A great international secret is being kept! According to “The Guardian” (United Kingdom), the secret is protected “under 24-hour guard in its own chain-link enclosure, with two locks requiring two separate people for entry.”
What is the secret? The Ten Commandments? The Holy Grail? Area 57? The President’s Book of Secrets? Nope. Instead, it’s Dan Brown’s latest novel, “The Lost Symbol,” which arrives Tuesday as one of the most anticipated fiction books of our time, and certainly the most widely outside of the “Harry Potter” series. Who’d have thunk it?!
My mom raised me according to some simple principles of behavior and rules of society, one of which was “never talk publicly about religion, money, politics or sex.” The point, she said, was that those are topics that get too personal and make too many people uncomfortable.
As the U.K.’s “The Guardian” puts it, “Despite savage reviews of the clunking style and tortuous religious conspiracy plot of the 2004 Da Vinci Code, the book became a worldwide phenomenon, with over 81m copies in print. The film got even worse reviews and equally stunning box office, taking $758m (£454m) to date.”

But wow! Brown’s prior books have been pretty much about those topics and only about those topics, even if the critics are harsh on the craftsman.
Random House has pre-printed their largest first run in their history: 6.5 million copies. This is gonna be big. But what will it say?
I look forward to the next few weeks, as the promotion, mystery and celebrity that surrounds its launch turns into a (hopefully) deeper conversation about Freemasonry, the Hebrew “Key of Solomon,” the ciphered pictogram in that talisman, the Masonic Code and what it has to say to us as Americans and as spiritual people.
My favorite by-product of books and movies which hold religion as a backdrop is the residual effect it has on our national discussion of who we are spiritually and how that should affect our lives, the things we do, the people we come across and the prayers we pray. Those are the secrets really worthy of being discovered, or re-discovered. Those are the keys I’m looking for, and they don’t have to stay under lock-and-key, or a fenced vault.