The Force and Freemasonry
By R. Stephen Doan, PGM
“May the Force be with you” is familiar to anyone who has seen a Star Wars movie. It is a sentiment expressed when friends depart. It encourages someone in impending danger. Obi-Wan Kenobi explained the Force to Luke in the first Star Wars movie released:
The Force is what gives the Jedi his power. It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us and binds the galaxy together.
Quantum Physics is based on the theory that everything is energy; matter is simply energy interacting in a fashion that makes it appear to us humans as something solid. Quantum Physics also provides evidence that energy on a quantum level observes certain rules. If energy is disturbed, it will return to harmony with those rules.
Pythagoras made a similar observation on a cosmic level twenty-five hundred years ago. He described it as the Music or Harmony of the Spheres: no matter how violent nature becomes, it will always return to harmony, perhaps not the old harmony but something in equilibrium. Hellenistic Jews and early Christians described this as the Logos, translated as “the Word” in the opening of John’s Gospel: that harmonizing force which the Creator sends to the Creation to bring it back into harmony.The Master in the Fellow Craft Degree describes this phenomenon thusly:
By geometry we may curiously trace nature through her various windings to her most concealed recesses. By it we discover the power, wisdom and goodness of the Great Artificer of the Universe, and view with delight the proportions which connect this vast machine. By it we discover how the planets move in their respective orbits, and demonstrate their various revolutions. By it we account for the return of seasons, and the variety of scenes which each season displays to the discerning eye. Numberless worlds are around us, all framed by the same Divine Artist, which roll through the vast expanse, and are all conducted by the same unerring law of nature.
Geometry measures harmony and therefore becomes not only the symbol of that harmony but the symbol of the source of that harmony, which we Masons describe as the Supreme Being.
What do we do with this wisdom about harmony and the Force? Again, Obi-Wan Kenobi shows the way, in exhorting Luke when his father, Darth Vader, attacks: “Use the Force, Luke; let go Luke. … Luke, trust me.”
Let go. Trust. Harmony will prevail if we let it.
