The Tao of Masonry

This District Grand Lecturer position is a totally sweet gig. All I’m actually required to do is make sure that the incoming Master of a lodge passes a ritual test, and at rare times, oversee a little written test on the Grand Lodge rules and regulations. In Connecticut, most lodges have their installations from December to January; human nature being what it is, this means that I would be at my most busiest toward the end of the Masonic year as I do the certifications during October and November. The rest of the year I am free to spend on loose cars and fast women, while basking in the fame and glory.

Well, I suppose I could if I really wanted to.

A while back I had a discussion with a brother who insisted that the District Lecturers were unnecessary, and that the simple requirements could easily be done by the District Deputies or their Associate Grand Marshals. And indeed, he’s quite correct; the position as it now stands does not require much work, and carries very little authority. I’ll be the first to admit that almost anyone could handle the minimum requirements. Hell, they asked me, didn’t they?

But why would anyone want only the minimum requirements?

Over the last year, several lodges have asked me to help them polish their ritual proficiency and floorwork, and so I spend most of my time at lodges reviewing degree work, and at rehearsals, giving tips, making suggestions, and (hopefully) inspiring new officers to be better by coaching them along. Not surprisingly, this is exactly how I was taught in my own lodge by experienced Past Masters.

Recently, the Master-elect at one of my lodges asked if I would be willing to help out at their degree rehearsals. As it turns out, all of the junior officers are new guys, and the Wardens are not Past Masters. You might think that this would have been a challenge, but in fact, I was thrilled to see that all of the officers put in a lot of work to learn their parts in such a short amount of time. It’s really a good feeling to be around men who take pride in their work and who want to make an impression on the candidates. We spent a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon going over floorwork, coordinating the parts, and rehearsing lines. As it turns out, this was also helpful brush-up for the new Master who hadn’t done an EA degree in 28 years.

The result was a very fine degree two nights later, and a group of very proud officers. They’re so pumped that they’ve scheduled another EA degree for mid-February. Considering that this lodge had been having some difficulties over the past few years, it’s heartening to see that things are turning around for them.

That lodge joins my affiliate lodge in the ranks of those who are making concerted efforts to improve the quality of their ritual and degree work by setting higher expectations for the officers, scheduling one or more rehearsals for each degree, and having back-up plans in case of last-minute emergencies.

Each lodge is responsible for their own degree work. Unfortunately, many junior officers have not seen good degree work modeled for them, and so aren’t able to pass on those good habits when they become senior officers. Connecticut typically runs one ritual seminar per year… at least, they used to. We stopped even that for a few years when the District Grand Lecturer system was put into place, in essence taking away the one opportunity that many officers had to learn. Last year, the Lecturers got together with the Committee on Masonic Education to put on the first ritual seminar in four years – and it attracted over a hundred Masons from around the state, plus another few dozen purple aprons. The feedback was so positive that we’ve scheduled another one, to be held in February.

I think that’s great.

I also think that it’s not enough.

And this bring me back to the point about the necessity of the District Lecturers. Some of us have held “mini-seminars,” inviting the officers around the district to an evening of instruction, held at a particular lodge. I’ve been working with one lodge at a time at rehearsals, believing that it’s better to work with officers in smaller groups. Either way, we all believe that it’s important to address the ritual issues, and having one or two officers in each district dedicated to Masonic education and instruction seems like a better approach than waiting until an officer is ready to be elected to the East.

Many jurisdictions have appointed officers to oversee ritual instruction, but how they handle it varies widely. Some have an appointed person in each lodge, so that there is always one authority on what to do (or not) at every rehearsal. I like that idea because it prevents the multiple cross-feedback loops that new officers get when two or more Past Masters have varying ideas of how things should be done, and spend half the rehearsal arguing over why their way is better or how they never did something that way before.

Anyway, they asked me if I’d be interested in doing this gig again next year. Of course, I agreed; It’s just too sweet to pass up.

Tao of Masonry | Freemasonry | Masonry

Tao of Masonry | Freemasonry | Masonry

Who’s Certifiable?
Well, for starters, Eric and Ryan

On Sunday, August 12th, the Friendship Lodge officers set aside the afternoon to take a shot at testing their proficiency as Worshipful Master. “Proficiency” in Connecticut is actually very simple; unlike some other US states in which entire passages of ritual need to be recited and judged for exactness and conformity to some standard, we only ask for five things.

- Open the lodge in full form
- Receive a Masonic dignitary (A District Deputy or Grand Master, for example)
- Go to refreshment (some people refer to this as “calling off”)
- Come back to labor
- Close the lodge in full form

Having talked to people from other jurisdictions, I’m almost embarrassed at how little we require of our officers, both in the way of ritual proficiency and proficiency in the bylaws and regulations of the their lodge and Grand Lodge. While I agree that we are all volunteers, and have limited time in which to memorize ritual and to study obscure bylaws, the fact remains that in volunteering for the job, we gave an implied promise that we would do everything possible to be up to the task at hand. If all you need to do is know how to open and close a lodge, and to remember, or at least know where to look up an appropriate rule, then complaints about a lack of time begin to smack of a lack of effort.

But that’s a rant that I’m going to save for another day. Right now I’d like to introduce you to Eric and Ryan.

