Tours of the Portland Masonic Temple

The Masonic Temple in Portland, Maine has been put up for sale. As a Past Master of Triangle Lodge No. 1, housed in this beautiful temple, I too am sad to see this day come. Unfortunately, the building is simply too expensive for our lowered membership numbers to maintain. The building is owned by the Masonic Trustees of Portland and its head, also the current Master of Triangle Lodge, loves the building perhaps more than anyone else in the State of Maine. He has arranged for an open house on Saturday, December 13th. The facility will be opened to the public from 10am to 2pm with tours of all of its historic halls. At some future day all of this grandeur will be lost to history, so take this opportunity to see what is inside this mysterious and beautiful building. Here is a preview: commercial.

Christmas Season

Today we bought our Christmas tree from the South Portland Rotary. Normally, Tandy and the girls pick out the tree and my function is little more than holder, turner and lifter. I heard this described in Oklahoma once as, "A strong back and a weak mind." This year, however, it was I who found the perfect tree. The family was in agreement and now it sits warming in its stand in the living room. While I have never been a big Christmas guy, I do love how the tree makes the house smell.

MobileMe Calendaring

Being forced to use Exchange for both my work and personal calendars has gotten on my last nerve. I am trying out Apple's MobileMe service in the hopes that I can have two push calendars at the same time. There has been little in the way of luck so far. I created two calendars with one event each, but neither has successully pushed yet...

On the other hand I just upgraded the-company-who-cannot-be-named to AccuRev 4.7.0 with minimal hassles. Some of the new features are awesome!! I will write about that tomorrow.

A New Season Begins

After a short break from the hectic schedule of a District Officer, the 17th is waking up with a bang! Before the first September event has even occurred I am already scheduled for ten evenings. Pretty wild for there being only twenty-two weeknights available. It is great to see the lodges with so much activity, to many candidates is a good thing. I am more than a little worried about my potential for burnout this year.

I did manage to read a lot of great books over the summer: Committed to the Flames by Morris and de Hoyos, William Preston by Dyer, Freemasonry: Secrets, Symbols, Significance by MacNulty, Knights Templar of the Middle East by Prince Michael, The Magus of Freemasonry by Churton, and a ton of reference materials for my paper and the MEALS Committee. Hopefully, this will provide materials for me to use during my brief Masonic education talks.

Breaking the Law

While I have never written a real book review, I have certainly given talks about books and recommend many of them. I know the old aphorism, "Never judge a book by its cover." Added to this appears to be an common law to never review or recommend a book from its first quarter. The true value of a text is ascertained during its great middle and completing finish.

This is a law which I feel compelled to break. Work is terribly busy right now, so I have to work on this flight, but my take-off and landing book is "The Magus of Freemasonry" written by Tobias Churton. I have mentioned this author a number of times in my blog, since he impressed me with his book "The Golden Builders: Alchemists, Rosicrucians, First Freemasons." While at Borders last year I purchased Magus and sat it on my reading queue. What a shame...

The work is a biography of Elias Ashmole, the first man to record his own becoming an Accepted Mason, called today a speculative Freemason. The distinction between so-called "Free" and "Accepted" Masons makes for a pointless inter-jurisdictional debate today, but it meant a great deal during the 17th and 18th centuries. Bro. Ashmole was a famous man in his day as a founding member of the Royal Society, antiquarian and general lover of history, science and alchemy.

At this moment I am in the air over Massachusetts having read about 10% of the book while on the runway and through takeoff. Though I have hundreds of pages yet to read I must strongly recommend this work to all Masons interested in a search for knowledge and understanding of our real 17th and 18th century history. To the general reader, I offer this quotation from the book which, like the stone itself, fell on me and is still blossoming in my brain:

[Ashmole] inhabited a world where science and magick were still handmaidens to religion and philosophy. He was one of the last men of learning to enjoy that world before the family broke up. All too soon, science would leave home to plow her own furrow independently and at times in contempt of her troubled parents. Nevertheless, Ashmole was a founding member o the Royal Society - a harbinger of that fateful parting - and was himself unconcerned with theological disputes. The philosophy he espoused stood above them; and so did he.

If I were wiser and more skilled with words, I might be able to explain the powerful picture those words create in my head. Imagine the history of the Enlightenment period and the eventually antagonistic relationship between science and religion as a painting illuminated by fluorescent lighting. With these few sentences, Churton turns off the lights and opens a window allowing the work to be illuminated by pure sunlight. A new depth and character appears in the work, which was never noticed before.

All this on page two! If the rest of the book is even half this quality, then we should all own a copy of it.

Why Pay More?

I wanted to write about this earlier, but I wanted to avoid encouraging other bidders. Last week I engaged in a bidding war for a copy of the 1948 cipher, "The Correct Work for Maine." The question is, why would I be willing to pay significantly for a copy of that particular ritual?

Can any of our Maine ritualists answer that question?

The Wind Between the Atoms

Hard to imagine being mentioned in a print article in the Scottish Rite Journal. Thanks very much, Bro. Tresner for the reference in "The Wind Between the Atoms"

“Just another person of little note writing about ordinary things,” says the cutline at the top of the blog Dispatches from Maine, http://lily.org/blog. It is the blog of Christian Ratliff, 32°, “a thirtyish software developer living and working in [Portland] Maine.” Brother Ratliff is over-modest. His site contains some excellent writing, especially including material on Freemasonry and the Church of Rome.

