For some reason whenever things go particularly well in my life, I find myself thanking a mysterious creation of my mind, sometimes called Lord, sometimes God. If it were imperative to have a specific religion associated with the nouns of address, it  is Christian because of my adolescent indoctrination.  Otherwise my reference is oblique at best; it could as easily have been a Star Wars reference to a Hollywood fiction, just something distant and beneficent to which attribute thanks. I simply felt the need to render thanks – beyond an implausible gratitude to fortuity or myself though I often conjoined my parents in the same breath (but always subordinately to the principal or primary recipient – the Unknown).

I can’t help thinking there is a native urge – perhaps provoked by a purpose or feature within us as yet undiagnosed or discovered – that commands us to give thanks to the Almighty or some such Being though certainly not the notion we have the indignity to glamorize as religion as though it were real when it requires very little thought to confess its absurdity.

Yet the paradox continues that we nonetheless seek to acknowledge the influence of an unseen force within our lives; and that, contrary to our intellectual arrogance about religion we willingly and readily submit to our own indefinable and indefensible Supreme authority. It is the classic purge of the agnostic to neither admit nor deny; or the Masonic mundane mindset of some order of Universal Authority, something Unimaginable driving it all or suspending it in layer upon layer of unending spheres with no beginning and no end, blah, blah, blah…

Freemasonry does not have one single, exclusive name for God, but rather uses inclusive titles to accommodate members of all faiths. The most prominent, official term is the Great Architect of the Universe (G.A.O.T.U.) used to represent the Supreme Being neutrally.

And while none of it gets us any closer to any pattern or truth we continue to insist upon thanking someone else. I would not dare to speculate the appearance of such a force of mind, indeed whether it were possible or desirable to do so. The very admission of appearance contaminates the fiction and the suggested reality. Our human intelligence directs us to look aside, to avoid the sight of the Impossible.