Eric is the Junior Warden at Friendship, and he’s been at my right hand ever since he joined the lodge. I escorted him around the lodge when he was an EA (not an easy job – Eric is easily six feet, and at the time was of a rather husky build), and when I went into the South, asked him to be my Senior Steward. Despite the fact that he could barely boil water, Eric toughed it out and proved himself to be dependable and conscientious. He stayed at my right hand to become the Junior Deacon, and then Senior Deacon when I was Master last year. Eric is now the Chairman of the Friendship Lodge Website Committee, and requested that I be on that committee – probably so he now has the opportunity to boss me around count on my support.

Being the most senior officer, Eric was on trial first. I explained that while it might not seem fair, that I was going to hold him to a higher standard for ritual than I might otherwise do for someone else. Friendship has a well-deserved reputation for good ritual work – not for just memorizing the words, but for good delivery; we believe that the candidates should have the best degree possible, and sometimes that means not just dead-on memorization, but a “drama show” that emphasizes the points.

I hope it goes without saying that Eric did an exemplary job, and that we can all be proud of him.

Ryan was a member before I joined; a former DeMolay with a head for memorizing ritual, I didn’t see him much for the first couple of years while he was in college, but after school he joined the officer’s line – not a surprise because he was very active in the Marcus Holcomb DeMolay chapter that is sponsored by our lodge.

Back in November, Ryan was the Senior Steward that jumped into the Senior Warden’s chair for that meeting when all the top officers were missing. He did miss one line in the opening then, but he did a great job in the East; better, in fact, than some twice-termed Masters that I’ve seen.

Naturally, I’m proud of both Eric and Ryan, but I also want to give props to Kevin and Kyle. Kevin is the Senior Steward, and Kyle (Eric’s actual brother) is the Junior Steward. Both of them made an attempt to open and close a lodge, and considering the short amount of time that they have been officers, I think that they really deserve some kind of honorable mention. Both needed prompting, but both of them were able to get through the ritual. They had the words in their minds, they just needed some help getting them in order. My guess is that next year they’d be able to qualify.

I did, however, want to mention one more thing. Although Eric, Ryan, Keven and Kyle are all young enough to be my sons, I try to always think of them (and I hope I’ve succeeded) as brothers. I’ve seen Eric go from a nervous, hesitant young man to being more self-confident, and more willing to take on leadership tasks. In the last few years, I’ve seen Ryan graduate college, look for jobs in his academic field, get married, and more recently, have a baby. I’ve known Kevin since he was a young teenager, and I’ve now had the opportunity to see him become more mature and become more active in the lodge. Kyle, the youngest of this group, has always distinguished himself as being ready, willing and able to pitch in whenever there was work to be done.

Why do I mention this in a post about Ritual Certification?

There is much more to running a successful lodge than being proficient in ritual, as I discovered first-hand last year. The Master of a lodge must be able to depend upon his officers for help, but too often I hear of Masters who do not call upon some of the younger lodge members, except, maybe, to help move something heavy. I think that this is a mistake on their part. Good officers – good Masters – are made not just from moving stones in the quarry, but from being shown where to place them. Too often, younger members are not given tasks that carry a lot of responsibility or visibility. They are overlooked so that more experienced members can run a program or plan an event. Let’s not forget, however, that experience comes from being given such responsibilities. New members, especially younger members, do not want to join an organization in which they’re expected to stand aside – many of them probably get enough of that at work.

Good Masters will understand that it’s part of their job to help develop the younger officers so that they can become good Masters one day. Sit with them. Get their ideas. Let them come up with a program and run with it, even if you’re not crazy about it yourself. The worst that could happen is that it might not come off perfectly (and what does?), but the best thing that could happen is that you’ll all be able to sit down and process the event, and that they can learn from it.

As a Worshipful Master, it’s your year. But that doesn’t mean that the year is all about you.

Tao of Masonry | Freemasonry | Masonry

A decade ago, the term “mission creep” passed into the vernacular; it describes the all-too-common situation in which various elements are added to a project, until at some point one realizes that the original concept of the project is no longer relevant. This usually happens when one person after another suggests that it would be a good idea to add “just this one little thing” until all the resources are drained and the project itself becomes virtually unmanageable. I suspect that this is what happened with our own Grand Lodge website development.

I wasn’t in on the concept from the start, so I can only guess as to how it happened; but I have a suspicion that the idea to give all of the lodges in Connecticut their own website, and then to link them all started out as something pretty simple. I do know that several Masons put a lot of their own time, money, and energy into getting the project off the ground, and for that I salute them. It could not have been easy to explain to the various non-Internet savvy committee members along the way how things could or should work. Even those of us with some computer background are surprised by the number of obstacles to a smooth transition – after all, most of us merely see the web pages, and have no idea about the underlying code, the layers of protection, the database linking, and the updating of a hundred different websites.

I do know that last year at this time I was pretty disgusted with the Friendship Lodge website; several crashes had taken out all of our trestleboard data (the various dates and descriptions of events). In mid-summer, the Grand Lodge site was hacked, and even more data was lost. Worse, some of the computer geeks in Friendship had modified our site by adding things to the template that all of the lodges were using, and each crash meant that the modifications had to be re-created. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I started blogging because I wanted a place to announce events, put up pictures, and keep the members of the craft informed.

