Freemasonry is the world’s oldest fraternal institution, a brotherhood that teaches moral truth through allegory and symbol. Its lessons descend from the operative guilds of medieval stonemasons, whose working tools, the square, the compasses, the level, and the plumb, became emblems of an upright life when the craft turned from raising cathedrals to building character. A lodge gathers men of every faith, calling, and station on equal footing, asks each to acknowledge a Supreme Being by whatever name his conscience supplies, and binds them to the three duties the fraternity has carried across centuries: brotherly love, relief, and truth.
It is not a religion: the craft prescribes no creed, administers no sacrament, and promises no salvation, and its assemblies bar sectarian debate alongside partisan politics. Neither is it a secret society, for its buildings are marked on the street, its rosters and charities operate in the open, and the sole privacy it maintains concerns the ceremonies and modes of recognition by which brothers know one another, a discretion no deeper than a family’s regarding its own household. What endures once the myths fall away is a school of character, where the improving labor of the old craft continues, its object no longer stone but the man himself.
In Massachusetts the craft is ordered under the Grand Lodge of Masons in Massachusetts, established at Boston in 1733 and the oldest Masonic governing body in the Western Hemisphere. Every regular lodge in the Commonwealth, this one included, works under a charter issued by that authority and returns to it each year an account of its labors. The jurisdiction’s chair has passed through hands the republic remembers, Joseph Warren, Paul Revere, and the namesake of this lodge, Moses Michael Hays, who presided as Grand Master from 1788 to 1792 with Revere serving at his side as Deputy. Membership in a Massachusetts lodge therefore joins a man to an institutional line that antedates the nation itself. The tradition is no museum piece: the same body governs, the same charters bind, and the same work proceeds in the lodges today.
Admission begins with a rule as old as the fraternity: no man is recruited, and each must seek membership of his own free will and accord. In this jurisdiction a petitioner must be a man of at least eighteen years, of good moral character, professing belief in a Supreme Being. The way forward is unhurried by design, running from acquaintance with the brethren to a written petition, from petition to ballot, and from election through the three degrees of the craft, Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft, and Master Mason. Curiosity carries no obligation; a conversation or a visit to the lodge commits nothing and answers more than any pamphlet can. Those who wish to learn more, or to meet the brethren of this lodge, are welcome to reach the Secretary through the Contact page, and the first step remains what it has always been, simply to ask.