‘Where Men Build Meaning’

   

It’s been available in a limited way online since Grand Lodge met two weeks ago, but last Wednesday the Where Men Build Meaning video was uploaded to YouTube. This advertisement on Grand Lodge’s Our Quarry channel aims to encapsulate—to borrow from Wilmshurst—the meaning of Masonry. Not easily done in two minutes.

The title is too opaque for my tastes. Freemasonry is a very specific and highly stylized thing. Then again, two minutes isn’t a lot of time, and a promotional video isn’t necessarily the place to venture too deep.

But it’s okay.

My problem with any such video is in how it speaks to existing Freemasons at least as much as it does to the public we want to meet. Still, this one surpasses the “Scottish Rite NMJ” message, which is self-congratulatory pap.

“Honey? Look at this. See? I’m not just a man. I’m a Mason!” “Congratulations. Now take out the garbage.”

So maybe there will be future videos from Our Quarry that might speak to more than making friends with a nod to the Principal Tenets. It’s hard. I understand. (I’ve always scoffed at the “elevator pitch.”) And I’m not knocking the making friends part, knowing that study after study documents how men, young and middle aged alike, are meandering through life friendless, with the predictable consequences. But the apt messaging exists. We have the Standard Work and Lectures. We have centuries of literature to mine.

Check out what Vermont recently produced.