Fortunately, the Grand Lodge website problems have been resolved, and for the last several months the administrators have been doing a fantastic job of keeping things running. They’ve added some useful features, like a search function for the various lodge activities, and online copies of our newsletter The Connecticut Freemason. They have polls, and a section where one can download various policies and procedures, and tons of contact information, and links of various Masonic interest. That they have not linked to The Tao of Masonry is surely an oversight. Excellent work, brothers!

One of the few nits left to pick, however, is that all of the lodges use the same template; with a few exceptions, the site for each lodge looks exactly like the others. This has been the source of much aggravation and many sleepless nights to the l33t h4xx0rs at Friendship Lodge – a cadre of men in their 20′s who have been wanting to upgrade the plain-vanilla site. So, over the last week they formed a committee and launched a new site: www.friendshiplodge33.org. Our Junior Warden Eric Charette heads up the committee, and is joined by his brother Kyle, and two of our newest members, Bill Reyor and Eric Tetreault.

While there is still some fine-tuning to be done, they have done a fantastic job of getting the new site up and running. They’ve been using Joomla content management software, mainly because that’s what our own Grand Lodge site is using – we’re looking down the road to where we can (hopefully!) replace the standard template with the new site. The new site has a calendar that’s fed from the GL Friendship 33 calendar, a place for members to post news and event articles, a photo gallery, a user forum (including a “tiled” section) and they promised me that they would soon have our own Wiki module set up. I can foresee setting up a forum group for the DeMolay chapter and Rainbow chapter that meet in our lodge, too.

Right now the site is being hosted on Bro. Kyle’s own server, so some of the content loads more slowly than we’d like. But I’d like all of my readers to stop by and give us some feedback, especially those of you from Connecticut. If nothing else, stop to share a joke at the Humor forum.

www.friendshiplodge33.org

Tao of Masonry | Freemasonry | Masonry

A priest was in charge of the garden within a famous Zen temple. He had been given the job because he loved the flowers, shrubs, and trees. Next to the temple there was another, smaller temple where there lived a very old Zen master. One day, when the priest was expecting some special guests, he took extra care in tending to the garden. He pulled the weeds, trimmed the shrubs, combed the moss, and spent a long time meticulously raking up and carefully arranging all the dry autumn leaves. As he worked, the old master watched him with interest from across the wall that separated the temples.

When he had finished, the priest stood back to admire his work. “Isn’t it beautiful?” he called out to the old master. “Yes,” replied the old man, “but there is something missing. Help me over this wall and I’ll put it right for you.”

After hesitating, the priest lifted the old fellow over and set him down. Slowly, the master walked to the tree near the center of the garden, grabbed it by the trunk, and shook it. Leaves showered down all over the garden. “There,” said the old man, “you can put me back now.”
– Zen Stories, “Nature’s Beauty”

So, summer is almost over and in getting ready for the remaining part of the year I was leafing through my ritual book when out fell a paper with three names on it. It took me a moment to figure out why these names were on a paper.

They were the names of the three young men that I initiated the first time I sat in the East.

It was about two years ago when, during a phone call with the “New Age” Dave, the Worshipful Master of Friendship Lodge at the time, he asked who I had lined up for which positions in the upcoming Entered Apprentice degree. Momentarily panicked, I replied that I thought he, as the WM, was the one that scheduled all that. Nope, that was all mine, he explained. Start to finish, soup to nuts, A to Z. I tactfully mentioned that I’d wished he’d clued me in on this sooner, then I hung up and went to work.

I really should have known better. Dave and I are long-time friends, and I should have remembered that Dave is a “big-picture guy”, as I like to call him. Not really much for details, though…

Lodges have different ways to prepare the upcoming WM for his duties. At Friendship, we typically have two sets of degrees: one set in late winter/early spring and the other in the fall. In the fall, the Junior Warden takes the East for the EA degree and later, the Senior Warden takes the big chair for the Fellowcraft degree. When you consider that at some point we’ll have a Past Master’s degree, then it seems like the WM hardly has to do anything at all!

Yeah, right.

Since I had already been studying, I made the phone calls to make sure that the rest of the guys were studying, too. Not only is the WM spot taken by another officer, but we usually move every officer up one chair to prep them for the next year. Our degree was scheduled for the second meeting in September (we meet twice a month on the first and third Wednesdays), and all of the officers were prepared, or at least assured me that they would be prepared in time.

Friendship Lodge is crazy. In a time when many lodges can’t fill the officer’s chairs, and when some WMs need to stay in the East for two or three years until the rest of the line is “seasoned”, our lodge usually has a complete line of officers, none of which are Past Masters. While it happened that I skipped three chairs, it appears that it was an anomaly; we have not had to recycle a PM since 1978.

But that’s not why we’re crazy. We’re crazy because at any time, out of the seven officers in the line, five of them will really, really enjoy doing the degree ritual. I’m one of them. Seriously, if you had told me five or six years ago that I’d be hamming it up with archaic British turns of phrase, I’d ask what you were smoking. But now, once I get through memorizing the words I start working on my delivery. I stand up, walk around, wave my arms, modulate my voice… in short, I try to get into the mindset of a WM from the 1700s trying to make an impression of the seriousness and solemnity of the degree on a nervous candidate in the back upper room of some old inn. And I’m certainly not the only one in lodge who does this. We have not one, but two rehearsals for every degree, and we rehearse from the opening to the closing. Crazy, I’m telling you.