First Inspection

Here in Maine, the District Education Representative is the right-hand man of the District Deputy Grand Master. I am very fortunate to be working with R.W. Bro. Walter Lamb, who is a big teddy bear and an all around good guy. It is his primary task to examine the records, financials and ritual of ever lodge under his care once per year. This event is a called the "Annual Inspection and Visitation" in our jurisdiction. The Secretary and Treasurer, unless they are new, generally do not sweat the experience at all, but the Master and his officers, whose ritual is being carefully examined, could loose a few pounds due to stress in that one evening.

We attended in the Inspection of R.W. Bro. Lamb's Mother Lodge, Presumpscot Lodge in Windham, this past Monday night. There was a great turnout to see his first Inspection and the two candidates were very attentive. I have little doubt they learned a great deal about the nature of our institution during their Fellow Craft Degree. Perhaps it is a sign of the economic times, but there was a well needed gift to our new District Deputy Grand Master. A Past DDGM, R.W. Bro. Jake Caldwell, remarked that lodges had been cooking a lot of spaghetti of late and poor Bro. Lamb's tuxedo shirt had been taking a lot of pink gunfire from the sauce. To help him endure the saucey onslaught Bro. Caldwell and his wife Judy presented Bro. Lamb a full size cloth bib with flags on the front and the square and compasses on the back. It reminds me why I often wear street clothes to dinner and change into suit or tuxedo before lodge!

This is going to be a great two years!

A Contribution to Maine

Working on the Masonic Education and Lodge Services Committee (MEALS) is simultaneously heavy work and a great pleasure. Rarely are we given an opportunity to marshal all so much information in so useful a pursuit. Over the last few months we have been reviewing and updating the "Instructor's Manual." This monumental collection of documents aim to help candidate coaches prepare themselves with suggestions for topics, interpretations of the ritual, and background on our Order and the degrees themselves.

For the most part this task is one of consultation and criticism, only rarely are we able to put something new into the texts. While reviewing the Fellow Craft Instructors Manual I finally had the chance to contribute a bit of new material, which was a real pleasure. As we worked through this document, it was apparent that there was insufficient detail about the symbolism of the "ancient and original Orders in Architecture." The previous paragraph discusses the first three steps in the "flight of winding stairs" and then briefly mentions the Orders in Architecture without additional information. I composed the following additional paragraph, which was accepted by the committee:

There is a hidden message in the first eight steps of the Fellow Craft Degree. Reflecting life around us, our knowledge of the Craft builds upon itself. The first three steps remind us of the three principal officers, which we were taught in the Entered Apprentice Degree represent wisdom, strength, and beauty. The “ancient original orders in architecture” also represent these same three principles. The Ionic column depicts an opened scroll, the very source of learning for the ancients, and represents wisdom. The Doric column is simple and sturdy and thereby demonstrates the essentials of strength. Finally, the Corinthian column is enriched with intricate floral designs on its capital, showing to the entire world its great craftsmanship and beauty. The principal officers, and King Solomon, King Hiram and Hiram Abif, whom they represent, are always depicted with these columns to cement our understanding of these ideas and encourage their application to our lives.

Role Changes

Since my last posting I have had a number of new responsibilities added to my Masonic plate. At the Annual Communication in May our Grand Master, M.W. Bro. Robert Landry, appointed me to the position of District Education Representative (DER) for the 17th Masonic District. The 17th is a Cumberland County region consisting of the lodges in Portland, South Portland, Westbrook, Scarborough, Gorham, Yarmouth and Standish. I have never been particularly interested in joining the purple aprons, so named for the color of a Grand Lodge apron, but the job is a genuinely interesting one.

The DER is responsible for assisting with Masonic education in his District. This includes organizing and hosting the Assistant Grand Lecturer with his School of Instruction, giving education presentations to the lodges, and coordinating other speakers. During the past few months, I have offered since my last posting I have had a number of new responsibilities added to my Masonic plate. At the Annual Communication in May our Grand Master, M.W. Bro. Robert Landry, appointed me to the position of District Education Representative (DER) for the 17th Masonic District. The 17th is a Cumberland County region consisting of the lodges in Portland, South Portland, Westbrook, Scarborough, Gorham, Yarmouth and Standish. I have never been particularly interested in joining the purple aprons, so named for the color of a Grand Lodge apron, but the job is a genuinely interesting one.

The DER is responsible for assisting with Masonic education in his District. This includes organizing and hosting the Assistant Grand Lecturer with his School of Instruction, giving education presentations to the lodges, and coordinating other speakers. During the past few months, I offered a few interesting programs including: “4^th Night” for Deering Lodge and “Masonic Etiquette” for Harmony Lodge. With any luck the renewed Grand Lodge Speaker's Bureau will provide an opportunity for a variety of speakers to get involved with Masonic education the District.

Another appointment given to me by M.W. Bro. Landry is as a member of the MEALS Committee, where MEALS is an acronym for Masonic Education And Lodge Services. Is responsible for managing the DERs and providing materials to the lodges to help them with administration and education. The committee is presently reviewing our "Candidate Instruction Manual," which gives candidate mentors educational ideas for each of the three degrees. Since the manual includes references to Masonic history and ritual development, the review is taking me the better of eight hours for each section. At our last meeting we spent over two hours just reviewing and approving revisions to the Fellow Craft Degree manual. The experience has been educational as I am constantly forced to pry references from my head to back up, or undermine, assertions made in the manual.

I hope, over the next two years, to be able to give Masonic Light back to my District after all it has given to me.