Greetings, Sir Knights! I’m sorry to have missed a couple weeks of messages. Some of you have been kind enough to email and check on me. I’ve been fine, but a combination of work commitments and medical appointments for my beloved Lady Debbie (recovering from a total Achilles tendon tear back in October) have taken up the last couple of weeks. Thankfully, work is fine and Debbie is just one week away from losing the boot for good.
We are less than 180 days from the start of the 69th Triennial Conclave in Salt Lake City, Utah. I look forward to seeing many of you there. We have a lot of work to do as the voting members of our Order, and the greater the participation, the more voices which will be heard. There are some very good answers to the challenges and opportunities we are facing, and some of you have those answers. Please, join us in Salt Lake City and share those answers.
Later this week, I’ll be in western Pennsylvania to speak to a Commandery about ritual and ritual proficiency. My presentation will look at how these apply to our proclamation that we are the premiere Masonic body for all Christian Freemasons, and investigate if we are holding up our end in that statement. If you’d like to hear it in person, plan to attend Damascus Commandery 95, Souderton, Pennsylvania, this coming Thursday, March 7. Otherwise, it will be posted at the website shortly thereafter.
Following the Thursday presentation, I’ll be en route to Fort Wayne, Indiana, for the 2024 East Central Department Conference. I’m really looking forward to being back home in Indiana, where I grew up, went to prep school and college, visited my first Masonic lodge after being raised, served in my first Masonic office, and wrote my first Masonic paper. It’s good to be back on the road, believe it or not, and being able to see fellow Knights in person.
Many of our Commanderies are in their “spring cycle” for conferring the Orders. My Maryland commandery recently teamed up with several others, including Maryland Commandery 1 (instituted 1790), to confer the Red Cross and Malta on about a dozen worthy candidates, and will be conferring the Order of the Temple on these men and another half-dozen on a date to be determined in the next few weeks. It’s exciting to see this kind of growth, and with it, the ability for more Commanderies to build their ritual teams and skills so that they can confer the Orders organically, and not require assistance from neighboring Commanderies. At the same time, by joining together to create mini-classes of candidates, the Orders can be conferred by some of the best ritualists in the area. Neither model is better than the other, because the most important thing is that we show the candidates the best work for some of the most beautiful and meaningful rituals in Freemasonry.
We should all be looking at our work, our ritual teams, and quite bluntly, the fees we charge to receive the Orders. If our fees are too low, then we are sending a sign that the Orders are not valuable, and that is often reflected in the quality of the ritual work performed. The Templar Orders are a premium product and contain premium lessons for the candidate. We should expect the costs to reflect that premium offering, and our ritual work–and ritual equipment–must also be premium. Tickets for the road performance of a Broadway show can run $100 or more per person, while the local high school production of that same show might cost $10 per person. Same show, but different quality and different expectations. Are we providing that professional, $100-per-ticket performance of our work, or are we charging off-Broadway prices for a high school production? I would hope the former, but I fear all too often it is the latter. Our ritual casts may not be filled with clones of Ernest Borgnine, Bronson Pinchot, or Richard Dreyfus, but we should be pretty good at our work–both spoken and movements.
And so, my dear friends, I leave you with this to ponder until next time. Are we marching forward in the right direction, or are we in need of some adjustments and changes in order to provide that which is so vital to our growth as an order? Discuss amongst yourselves, but feel free to let me know what you are thinking, too!