The upcoming EA degree was special because the Senior Deacon was bringing in one of his sons, and the Junior Deacon was bringing in his younger brother. I had escorted the JD around for his own EA degree, and I was happy to have a part in bringing his brother into the lodge as well. The JD and SD, each taking the part of the next station, were going to join me at the altar for the grippy part. The Stewards had rehearsed the First Section Lecture (we added some floor work to make it more interesting and meaningful). One brother, a Senior DeMolay, was going to take the Marshal’s chair and deliver the charge at the end of the evening.

Yup, we’re all set.

A few of the guys missed the first rehearsal; no biggie. The second rehearsal was great, even with a lot of fooling around. Admittedly, we goof off a bit in rehearsal, in part because we pretty much know what we’re doing, and while we want to take it seriously, we also want to have fun with it. So a couple of days before the degree we’re having a Trowel Club meeting (other lodges have similar groups with different names; Craftsmen’s Club, etc.), and the young Marshal-to-be asks if I’m sure I want him to do the charge. Of course I do; he assured me that he did particularly well at memorizing DeMolay ritual, and that he’d have no problem getting the EA charge down. Well, seems that he’d been working a lot and really hadn’t put the time into it that he should have. I told him that I had every confidence in him, and that he still had a couple of days, so we wouldn’t worry about it. He thought about it for a moment and agreed that he should be able to make a good job of it. And since I was already in a dither over my own part, I promptly forgot about it.

A couple of days later, it’s not a rehearsal anymore. I’d taken half a day off from work just to get calmed down and into the correct mindset. Dinner was great, not that I could eat anything (even now I still get nervous before meetings and won’t eat until afterwards). The degree itself was great; the first half moved along smoothly as everyone did everything right on cue, including an optional bit that the SW and the Deacons added in without telling me first – just because they wanted to impress me. The obligations came off without a hitch, and we soon took a break. The candidates were suitably impressed, and when we came back to labor the officers did a fine job with the new version of the lectures. I was proud of the work of the evening, it seemed that I’d never seen any degree come off so well.

Then the Marshal got up to do the charge. He was sweating profusely. He faced the candidates, got through a few sentences, and paused for a prompt. Big deal, right? Well, it was that night; especially impressive because it was the first time in their respective spots, the degree had come off with only one or two prompts, at least up until that point. The Marshal, aware of this, got even more nervous. And paused. Paused again. And again. And again. When he finally finished, you could almost see the huge weight falling from his shoulders, although he looked horribly downcast as he returned to his chair.

We ended the degree on a high note, with lots of hand shaking and back slapping and high-fiving, and w
e all went downstairs for coffee and, that is, except for me and a PM that I considered to be a mentor. Richie told me not to worry about it, and pointed out that the Marshal had learned a lesson and would never again be so unprepared; indeed, he does very well, and is now serving as the Junior Steward, and does a fantastic job as a DeMolay advisor. Later, the candidates all told me how “believable” the degree was, and how much they enjoyed it, and how impressed they were. Visitors congratulated our work, seemingly impressed that everyone was serving in a different chair. I went home, proud of the fantastic job that they did, and proud of myself as well.

Now, you might think that this is a lesson to young officers to make sure that they study up. Yeah, sure, if you want. And if my JS is reading this, believe me; I’m not trying to make you feel badly or relive a bad moment. That’s not the point here.

No, this is not a lesson for the junior officers. This is a lesson for the Worshipful Masters out there.

See, the Marshal warned me that he might not have it down. He told me that he thought he’d be able to memorize it in a few days because of his DeMolay background, but apparently it just didn’t come together for him. He came to me two days beforehand, and although he reassured me that he’d be okay, I completely ignored Rule Two:

Always have a Plan “B”.

I should have contacted a PM to ask if they could brush up “just in case”. I should have offered to work more closely with the Marshal. I should have done something other than what I’d done, which was to smile and be supportive and to hope for the best.

As the Master of the lodge, you have a responsibility bordering on the sacred to make certain that the candidate gets the absolute best degree work possible. That means not just your own command of ritual, but using your best managerial skills to make sure that everyone else is going to work to the best of their capacity as well. Especially for an EA Degree; it is the first exposure to the mysteries of Freemasonry that a brother will have, and it should be one of the most impressive, solemn and thought-provoking experiences that he will remember for years to come.

Okay, it was my first time in the East. The candidates were impressed, and things ended well. Besides, nothing is perfect, and we need these little bumps in the road to allow us to appreciate the good parts of life’s highway, right? I’d even forgotten about it until that bit of paper fell out of my book the other day, but even with only four months of meetings left in my year, Rule Two is still a lesson worth remembering.

Tao of Masonry | Freemasonry | Masonry | EA Degree| Rule One | Terry Pratchett | Lu-Tze

I’ve mentioned that I am – for reasons best left for another entry – a member of a Grand Lodge committee, specifically the Committee on Masonic Education. Until recently, one of the main functions of the CME was to plan and hold seminars for the purposes of ritual instruction (mainly targeted at new officers) and lodge management (targeted toward Wardens and Masters-to-be).

