The Tao of Masonry

Recycling? Wait, that was a typo. I meant Bicycling.

Like our ancient brethren, I’ve been working six days a week for quite a while, and the little bit of free time I’ve had has been devoted to household chores, family time, and exercising. Those of you who follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and more recently on Google Plus know that I try to get several bicycle rides in every week, ranging from 5 to 25 miles. When my family finally dragged me away for a week’s vacation at Cape Cod (Massachusetts), I brought my SUV-bike: a 1995 GT Outpost non-suspension mountain bike that I outfitted with kevlar-lined, puncture resistant street tires. I love my road bike, but I hate fixing flats.

The Cape has some fantastic bike paths, built upon old railroad lines. Unfortunately, once you’ve gone from one end to the other, the scenery gets a bit dull. Despite the traffic (Cape Cod is a popular vacation spot in the northeastern US), I wanted to take some detours to make the rides more interesting. With no actual goal in mind, I decided to cycle to the handful of lodges in the area of the Cape near where we were staying.

The first on the list was Pilgrim Lodge in Harwich. No, there’s no lodge number; apparently back in the old days Massachusetts had a Grand Lodge of Ancients and a Grand Lodge of Moderns, and when the two merged, everybody agreed to drop the numbers so as to avoid the “Older is better” game that we Masons love to play. You can’t see it from this side, but the first floor of the building is rented by a liquor store. I only mention it because lodges in many parts of the US are so dry that they don’t even allow people in the liquor industry to be members.

The next day I went to Mt. Horeb lodge in Dennis. As you can see, this is a full-service lodge, having an OES chapter and a Shrine hangout. Nothing was happening on the morning that I was there.

Okay, I didn’t actually bike the 100 mile round trip up to Provincetown to see King Hiram’s Lodge. We just happened to be there as part of a family outing. I do recommend that you look at the pictures of this old, historic lodge.

This is St. Martin’s lodge in Chatham. I made a special trip to get here, simply because I figured this to be the easternmost lodge in Massachusetts. The name is interesting; we  often see lodges named after St. John (one or the other), so I often wonder how a lodge ends up being named after one of the more obscure saints.

The final lodge I managed to visit that week was Universal Lodge in Orleans. Located near Nauset Beach, this lodge had the coolest marker out in front.

  Sharp-eyed readers will spot that this isn’t a lodge. I just posted it because Massachusetts has got to be the only place where you will find a traffic rotary (sometimes called a roundabout) on a bike path. Unlike the other traffic circles in this state, at least there weren’t three dozen cyclists blocking the way and blaring their horns. But it was a pretty busy place every time I passed by.

I’m not a hard-core cyclist; each lodge was within 15 miles of Dennisport, so each day I cycled about 30 miles over the course of a few hours. I ended up having gone about 130 miles, and I got to see some of the sights that I might have otherwise missed in just taking a jaunt in the car — especially with all the vacation traffic. Plus, I got some healthy exercise, and felt less guilty about eating the vacation junk food that I don’t normally eat at home. A quick online search finds that there are a few dozen motorcycle clubs for Freemasons. Does anyone know about one for bicyclists?

We Masons love the idea of learning our ritual and ceremonies in a word-perfect fashion. Well, Past Masters love that idea, especially if it means that some newbie officer should be doing the learning while the Past Master does the  complaining  coaching from the sidelines.

Some jurisdictions in the US have a “mouth to ear” tradition, in which the ritual is taught by a proven instructor to one person, or a small group. Other states have printed copies of the rituals and ceremonies that are passed out to (or sometimes, purchased by)  a member. Some states have such monitors written in plain English, while others might use a shorthand or some other kind of code in order to disguise the words – as if you couldn’t already get them from some website, or purchased in book form.

Connecticut is one of those states that has a ritual monitor in plain English; that is, if you can call the sometimes tortured grammatical constructions and archaic words and phrases “plain.” They have had this plain English version for at least ten years before I became a Masons, which was almost another ten years ago. The English version grew out of an older version that used two books: one being encoded (really, just using abbreviations), and the other a key; that version had been used for quite some time.

Recently, some people have been suggesting that we might want to go back to using the abbreviated word code. I have found that the people suggesting this are either old-timers who learned that way in the first place, or young, new guys who are geeky about Masonry. The old-timers claim that people will learn ritual better, since they will have to work harder, and the young-timers are usually the kind of geeks who would, given the opportunity, have been taking a Klingon class.

