The Entered Apprentice white apron

Right after the initiation, the Worshipful Master puts the apron to the apprentice pronouncing these words:

"Receive this apron that distinguishes a mason, more honorific that any other human decorations, because it symbolizes work: The one and only source of wealth, health and virtue. Gives you the right to be seated among us, and without it you'll never be inside our lodge.

Its whiteness is emblem of innocence and gives us the understanding of what must reign in our hearts"

This constitutes the first act made by the Worshipful Master just after the moment the recipendiary sees the light, which recreates that biblical passage when the Lord gives some skin garments and says:" The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever. So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken". (Genesis 3:20-23)

Like the Lord provide us with a body to work, the garments, so the Worshipful Master in the initiation ceremony give us the apron as the first element for our rebirth, in order to work on the row stone.

The apprentice got his apron, that is the first clothe employed by man -according to what the story says- after the discovery of the Masonic light, the one that establishes a starting point for a new life, because till that day he was blinded -longing for the truth and knowledge- and from this moment, like the Bible speaks, a new chance to reach his mission in the universe is given to him, taking him to higher spiritual levels in order to transcend from its human limitations to a divine condition.

This apron becomes part of him during all the way, to remember him that any progress is to be made only by work. Work that, under the causality that rules the universe has to be taken as an instrument to obtain health, virtue and wealth, and as a goal itself, as long as it represents that the particular labor that every person has to fulfill and the one that shares with his peers as human being could be accomplish solely on a spiritual and physical actions basis.

The whiteness of the apron can be interpreted as an absence of color, the emptiness that will be filled, the beginning, the start for the apprentice that with the purity and innocence that identifies his age, will bring him the ethics, moral principles and knowledge to be use as a foundation for the temple that is called to build.

Besides, in the second and third grade of the Symbolic Masonry, some elements are added to the apron but it remains white, because taking apart the differences in the tools employed in one or another grade -considering the type of job that is required to do and the abilities acquired for the purpose- the need to maintain mason's thoughts and actions farther from vicious, lie or ignorance remains through his entire life.

Doing some research, a variety sort of explanations is founded regarding the shape of the apprentice's apron, however an important group of brothers opine that the part of it that is stick to the body is the new mason itself, who is in the occident where the light is weak, and the triangle that is above this square constitutes a representation of the three lights, that remembers him about his incorporation and belonging to a mother lodge and also that any effort must be made to travel to the place where there is plenty of light, the Orient.

It is important to note that the apron received after the proofs and oath given in a voluntary manner, and that constitutes the main act of the initiation's ceremony, has also the nature of a decoration, and being that so, remains as part of himself whether he uses it or not, because taking into account that is a part of his own self, it generates a feeling and certainty that, after finishing the lodge's work and take off the symbol from his body, it lingers in himself, guiding his actions in order to be just and perfects, and reminiscing that on the profane world, he has a superior mission, and that a privilege has been giving to him, the honor to be part of the Masonic Order.

Finally the apron is the symbol that recall us the words of the Worshipful Master when, in the moment that we finish our meeting in the first degree says : "Don't think the world that you have work in vain, and expend your strengths in nothing, because your work is with the Lord and your reward in heaven".

July 01, 2003

Q:.H:. Miguel de Pomar