Like most volunteer organizations, anyone who happens by showing even a passing interest ends up being drafted. Contrary to what H. Ross Perot once said, that “giant sucking sound” is actually the sound of committees looking for unpaid volunteer members, and sad to say, as our lives fill up with career and social and family obligations, Freemasonry is no exception. I’ve had occasion to sit on meetings of half a dozen different committees in the last couple of years, and I’ve noticed that it’s not at all unusual for a person to serve on two or three others. That’s when I came up with the hypothesis that out of the 16,000 Masons in Connecticut, only 1,600 are active enough in the state to keep things going, and only 160 are probably responsible for running the entire fraternity.

Anyway, earlier this year the elder members of the CME – guys with 20 or more years in Masonry – decided that it was time for me to stop observing and to actually do some work. I’m a few months shy of my 5th year as a Mason, and even though I’m serving as the Worshipful Master for Friendship Lodge, I still feel like a newbie. But apparently my co-members thought I could at least give a short – 10 minute – talk for the younger officers. Of course, anyone that knows me would tell you that I’m a quiet guy… until I get warmed up. The biggest problem might then be in limiting me to only ten minutes.

My subject was termed “Lodge Etiquette”, although I need a new name for this, because we aren’t talking about the etiquette while sitting in lodge; you know, the standing and saluting and all that. Rather, I wanted to address how new officers could be better at their jobs and responsibilities, and how they interact with others. I split it up to address some things for the Stewards, and some for the Deacons. While in the course of my speaking to the Deacons, I related an incident that I was recently reminded of.

First, let’s stop kidding ourselves that most lodges have full officer’s lines and that it takes 7 or 8 or 9 years for a new member to go through the line. While Friendship Lodge is very fortunate, we had a few years in which there was a lot of chair jumping – it happened to be when I joined, so I know this first-hand. We’ve been able to recover, but that is not the case with most of the lodges that I know of. In my admittedly limited experience, most lodges – even the ones that have a weak officer’s line – tend to put a new officer (who is usually a new member as well) in a Steward’s chair, although I’ve seen some go right into the Junior Deacon’s spot. One of my co-members likes to say “From a dead level to a living Senior Deacon”, and he’s unfortunately only half joking at times.

But barring those more extreme cases, by the time one is a Deacon, you can expect to have been around the lodge for a year or two and to have met a fair number of the more active members. I have explained to new Deacons that it’s time to stop being shy; stop hiding in the kitchen and start greeting your brothers at the door, run some errands for the Worshipful, and certainly get the names of any visiting brothers – especially the ones with purple aprons, signifying some rank with the Grand Lodge. It may not mean anything to you now, but those guys are your Worshipful Master’s supervisors, and part of your job is to make things a bit easier for him. But beyond that, if you make a point to meet and greet people at the door, then you’ll both get to know more of your brothers from your own lodge and from other lodges, and you’ll make your lodge more friendly to visitors.

I told the following story for the benefit of the new Deacons at a seminar back in February. The room had over a hundred new officers, plus a few dozen of Grand Lodge officers, District Deputies, and other Masonic types.

Back when I was a Junior Warden, I visited another lodge, and I happened to pull into the parking lot at the same time as someone else. I waited until he parked and went over to say hello. I didn’t recognize him, so I introduced myself as we walked to the door. I asked if he was a member there, and he replied that he wasn’t sure, but that after tonight it would have something to do with that. Ah… that explained the “deer in the headlights” look; he was the new Entered Apprentice candidate and it so happened that I stopped by on the degree night. So I told him that he was joining a great lodge, lots of friendly people, that I visit once in a while, and that I’m sure he’ll enjoy his new lodge.

Just as we were walking in the door, a few guys I knew were coming outside for a cigarette. I told the candidate that I would see him later, and he continued inside while I stopped to chat. We only stayed outside until they had finished their cigarettes, perhaps 10 minutes, 15 at the most. We went back into the lodge to get warm, where I was absolutely stunned, no, mortified by what I saw:

The candidate was still standing right inside the doorway.

Immediately, I asked if anyone had come to see him. He shook his head, so I asked him who his sponsor was. I didn’t know the name, but there were about 40 guys in the meeting hall, so I took him right over to a few of the guys that I recognized and made sure that they would take care of him. I was both embarrassed and angry, even though this was not my own lodge.

At this point in my story, the room had fallen dead silent; I think that suddenly just about everyone in the room felt almost as embarrassed for our fraternity as I had been two years before. And while this was a cautionary tale for the new guys, an example as to why a lodge should always have a few guys keeping an eye on the door looking for visitors, I think that everyone should be aware that such a simple oversight will completely negate the ideals of brotherhood that we try to emulate.

I don’t have any cute or witty ending to this tale. I understand that the candidate eventually took all of his degrees, but I have the feeling that he’s probably not an active member of his lodge. It’s too bad that while we bemoan the fact that our membership is dwindling that we’re not more aware of the little things that help “spread the cement” in our own relationships.

Tao of Masonry | Freemasonry | Masonry

I have a small manufacturing business, and my company is in the middle of the process of becoming certified to an AS-9100 / ISO-9000 Quality Standard. For those not familiar with this, it’s a way of organizing the processes within a company to make sure that everything that needs to be done is carefully documented and those instructions are then passed on to everyone involved in any particular product.

