The Light Returns

I’m sitting in my living room this Christmas morning, coffee in hand, watching the first gray light creep across the snow outside. The house is quiet. My children are still asleep, dreaming of presents and possibility. Tancy won’t be up for another hour. This is my favorite time, the liminal space between night and day, between anticipation and arrival.

Christmas has always been about waiting in darkness for light to return.

The operative masons who built the great cathedrals of Europe didn’t work in winter. The mortar wouldn’t set properly in the cold. So they gathered in their lodges, actual lodges, temporary structures built against cathedral walls, and they waited. They sharpened tools. They trained apprentices. They told stories and transmitted knowledge. They kept the craft alive through the dark months until spring returned and the work could resume.

I think about those men this morning. Gathered around fires in December, breath visible in the cold air, hands that had shaped stone now wrapped around cups of whatever warmed them. They were building houses for God. Every cathedral was an act of devotion made permanent in limestone and granite, geometry transformed into prayer.

We are their inheritors.

I’ve written extensively about the challenges facing Masonry today. The mathematics are stark. The empty lodge rooms are real. Christmas morning is a time for remembering why any of this matters in the first place.

Our ritual and symbolism didn’t emerge from a vacuum. The temple we build in our minds and hearts, the working tools we employ, the progressive journey from darkness to light, these grew from soil that was specifically, undeniably Christian. The medieval craftsmen who became the first speculative Masons lived in a world where Christ’s birth, death, and resurrection provided the foundational narrative for understanding human existence. Their tools became moral symbols because they already inhabited a universe where material things pointed toward spiritual realities. The incarnation itself, God becoming flesh, the divine entering the material, sanctified the work of hands shaping stone.

The cathedral builders were Christian. The symbols that became our working tools were Christian symbols first. The light we seek in our degrees is the same light that shone in Bethlehem, whether individual brothers recognize it by that name or not.

A tree doesn’t deny its roots by growing branches that reach in every direction.

My children know both versions of Christmas. They understand Santa and reindeer and presents under the tree. They also know the older story. The young mother far from home. The birth in humble circumstances. The light entering the world in the last place anyone expected to find it. I want them to hold both without confusion. Joy and generosity and family gathered together are genuine goods. And beneath the wrapping paper and the carols, there’s a deeper current. The darkness doesn’t win. Light returns. Hope is not naive but prophetic.

This is what the cathedrals were built to proclaim. Stone and glass arranged to capture and multiply light, to lift the eye and heart upward, to make tangible the intangible. The operative masons who created those spaces understood something we forget too easily: beauty is an argument. The existence of Chartres, of Notre Dame, of Cologne, these are testimonies in stone that transcendence is real.

We have inherited something precious. Not perfect. Our history includes failures and blind spots, as does every human institution. A tradition that stretches back through centuries, connecting us to men who believed that the work of their hands could glorify God and serve their neighbors.

That inheritance comes with obligations. To preserve what we’ve received. To transmit it faithfully to those who come after. To keep the craft alive through whatever dark winters we must weather. To sharpen our tools and train our apprentices and tell our stories and wait, actively, hopefully, faithfully, for spring.

The light returns. It always has. It always will.

The house will soon stir. I can hear movement down the hall, probably my youngest, unable to contain excitement any longer. In a few minutes this quiet space will fill with noise and laughter and the wonderful chaos of Christmas morning with children.

So to my brothers, wherever this finds you: Merry Christmas. May the light that shone in Bethlehem shine in your hearts and homes. May you feel the presence of those who built before us. And may we, when spring comes, be ready to build.

From a quiet living room in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Christmas morning, 2025.

-Brother Rob