I used to pooh-pooh the idea because I learned ritual using the plain English books, and I think I have done rather well, at least, if you don’t count the fact that I often find myself substituting some of the archaic words with synonyms that roll more readily off the tongue. But the way that I learn these passages isn’t necessarily the best way for everybody, so I concede that the coded books might have some merit.

That’s why I found it interesting to see an article on Lifehacker this past week, which revisited a study in which  schoolchildren were given copies of material to learn; some were given good copies, while others were given copies in hard-to-read fonts. Researchers discovered that the children who had to work harder to read the material had the best retention.

From the BBC News Article:

Researchers found that, on average, those given the harder-to-read fonts actually recalled 14% more.

They believe that presenting information in a way that is hard to digest means a person has to concentrate more, and this leads to “deeper processing” and then “better retrieval” afterwards.

It is an example of the positive effects of what scientists call “disfluency”.

“Disfluency is just a subjective feeling of difficulty associated with any mental task,” explained psychology Prof Daniel Oppenheimer, one of the co-authors of the study.

“So if something is hard to see or hear, it feels disfluent… We’d found that disfluency led people to think harder about things.

[...]

Students given the harder-to-read materials scored higher in their classroom assessments than those in the control group. This was the case across a range of subjects – from English, to Physics to History.

The lead author of the study Connor Diemand-Yauman told the BBC that psychology is revealing all sorts of “counter-intuitive” results in the field of education.

“Everyday psychologists are showing that seemingly insignificant factors can have big effects on how we process and retain information.”

[...]

It’s an interesting idea, and while I’ll concede that there may be some benefit to the idea that learning ritual in code is inherently better, I think that there are too many variables for this to be definitive.  Again, from the article:

“What really matters most when reading is mindfulness… it’s not printing things badly that’s needed, but more thoughtful reading”.

[...]

“Obviously, if you can’t read it at all, you can’t learn it. At some point you may get so annoyed that you give up without trying! Different people probably have different thresholds.

And in my opinion, that is what holds so many members back; they simply get annoyed at trying to read something that they just don’t understand. Will presenting it in code make the archaic usages any more attractive?

First of all, I’m excited that Charles Tirrell of Masonic Renaissance has found the time and inclination to get back into blogging.  Charles was my counterpart District Grand Lecturer in the New Haven part of the state, then moved on to be an Associate Grand Marshall, and I now see that in April he will be the District Deputy in that area. I extend my heartfelt congratulations, and I know that he’ll do an excellent job.

I like Charles; he’s young and progressive minded, and he’s the kind of person I have in mind whenever I hear the (sadly clichéed) expression “The future of Masonry.”  Charles has consistently pushed for our Grand Lodge to adopt new technologies in order to reach — and be relevant to — the newer members of our fraternity. He’s bright, and well-spoken, and modest about his achievements.

And he prefers Apple computer products.

Apparently, I have so little going on in my own life right now that I have taken to ribbing friends about their choice of technology, much in the way many people poke fun at one’s favorite sports team, choice of automobile, or taste in literature. This ribbing is further driven by the fact that for the last year, my office and home networks have been plagued by more computer problems than I’ve ever seen; obviously I’m envious of anyone who is actually happy with their computer, and confess to some distrust at anyone who doesn’t have some anger, annoyance, or irritation with their gadgets.

To his credit, Charles has refused to take the troll bait; although for that matter, I don’t particularly think about Apple products except when I hear from him or a few other similarly inclined friends.

Until yesterday, that is.

Some of you may remember that last year I wrote a post that made light of the similarities between Freemasonry and the GNU/Linux community. I should have remembered that satire is based in reality.

Yesterday, while reading Lifehacker, I ran across a couple of articles about how Apple is introducing a new way to get software, entitled respectively, Why the Mac App Store Sucks, and Why You Might Really Like the Mac App Store In The Long Run. And suddenly, the pictures jumped out at me. Why?

Here’s the logo for the Mac App Store:

Umm… does this look familiar to you?

For reference, here’s a couple of random images from a Google image search.

A Past Master's symbol from some areas of the world.

An older, lesser known version

I mean, of all the possible combinations that the graphic artists could come up with, they riff on the Square and Compasses?

Coincidence? I think not.

Although I’ve long explored the twisted logic of the conspiracy theorists, I don’t have any background with regard to the twisted logic of Apple users. I believe, however, that this bears looking into.

Yes, Friendship Lodge is back for another two weekends at the Southington Apple Harvest Festival. Once again we are featuring our fried apple wedges, and despite the damp weather, the crowds are lining up for a taste.