The Burden Of Light

Paper 35/2007 Title The Burden of Light Author Bro Peter Popovic - Croatia In our hard, life-long labour on the raw stone, we the Freemasons are guided and inspired by the mystical symbolism surrounding us in our Craft. Of all the symbols that teach our conscience and feed our courage in taking the right paths in life, the most striking metaphor by far is the acceptance of the light. In the beginning, God separated the light from the darkn ess in order to shape the Earth. Similarly, the Freemason’s life is “without form and void” until the moment of his initia tion, in which, by accepting the light, he separates it from the darkness. However, t he individual triumph of t he light is nothing but ones true cognition of the darkness itself!
To know the difference between light and dark is to know the difference between right and wrong; moral and immoral; good and evil. This knowledge inevitably imposes the responsibility of making the right decision. However, the wisdom of the flames of Knowledge, with which the Freemason discovers his inner moral values, could easily be transformed into the tool of self destruction, for the beauty of the light can quite often be blinding. Was it not in the name of “tec hnological progress” and for the pu rposes of stopping the bloodiest war in history that the atomic bomb was constructed and ultimately used - whose light was so great that it was prised in the verses of ancient prophesies, Indian religious epic poems and Nostradamus’s Centuries, as a “radiance of thousand suns, which will flash in the sky; the Shininess of Almighty?” Prior to the dreadful thunder, somewhere in the fi rst quarter of the second, the impact of the bomb created an unimaginable light that gave way to t he new, advanced and progressive era. Technology improved to the extent that toda y the life of the near past seems unima ginable. As a tool of political intimidation, the atomic bomb reduced the possibility of a new world war, and for the first time the war itself was outlawed by the United Nations Charter. But apart from the bomb’s shining legacy, what was its eminent impact? To many it brought eternal darkness.
It was a moment in which as a Grand Master, the father of the bomb Robert J. Oppenheimer initiated the humankind into the new order, thus changing his carv ed stone - the world - forever. Humankind’s last stop on a journey of its initiation was in Los Alam os, the lost and forgotten Indian Territory, where the atomic bomb project was being pursued. The greatest light was born in the place which, ironically, Indians called “Oscuro”, or the place of “darkness”.
The impact of the atomic bomb made a new cohesion of light and dar k, thus, bringing us back to the time when the world was without form and void. To separate it again would not be God’s work, but a work of individuals whose greatest ac hievement would not be to separate the light from the dark, but right from wrong.