The Interview
I didn’t come to Freemasonry through a lecture or a pamphlet. I came to it through people — specifically, through noticing a pattern I couldn’t ignore.
Over the years, I kept running into the same quiet fact: some of the best men I knew in my community — the ones who showed up when it mattered, who kept their word, who carried themselves with a kind of steady integrity you don’t see enough of — turned out to be Masons. Not all of them said so outright. I’d just eventually learn it, almost as an aside, and file it away. One name. Then another. Then a third.
It wasn’t a coincidence I could keep dismissing. Whatever this organization was doing, it seemed to be doing it to a certain kind of man, or at least attracting one. I wanted to understand what that was.
That’s what led me to the Secretary of Century Lodge #190 in Greeley, Colorado. I didn’t go to him with idle curiosity — I went because of the men I already respected, and I said as much. I told him plainly: I petitioned on their merit. If Freemasonry was good enough to shape the people I already looked up to, it was worth my serious consideration.
He didn’t oversell it. He gave me honest, patient answers to my questions, and left the door open.
That conversation planted a seed. But in Freemasonry, seeds aren’t allowed to sprout overnight.
Colorado’s Grand Lodge requires a waiting period before a man can petition a lodge if he is unknown to a member of that lodge for at least six months — if not, a waiting period is mandated of six months from the time he first expresses interest to the time he can formally submit his petition. At first, I’ll admit, that felt like an odd rule. Why make someone wait half a year to ask a question?
But that’s exactly the point. Freemasonry isn’t interested in impulse. It wants men who have sat with the decision, who have let the initial spark of curiosity either fade or turn into something steadier. The wait isn’t a barrier so much as a filter — one aimed as much at me as at the lodge. It gave me six months to ask myself, honestly and repeatedly, whether this was something I actually wanted, or just something that sounded interesting on a Tuesday afternoon. In all reality, it also gave me six months to forget I had made this request in the first place.
But the desire held. Six months later, I was still asking if I could join.
When the waiting period ended, I petitioned Century Lodge #190 on the same grounds I’d walked in with: the character of the men I already knew. Filling out that petition is its own small ritual — you’re putting your name forward, in writing, to men who don’t know you yet, and asking them to consider you worthy of trust. I didn’t have a family lineage of Masons behind me, called a “Lewis”, or some dramatic origin story. I had evidence, standing all around me, in the form of good men. That was reason enough to sign my name.
Not long after, the interview committee came to my house.
I’d heard about this part before it happened, and I still wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. Three men from the lodge, sitting in my living room, asking me questions — about who I was, what I believed, why I wanted in, what kind of man I intended to be. It could have felt like an interrogation. It didn’t. It felt like a conversation with people who actually wanted to know the answers.
They weren’t there to trip me up. They were there to see whether I understood what I was asking for, and whether the lodge would be better for having me in it. That’s a very different kind of scrutiny than a job interview or a background check. It’s personal. It’s about character, not credentials. Though they did ask the obligatory question to my wife of what she thought of me joining.
By the time they left, I understood something I hadn’t fully grasped from the outside: every step of this process — the wait, the petition, the interview — exists to slow a man down long enough to make sure he’s arriving on purpose.
Freemasonry doesn’t recruit. It waits to be sought. And when I looked around at who had already been sought, and what it had made of them, I knew I wanted in.
Which, I suppose, is where the name of this blog comes from.