So, I’m sitting at my desk, trying to catch up on all the paperwork that mysteriously multiplies when one is on vacation when I get the call from Jim, a young brother currently serving as my Junior Warden and as the Secretary for our Temple Corporation. In Connecticut, most lodges have a separate board that manages the affairs of the building and grounds. Because I didn’t use the word “No” in time, I happen to be the President… but that’s another story waiting to be written.

“Tom, you’ll never in a million years believe what just happened.”

Knowing that Jim is involved in local politics, I resist the urge to tell him that I’d never believe anything a politician tells me anyway. “What’s going on?”

“You know how they were supposed to dig up the area for a little footing wall on the side of the building?”

Of course I knew. But hearing the question phrased that way made me jump to several possible outcomes too horrible to contemplate. I could feel myself wincing as I asked him “Do I even want to know?”

“They dug up the entire section, all the way to the front of the building,” he said.

“Uh…”

“For some reason they thought that they were doing the foundation for an entire handicap access ramp. They tore off the steps to the side door, and it looks like they might have broken the sewer line, and …”

His cell phone cut out. I waited a few minutes and dialed back.

“Yeah, there’s definitely a broken sewer or drain line or something, and they might have cracked a gas line, too,” he continued. “And we can’t get into the building now because they dug right up to the front door, and we don’t have keys to the back door, so we’ll have to get a locksmith down here.”

Well, at least they didn’t run the backhoe through the side of the building, right?

Confident that things couldn’t get much worse, we spent the next hour and several phone calls getting information and trying to straighten out the apparent miscommunication.

Like many small New England towns, Southington has a number of small buildings built close together around the town green. Friendship Lodge is located in the old home of former Gov. Marcus Holcomb, a 3 story house built in the mid 1800s and bought from the family in the late 1930s. The old building on the left (to the south) was replaced by a small brick office building years ago, and the current owner has been remodeling the outside to add a drive-thru window for the new tenant – a local bank. Our lodge is leasing the little strip of land between our buildings to him in exchange for his doing some remodeling and repairs on our admittedly deteriorating home. He did a great job with the back entrance, which is the one that we tend to use. Our next project was to make a small footing wall on which we would – eventually – build a handicap access ramp. Since the drive-thru area was right next to that section, it seemed like a good idea to make the wall while the bank was under construction. When they put in the driveway, on the edge of it they were supposed to dig a narrow, shallow trench in order to place some footings.

Apparently the communication broke down somewhere.

Now, knowing that my business is in a very quality conscious industry, one might think that I rarely see such huge mistakes and that I’m taking this opportunity to rant and rave about how good communication is imperative.

Hah! Were that only true.

I don’t blame the construction crew for this. I don’t blame the contractor, the bank, nor the owner of the building. Hard as this may be to believe in these lawsuit conscious times, I really don’t blame anybody at all. Stuff simply happens.

Recently, one of my customers in the aerospace industry sent me a print for a part that they needed made. The print was originally drawn in the 1960s, and some of the dimensions were not specifically drawn in; one needed to calculate several critical dimensions from the information given about certain others. While anyone with decent math skills could do it, I had to ask myself why it would even be necessary. My own math skills, honed by years of reading similarly vague prints, is very good, but even I’ve been known to mistype a number on a calculator or to miss a line on a sine table. We spent a couple of hours with our customer to make sure that everyone would measure and interpret the drawing in the same way. So, why didn’t our customer – another AS-9100 certified company – simply redraw it to be more clear? Simple: the print was fine back in 1966, so why change now?

We machined the part and sent it out for a complex electroplating process in which a type of plating had to be deposited on one section and other coatings applied to another section. Our supplier was an ISO-9000 company and was approved by a dozen other aerospace companies for their electroplating processes. Naturally, when the part came back to us it was wrong. They claimed that the drawing wasn’t clear enough.

Keep in mind, now, that we have three companies, all with a professional commitment to better communication to ease the process along and to ensure that there are no mistakes. The thing that constantly amazes me is that the sheer number of screwups in everyday life aren’t bigger and more frequent than they already are.

Of course communication is important to us; without it, we couldn’t have a culture, let alone a civilization. But despite the wonderful modes of expression in our language, we so often fail to communicate our essential meaning. We can paint glorious verbal pictures but can not manage to create drawings that are easy to understand. As Masons, we acknowledge the importance of our symbols and ceremonies; indeed, most of our degree work is taken up in explaining the meanings behind various tools and implements of our craft, and we explain that we believe that communicating through symbols is the best way to pass along knowledge. Even our meetings are described as “Stated Communications”, at which we have “trestle boards” and “tracing boards” to help us explain and teach each other those esoteric truths.

So, why is it so much easier to communicate ancient wisdom than to explain where and how to dig a ditch?

Friendship Lodge – Building Improvements

When I left work a few hours later I stopped by the lodge to see the damage. Fortunately no sewer or gas lines were broken – the workers had dug through some old drainage lines that are no longer in use. But I did see the huge misunderstanding in the form of a trench 5 feet wide, 5 feet deep and 30 feet long (3 and 5 being important Masonic numbers); enough to bury several Hirams, and with nary a sprig of acacia in sight with which to mark the spot.

