Brethren and our extended Masonic family network,
This month we are returning to in person stated meetings. Masks are required. Winter dress. Thanksgiving dinner. See you at the lodge!
Recently our award committee came to me with recommendations for recognizing two outstanding brothers in our lodge, recommendations I wholeheartedly agreed with, and so at last month’s stated meeting I was very proud to announce brothers Eric Forrestall being awarded Mason Of The Year and Hector Marroquin, PM as receiving the Hiram Award. We’ll have a dinner at some point to properly present these awards, but before we do, make sure to elbow bump these two worthy brothers.
Are you feeling “Masonic Burnout” or are you excited to return to lodge? If you see Masonry as important for the world and are afraid it may slip away into history without our constant effort or if you’ve been lonely without the fellowship of your brethren at lodge, you’re probably excited to get back. If you’re waiting to get a degree, I bet you are really excited we’re getting back to work.
On the other hand if you’re an officer that has been ‘round the chairs several times or more, back to back, you might be feeling a bit like you’re going to miss Zoom and maybe a little bit dreading the upcoming need to turn up our energy on memorizing and practicing again. Being active in Freemasonry is, well, work. Running a lodge is no different than any business, and there are a lot of responsibilities that have to be seen to. The difference is that, except for a few positions (and those are woefully underpaid for the time it takes), most everybody is working for free. Free labor equates to hobby time, and a hobby is supposed to be a fun distraction to one’s working life. Hard work can be fun. Hard work is fun, so long as we are getting something positive out of it.
What motivates you to keep doing a job over and over and avoid burnout? I believe a common reason men seek out membership in a fraternity is to be in an environment of brotherly love and affection. I think that’s the emotional juice that keeps brothers engaged year after year. We should help brothers to have a good time while they go through the chairs. We should make being an officer look like a challenging but emotionally rewarding time.
Some of us came for the secrets and discovered brotherly love. Some came for the love, and discovered the secrets.
People like being recognized for the work they do. It might be poor work sometimes, but few of us have wiz-bang corporate level leadership skills, right? I like a loving brother’s hand on my shoulder telling me I’m doing ok even when I know my performance is marginal. And when brothers do exceptional work, they should be rewarded verbally and with accolades (Mason of the Year, Hiram Award, a special dinner, etc.). We should strive to make everyone in our life feel good about themselves, and most certainly our brothers. To keep someone coming back to the hard work over and over and over, they have to be getting some good “emotional food”.
I believe Freemasonry has existed for millennia, and I firmly believe it will continue far into the future. Nothing that happens in a lodge today has any lasting impact for the future except this: the furtherance of brotherly love, or I would prefer to speak on a global scale and say: the furtherance of love.
Most of us, when we come into leadership in the lodge, do so without a high level of leadership skill and experience. We must rely on the guidance of the secretary, the inspector, and past masters. This is why it is so important, and I wrote about this years ago, that past masters of the lodge, wherever possible, continue to go to lodge, and, as much as possible, even attend practices. I would go further and suggest that current lodge leadership actively engage these Worshipful brothers. The most important benefit to a lodge, and this gets to the point, is that a lodge does not know it’s identity and culture without knowing it’s history. Without the past masters around to share the lodge’s earlier vision, culture, and history, we get a new culture in the lodge every half a dozen years or so. While an organization that has a culture that swings with each year’s leadership can have the benefit of attracting
different kinds of people every few years, the downside is you might cause burnout in those that joined for a culture that no longer exists. Past master participation in lodge can smooth out culture change, but only if the past masters support the change. If they resist, the change will occur anyway, but there will be strife instead of smooth.
I have read many stories from people who have died and went through the life review experience and then came back to life, and they all report that the life review is one of experiencing how you made other people feel throughout our life. I believe this is a significant reason we are experiencing life as humans. Treating everyone as members of a single family, recognition that all of us are members of one species inhabiting a space ship that is going endlessly in circles is a message of Freemasonry. The message here is to treat everyone as if they are yourself, which, ultimately, is exactly how things are.
As Masons we accept everyone as being the same entity, the Supreme Architect animating each and every living and non-living thing in existence in the same way. When we look out our eyes or think our thoughts, all of us, each and every single person on the planet, experiences the awareness behind thinking and seeing as exactly the same thing, at every single eternal moment. We literally are one giant living organism sharing a single awareness but making a mistake of distinction when we say “I experience the world, therefor I am unique and separate”. As soon as the “I” thought arises, we create this separation, and what ends up happening is this separation is what we focus on, and completely ignore the originating source which is constantly always animating that separation.
It’s like we have to eat a big ‘ole humble pie and realize nothing we do matters except spreading the cement of love and affection. Note I left out the word “brotherly”, because if we could get the whole world to behave this way we would achieve the civility in the world that Freemasonry pines for. If everyone acted like they loved everyone, and everyone treated everyone with respect and dignity, that would pretty much be a completely different world than we have today.
I am forever your brother in Freemasonry, Michael McKeown
