Most Worshipful Grand Master, Right Worshipful Grand Lodge Officers,
Worshipful Grand Lodge Officers, Worshipful Brethren
Brethren all:
I come before you as your Grand Orator, a station that has been filled by many great men and Masons, starting with the "Little Giant," Stephen Douglas, and continuing down through time by such illustrious personages as Adlai Stevenson and Preston Bradley among others. I knew the history of this office in Illinois before I accepted the appointment of my friend and Brother, Most Worshipful Charles H. Sullins, to whom I owe a great debt of gratitude for the experience of serving the Grand Lodge in this role.
In the year that has past since our last Grand Lodge, I have enjoyed our visitations to Lodges, in communities large and small, mostly the latter. I had the opportunity of seeing places and meeting people I most likely would not have encountered had I not been asked to serve. Everywhere your Grand Lodge officers went, there we were treated with the utmost respect-warm friendly faces welcomed us, made us feel at home and generally showed us that the sort of courtesy which is a hallmark of our Craft is alive and well today in Illinois. Grand Master Sullins set a goal to visit each Lodge in our state, either in person or by a representative of the Grand Lodge. I can tell you that if I did not have a fulltime job and had to work for a living, I could not think of a more enjoyable task, for when you meet a Mason, you have found a friend. One of the old code phrases for a Master Mason is "a travelling man" and today I would like to talk to you about taking the journey of Masonry seriously, for among its many reward, the trip bring the rich gift of friendship.
Many of us may have begun our Masonic journey feeling like tourists in a foreign country. No matter where you travel, unless you have been there before, you will encounter places and people who are unfamiliar, perhaps even strange, to one's sensibilities. The language may well be new to you and not completely able to be understood in context. I recall the first time I heard that the Valley of Chicago, Ancient Accepted Scottish Rite, was hosting a "Wardens' Night" and I wondered to myself how many correctional officers they had as members! Anyone who has tried to explain in a few words to a non-Mason the structure of our Fraternity and its many organizations will quickly realize that all of us have acquired a large, nuanced vocabulary of technical terms which we use without thinking how foreign they may sound to a newcomer.
Putting aside all these barriers to understanding that a Masonic journey may entail, what is it that will bring a man into our fold and transform him into a Brother Mason? I believe an essential drive is the need we have for friendship. In the best of all possible worlds, the persons who sign your petition for membership are already your friends. Nothing is a happier sight in a Lodge than seeing a father participate in his son's degree work. But in our modern world, with so much ease of movement, our lives are not as settled as they were in the past generations where people so often stayed in one place their entire lives. You can examine the membership numbers for the last seventy-five years and compare them against the birth rate and it is obvious that somewhere along the way the tradition of fathers bringing their sons into Masonry ceased to be as prevalent as it once was. Often enough, as the former Secretary of Oriental Lodge No. 33, my mother Lodge, I received membership inquiries from complete newcomers to the Fraternity who had recently moved to Chicago for work or educational reasons. These men typically were trying to establish roots and they saw Masonry as a good opportunity to make friends and establish a sense of community in their new home. They were right.
Brethren, it all begins with friendship. Our ritual tells us that a friend who we afterwards found to be a Brother brought us to the door of the Lodge. You may say that "Brother" is a term which implies more than "Friend" since it includes the concept of kinship, but to be a true Brother in Masonry, you must be a friend first and always. Please keep this in mind: if you have joined this Fraternity and not significantly increased the number of men you can in truth call your friend, you have not yet realized the potential in your membership. Masonry is about making and keeping friends.
