can rely, of being both trusting and trustworthy, of realizing that you have a spiritual nature as well as a physical or animal nature, of the importance of self-control, of knowing how to love and be loved, of knowing how to keep confidential what others tell you so that they can "open up" without fear.

The first are the ways in which a man can identify himself as a Mason -- grips and passwords.  We keep those private for obvious reasons.  It is not at all unknown for unscrupulous people to try to pass themselves off as Masons in order to get assistance under false pretenses.

The second group is harder to describe, but they are the ones Masons usually mean if we talk about "Masonic secrets."  They are secrets because they literally can not be talked about, can not be put into words.  They are the changes that happen to a man when he really accepts responsibility for his own life and, at the same time, truly decides that his real happiness is in helping others.

It is a wonderful feeling, but it is something you simply can not explain to another person.  That is why we sometimes say that Masonic secrets cannot (rather than "may not") be told.  Try telling someone exactly what you feel when you see a beautiful sunset, or when you hear music, like the national anthem, which suddenly stirs old memories, and you will understand what we mean.

"Secret societies" became very popular in America in the late 1800s and early 1900s.  There were literally hundreds of them, and most people belonged to two or three.  Many of them were modeled on Masonry, and made a great point of having many "secrets."  Freemasonry got ranked with them.  But if Masonry is a secret society, it is the worst-kept secret in the world.

Sometimes people confuse Masonry with a religion because we call some Masonic buildings "temples."  But we use the word in the same sense that Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes called the Supreme Court a "Temple of Justice" and because a Masonic lodge is a symbol of the Temple of Solomon.  Neither Masonry nor the Supreme Court is a religion just because its members meet in a "temple."

In some ways, the relationship between Masonry and religion is like the relationship between the Parent-Teacher Association (the P. T. A.) and education.  Members of the P. T. A.  believe in the importance of education.  They support it.  They assert that no man or woman can be a complete and whole individual or live up to his or her full potential without education.  They encourage students to stay in school and parents to be involved with the education of their children.  They may give scholarships.  They encourage their members to get involved with and to support their individual schools.

But there are some things P. T. A.'s do not do.  They do not teach.  They do not tell people which school to attend.  They do not try to tell people what they should study or what their major should be.

In much the same way, Masons believe in the importance of religion.  Masonry encourages every Mason to be active in the religion and church of his own choice.  Masonry teaches that without religion a man is alone and lost, and that without religion, he can never reach his full potential.

But Freemasonry does not tell a person which religion he should practice or how he should practice it.  That is between the individual and God.  That is the function of his house of worship, not his fraternity, and Masonry is a fraternity, not a religion.

Almost all school assemblies, for example, start with the principal or some other official calling for the attention of the group.  Then the group is led in the Pledge of Allegiance.  A school choir or the entire group may sing the school song.  That is a ritual.

Almost all business meetings of every sort call the group to order, have a reading of the minutes of the last meeting, deal with old business, then with new business.  That is a ritual.  Most groups use Robert’ s Rules of Order to conduct a meeting.  That is probably the best-known book of ritual in the world.

There are social rituals which tell us how to meet people (we shake hands), how to join a conversation (we wait for a pause, and then speak), how to buy tickets to a concert (we wait in line and do not push in ahead of those who were there first).  There are literally hundreds of examples, and they are all rituals.

Masonry uses a ritual because it is an effective way to teach important ideas -- the values we have talked about earlier, and it reminds us where we are, just as the ritual of a business meeting reminds people where they are and what they are supposed to be doing.

Masonry’s ritual is very rich because it is so old.  It has developed over centuries to contain some beautiful language and ideas expressed in symbols.  But there's nothing unusual in using ritual.  All of us do it every day.

It has continued.  Masons started some of the first public schools in both Europe and America.  We supported legislation to make education universal.  In the 1800s Masons as a group lobbied for the establishment of state-supported education and federal land-grant colleges.  Today we give millions of dollars in scholarships each year.  We encourage our members to give volunteer time to their local schools, buy classroom supplies for teachers, help with literacy programs, and do everything they can to help assure that each person, adult or child, has the best educational opportunities possible.

And Masonry supports continuing education and intellectual growth for its members, insisting that learning more about many things is important for anyone who wants to keep mentally alert and young.

Masonry teaches some important principles.  There is nothing very surprising in the list.  Masonry teaches that:

Since God is the Creator, all men and women are the children of God.  Because of that, all men and women are brothers and sisters, entitled to dignity, respect for their opinions, and consideration of their feelings.

Each person must take responsibility for his/her own life and actions.  Neither wealth nor poverty, education nor ignorance, health nor sickness excuses any person from doing the best he or she can do or being the best person possible under the circumstances.

No one has the right to tell another person what he or she must think or believe.  Each man and woman has an absolute right to intellectual, spiritual, economic, and political freedom.  This is a right given by God, not by man.  All tyranny, in every form, is illegitimate.

Each person must learn and practice self-control.  Each person must make sure his spiritual nature triumphs over his animal nature.  Another way to say the same thing is that even when we are tempted to anger, we must not be violent.  Even when we are tempted to selfishness, we must be charitable.  Even when we want to "write someone off," we must remember that he or she is a human and entitled to our respect.  Even when we want to give up, we must go on.  Even when we are hated, we must return love, or, at a minimum, we must not hate back.  It is not easy!

Faith must be in the center of our lives.  We find that faith in our houses of worship, not in Freemasonry, but Masonry constantly teaches that a persons faith, whatever it may be, is central to a good life.

Each person has a responsibly to be a good citizen, obeying the law.  That does not mean we can not try to change things, but change must take place in legal ways.

It is important to work to make this world better for all who live in it.  Masonry teaches the importance of doing good, not because it assures a persons entrance into heaven -- that is a question for a religion, not a fraternity -- but because we have a duty to all other men and women to make their lives as fulfilling as they can be.

Honor and integrity are essential to life.  Life without honor and integrity is without meaning.

Those are the only "formal" requirements.  But there are others, not so formal.  He should believe in helping others.  He should believe there is more to life than pleasure and money.  He should be willing to respect the opinions of others, and he should want to grow and develop as a human being.

There is a good reason for that.  It is not that we are trying to be exclusive, but becoming a Mason is a very serious thing.  Joining Masonry is making a permanent life commitment to live in certain ways.  We have listed most of them above -- to live with honor and integrity, to be willing to share with and care about others, to trust each other, and to place ultimate trust in God.  No one should be "talked into" making such a decision.

So, when a man decides he wants to be a Mason, he asks a Mason for a petition or application.  He fills it out and gives it to the Mason, and that Mason takes it to the local lodge.  The Master of the lodge will appoint a committee to visit with the man and his family, find out a little about him and why he wants to be a Mason, tell him and his family about Masonry, and answer their questions.  The committee reports to the lodge, and the lodge votes on the petition.  If the vote is affirmative -- and it usually is -- the lodge will contact the man to set the date for the Entered Apprentice Degree.  When the person has completed all three degrees, he is a Master Mason and a full member of the fraternity.

"When is a Man a Mason?"