My latest piece The 50 Year member-a Menace to Freemasonry has bee published on the Midnight Freemasons website. I hope you will check it out and share it with your friends.
This piece was taken from personal experiences. A decade a go I was the building manager of a Masonic temple and one of my jobs was cleaning the building. I will admit I did get a bit angry the next morning after the Demolay boys would meet in the Egyptian room of the temple trying to clean dried candle wax out of the eighty year old carpet. besides picking the red wax out of the carpet on my knees I also ruined several vacuum cleaners because the stuff went everywhere.
The youth also spent a lot of time at the building meaning I had to be onsite more than my usual 14 hour day for their meetings, fundraisers…etc. I was tired and grumpy while I would hear them
running and screaming through the hallways of our sixty seven thousand square foot edifice. Their echoes of them having fun while I wanted to be home in my easy chair made me even more grumpy. Sometimes they would leave our manually operated elevator at the top floor of the building, meaning myself or someone else had to walk up eight floors in order to bring it back down to the lobby. I was the poster boy for the grump, overstressed old Mason.
After a decade I reflect on those days and I see many of those kids who were then Demolay boys and Jobs Daughters. I see them on Facebook and those kids are now grown men and women. Many of them now have children of their own and sine if them are now Master Masons or members of the Eastern Star (Or both).
I like to think as I see them in those photos smiling with their families that hopefully some of the lessons our Fraternity taught them back then are in some way the reason they have grown to be such good citizens. Maybe all those hours I spent in that building may have been worth while.
I realize now that our Masonic youth groups provide a great service to us. Since we as Masons are a bit farther down the level of time our experiences can help these young ashlars as they progress and we can hope we are such a good influence they will follow in our footsteps to train the next generation after them. If we handle this right the youth could be the “Perfect Masonic circle” a way to perpetuate our Fraternity.