Tao of Masonry | Freemasonry | Masonry | Southington | AS9100 | ISO-9000 | Construction | Friendship Lodge | Communication

When I started this blog… well, when I tried to start this blog last fall, it was my intention to write a little bit about the things that I was doing during my year as Master of Friendship Lodge in Southington, Connecticut. After a number of false starts, I finally got this off the ground, and heading in what I think is a good direction. I’ve decided that I want to post original content, that is, my own thoughts and ramblings. There are scads of great Masonic resources out in cyberspace, and I certainly don’t need to duplicate them, nor do I have the time or resources to research and publish the way that some of the more prolific authors do.

I’ve noticed that as I move from Usenet to the blogosphere, my blogroll – the list of other Masonic blogs that I read and respond to on a regular basis – is gradually increasing. One of the interesting things about blogging is that when someone on your blogroll “discovers” a new site, blog, or item of interest, it’s only a matter of time before you’re checking it out yourself… and quite possibly adding it to your own list.

That said, I thought it was a wonderful coincidence when Masonic pundit Tim Bryce published this essay for Masters halfway through their year in the East, nicely coinciding with my own labored ruminations. Tim’s article is less wordy and more useful than mine, and I urge both Masters and upcoming Wardens to check it out.

Freemasonry | Masonry | Tim Bryce | Senior Warden | Time Management | Planning | Tao of Masonry

I would like to say, with all due modesty, of course, that I was invited to sit on an important Grand Lodge committee the other day. In fact, I’d also like to think that I was asked because the other members desired to hear my input, and respect my keen insights and quick wit. In fact, literally half the people recognized me and called me in to sit down.

Yeah, well, I’d like to say that. Unfortunately, it’s much more likely that I was asked because I happened to stick my head into a room in which there were only 2 people, one of whom knew me and wondered what the hell I was doing wandering around the building.

Good thing I’ve got a pretty good imagination to make up for my lack of ego, huh?

As it happened, I was looking for another committee meeting which I had thought was in that room. Having nothing better to do for a couple of hours, I sat in on this one, increasing the membership by 50%, as summer vacations and functions of appendant orders caused most of the other members to be absent that day. The Chair introduced me to the other member, a relatively new Mason who was trying to help re-write some of the new GL rules that this year’s Most Worshipful wanted to implement.

As I listened to the changes and the reasons for them, I began to think about that old quote attributed to Otto von Bismark about laws and sausages, and how it’s best not to see either of them in the making. Some of the discussion involved not only interpreting what the GM would want, but also trying to implement the new regulations in such a way as to not cause hard feelings for people in other positions who might be affected, nor to make it difficult for those who need to implement the rules, nor to cause people not even connected with the section to feel slighted.

Feel slighted? Hey, we’re all Masons, right? We’re all working for a common cause, right? Anyone would immediately look beyond their own area to see how it impacted the greater good of the Craft, right?

Yes, I’m a new Mason. Does it still show?

Freemasonry is an organization run on volunteer efforts, but like any organization there is a political component that one must understand. I’m using the word “political” in its widest sense; any organization with more than two people needs to take into account the strengths and weaknesses of its various members and apply them where most appropriate. The problems come in when some of the members need extra incentives or motivations for doing the things that need doing: some members want to feel that they’ve made an important contribution and want to be recognized for that. This in itself isn’t the problem, the problem is how to recognize and reward those people. In a non-paying organization, recognition and awards are often the currency, the speculative wages, if you will.

Before I joined the fraternity, I used to volunteer time, money, and energy to other causes, some of which would recognize my input with dinners or plaques. I pointedly told one chairperson that my own time is valuable, and when I donate, I want all of it to go toward the organization, so please not to waste any of it by spending money on a plaque or a dinner for me. Hey, look, a couple of bucks on a fancy pen with the organization’s name on it is one thing; treating me to a $50 dinner or a $20 plaque is wasteful – in my opinion, of course.

But that’s me. Other people really cherish their name on a brass strip, or being called up for a photograph in front of a group of their peers. While I disdain publicity (yes, I know I’m writing a web log, so please shut up), I’m also not oblivious to the fact that some people will work like crazy for such compensation. A brother elsewhere has whispered good counsel in my ear, explaining that if someone is willing to pitch in all year long to get a project off the ground, or to set up booths, or to flip pancakes, and if all it takes is a $10 pin and his name in the paper, then what’s the problem? And in that light, I have to agree.

Because I own a business and am used to just running things my own way, I too often get focused on the process itself, instead of considering how the process affects the other people involved. This makes me a little too quick to plan things and get them started, and I find that I’ve needed to learn to take a step back and let other people haggle over some of the details for a bit. It gives them a sense of ownership and an opportunity to “buy in” to the project because they know that they’ve had some input. And don’t get me wrong – I truly feel that this is important, especially when all of those involved get only speculative wages. My own impatience when trying to figure out all the details is my problem, and because I’m ultimately more concerned with what makes the fraternity operate better, I’m trying to take more consideration for that.

And that brings me back to my sitting in on this committee meeting. It’s difficult enough to get people to help with some of the heavy lifting, so we need to be as accomodating and appreciative as possible for everyone who puts in an effort. I have this theory that out of the 16,000 Masons in Connecticut, only 1,600 show up at lodge meetings and other functions, and out of those, only 160 are probably doing the work to organize and make things run smoothly… or as smoothly as can be expected in our volunteer organization.

