Thesis 11: Masonic Rituals
Growing up I’d watch movies like the Da Vinci Code or Indiana Jones or Sherlock Holmes or National Treasure that highlighted strange groups that had devilish, complex, barbaric rituals. These rituals usually occurred in caves or underground rooms and involved group chants, secret symbols and handshakes, and special clothing that covered faces and bodies.
For 19 years I didn’t give the people in these strange, fictional ceremonies much thought. And then I went through the temple. And in the blink of an eye, I was one of them.
The night I went through the temple for the first time, I came home and sobbed alone in my room. The ceremony I had just participated in involved secret handshakes, unique and embarrassing clothing, group chants, and oaths of unquestioning allegiance. Nothing in my 19 years in the church had prepared me for what I had just seen and done. All of a sudden, everything I thought I knew about God and about this church I loved was up in the air. And on top of that, I was now required to wear uncomfortable “special underwear” for the rest of my life, symbolic that I now knew the big secrets of the temple.
But what was even more confusing was that my family all seemed perfectly fine with it. As I was finishing the the last ritual and passing “through the veil,” my older sister who had gone through the temple before me, pulled me aside and with a smile said, “Who knew! Getting into heaven all comes down to secret handshakes!” My sister who I had always looked up to was just accepting all of this like it was no big deal. And my parents who I had trusted my whole life had just led me unprepared into a world that felt dark, confusing, and wrong.
And it went beyond my family. The temple ceremony screams of something out of a God-crazed cult from thousands of years ago. So how could millions of good, ordinary Mormon people be so seemingly ok with something so blatantly wrong? The way I see it, they either actually believe in it or they are just as shocked as me but are too scared or passive to say or do anything about it. Both options are equally scary realities about the people in the church.
A couple weeks after going through the temple I left on my mission. I already had a mission call and the pressures from friends and family mixed with my state of shock from my temple experience left me paralyzed. When I returned I did everything I could to get to the bottom of things. Eventually I learned that Joseph Smith had basically copied over a ceremony he had learned with the Masons and that it used to be even darker (and included a “slit your throat” action and a blood oath to keep certain secrets). It didn’t take long for me to decide that I didn’t want any part of this.
I could not keep passively accepting this ritual as ‘ok’. And I could not bear the idea of one day looking my kids in the eye and telling them that I was on board.
Wearing a strange costume, making blood-oath promises at an altar, and learning secret handshakes and passwords for entrance into heaven immediately screamed out to me, “this is wrong!” and I can’t be part of a church that holds this ceremony at the center of its doctrine.