Oh, and did I mention the reason that I had popped my head into that particular room? I was looking for the committee that I actually serve on. Turns out I had the right room, but the wrong time. Well, more like wrong day. My own meeting was, er, an entire week later.

Volunteers, eh? I guess you get what you pay for.

Freemasonry | Volunteer | Laws and Sausages | Tao of Masonry

I’ve never quite understood why most lodges in Connecticut – indeed, in New England – close down for a couple of months in the summer. This is generally – and erroneously – referred to as “going dark”, an expression that should only be applied to lodges that actually give up their charter and close for good. I’m sure that there was some Yankee economy involved in this, but nobody has been able to explain it to me.

But getting ready for the summer break was the reason that Dave (the best SW east of the Mississippi), and I were sitting in the lodge after our St. John’s Day observance, eating donuts, drinking coffee, and speculating on the low turnout of brothers for the service at the historic First Congregational Church on the town green across the street from our lodge building. Graduation parties, involvement with other activities, sleeping late all came up… and suddenly, a question that had been napping fitfully in the back of my brain woke up, stretched a bit, and popped into the forefront of my thought processes.

Did I, um, remember to announce the event in the first place?

For many of us, being the Master of the lodge is our first time in a managerial position, and while we’ve prepared ourselves by honing our ritual work for our new position, learning the proper introduction for the seemingly endless titles of Grand Lodge officers, and getting the phone number of the Grand Lodge secretary, most of us aren’t prepared for the real secret of the Master’s chair: Almost none of the things that were important last year will apply to you this year. That said, you’d think that those of us with years of managerial experience would sail through the year with nary a slip, right?

At this point, perhaps I should further add to my embarrassment and mention that I actually own a business. So much for my own managerial skills. The fact that we make money is a testament to the well-organized and hard-working people who keep me on task. I’ll be the first to admit (albeit only by a slim margin) that “organized” is not one of the words usually used to describe me. This is evident when one sees the number of people each day who keep asking me if I’ve called this person or filled out that form. This is also evident because I see that I’ve gotten way off track from where I was going with this essay.

Anyway, Dave, who is finally getting a little nervous about next year, started talking about some of the projects and plans that he’d like to accomplish, and in listening to him I began to feel a little disappointed in myself for not carrying out all of the plans that I began outlining last year at this time; moreso because he mentioned several of the same things that I had wanted to do, myself.

On the way home I reflected on how things seemed to start going wrong right from the second meeting. Maybe not wrong so much as the normal flubs and fluffs of everyday life seemed to get in the way. I’d planned an EA degree for the second meeting in February, but the candidates hadn’t been available for investigation, which meant that we couldn’t vote in time, and the entire degree series ended up getting pushed out a month. That messed up the scheduling of certain other programs for other nights – not necessarily a bad thing, but one of the goals I had set was to have something interesting at most, if not all of the meetings. I wrote about the several changes of schedule in order to have the MM degree at a lodge halfway across the state; the last meeting before we close for the summer is generally the Awards Night (Ah! That explains why I had the bad mojo!).

But I’ve got the summer off, so now isn’t the time to dwell on what didn’t go right – it’s time to look forward to 4 more months (4 being a number with deep Masonic significance), which for the most part are already programmed. An EA in mid-September, FC in mid-October, the Past Masters MM in mid-November, then elections and the annual meeting in December. We have a dinner scheduled for one of the nights, so that leaves only 2 or 3 “open” meeting nights.

Gosh, re-reading that makes it seem like the year is pretty much over!

I’m not upset that things didn’t go as planned; part of being a grown-up is that we understand that some things are simply out of our control, and we learn to adapt to new situations. On one night when plans fell through a couple of days before the meeting, a brother – one of the several engineers in our lodge – created a set of button controlled lights and we had a Masonic Jeopardy game. Another night, when we should have been having our first EA degree, we ended up with a “mini” awards night, at which a brother presented something to the lodge, and I presented several awards that hadn’t arrived in time for the previous WM to present.

And of course, some things did go well, perhaps even better than planned. We had a St. Patrick’s dinner, which was served by the Rainbow chapter that we sponsor. We had a Cinco de Mayo night, and while I did not wear a sombrero, we did have a visit from a newspaper reporter that was looking to do a story on the local fraternal and civic groups. We gave him so much information that he ended up writing the entire article just on our lodge. And although a local event was rained out, the next night a group of us went to see “The DaVinci Code” as a group – meeting first for some pizza to get us into the mood (The 8 triangular slices being of deep-dish Masonic significance, you understand).

More importantly, I think, is that the lodge overall seems to be functioning smoothly. Officers and members seem to enjoy coming to lodge and attendance seems to increase a bit with each meeting. I never lack for volunteers when I ask for committees to investigate new candidates, plan projects, or take a degree part. In fact, we’ve never had a last minute no-show; the couple of times that an officer thought he’d have a problem, they’d made arrangements with someone else to keep things covered. And after meetings, guys and visitors are always hanging around for hours afterward, talking about Masonry, computers, gossiping, and generally enjoying themselves.

Hmm. The lodge seems to be having fun. That can’t be such a bad thing, right? So I’m going to stop worrying about the plans that didn’t materialize and about the programs that didn’t work. I’ve got two months in which I can take stock of what went right, and to fine tune my plans for the fall.

Now, where the hell did I leave my Palm Pilot?

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