I urge all my listeners to cherish their Masonic friendships and strive to maintain them throughout your life. It is one of the greatest gifts we can offer a fellow human being, to treat him as a friend. Aristotle, in his Ethics has this to say on the nature of friendship:
"It is also disputed whether the happy man will need friends or not. It is said that those who are supremely happy and self-sufficient have no need of friends; for they have the things that are good, and therefore being self-sufficient they need nothing further, while a friend, being another self, furnishes what a man cannot provide by his own effort; whence the saying 'when fortune is kind, what need of friends?' But it seems strange, when one assigns all good things to the happy man, not to assign friends, who are thought the greatest of external goods. And if it is more characteristic of a friend to do well by another than to be well done by, and to confer benefits is characteristic of the good man and of virtue, and it is nobler to do well by friends than by strangers, |
|
the good man will need people to do well by. This is why the question is asked whether we need friends more in prosperity or in adversity, on the assumption that not only does a man in adversity need people to confer benefits on him, but also those who are prospering need people to do well by. Surely it is strange, too, to make the supremely happy man a solitary; for no one would choose the whole world on condition of being alone, since man is a political creature and one whose nature is to live with others. Therefore even the happy man lives with others; for he has the things that are by nature good. And plainly it is better to spend his days with friends and good men than with strangers or any chance persons. Therefore the happy man needs friends."
Friendship, like brotherhood, is a weighty responsibility. It means that we look out for each other's good and should promote each other's laudable undertakings, as our ritual tells us. Friendship also entails the duty of honesty in our dealings with each other. A true friend is one you can rely on to tell you the truth. And sometimes the truth is like a finely honed blade, which requires careful handling lest someone get hurt. Our Masonic friendships are not the work of a moment, to be picked up and set aside on a whim. Like the obligations we all took kneeling at our symbolic altar, our mutual responsibilities to our Masonic Brethren are not mere words we once repeated as instructed. For them to have any effect on our lives they must be lived, every day, binding our words with deeds.
Look around you in your Lodge and determine to make your Masonic friendships the cornerstone of your fraternal life. The mission of Masonry has often been described as making good men better. I would like to say that, following from Aristotle, Masonry strives to make better men seek the Good. And it is not just the good of one that our Ancient Craft promotes and cherishes; rather it is in the ordered harmony of one with all, the friendly competition for the common good that we should all set to make as our goal in our Masonic lives together. All this begins with the one-on-one effort that is friendship. The work we do in the Lodge to bind better men together to the pursuit of the good is a benefit for all mankind. Our society as we know is one increasingly fragmented by every manner of division, where the notion of a collective good is being replaced by the demand of each group for its own separate and distinct form of reward. For our world to move ahead peaceably, we must find common ground, things on which we can all agree to accept. To me, the answer to so many of the world's most agonizing problems could be found in the principles of Freemasonry. We preach no divisions along religious lines. We try to live the teaching that all men are Brothers, making of Masonry a true Universal Brotherhood, wherein all are equal. The Masonic symbol of the beehive, each working harmoniously for the good of the whole, could and should be extended to the world. We live on one planet, we have global economies and a concurrent need to husband the earth's resources. The ideals of the Craft, properly applied, could do much to heal the world, so wracked by ethnic, religious and national conflicts. We are all one, and the sooner mankind beings to seek the common good, the better it will be for us all. The true Freemason, as denominated on the English Royal Arch jewel, is a citizen of the world.
It all begins with friendship. I can give witness to the blessings of friendship in my Masonic life, the enrichments my friends have provided my earthly existence. As it is taught in the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, taking a lesson from the Old Testament, "Life without friends is worthless." Although the bonds of fraternity today link all of us in this assembly, we can't possibly all be close friends. Yet I exhort you to renew "the ties that bind" with your Masonic Brethren in your life, and look around for opportunities to enlarge your circle of friends in the Craft. Extend the hand of friendship to the new members of your Lodge, give them a chance to benefit from knowing you, and vice-versa. Each of us in our daily lives is a spokesman, an exemplar if you will, to the world at large of what our Fraternity stands for. As our Masonic teaching informs us, the world does not know Freemasonry, only the actions of it members. Make your every action exemplify what we stand for in the world: brotherly love, charity and the unending search for truth which is the Masonic journey. And I again urge you to practice inside the Lodge those very same great principles. Start today, I guarantee your renewed efforts to love your Brethren, to be jealous of their good name, and to do everything within your sphere of influence to promote friendship in the Fraternity will yield immediate and lasting results. My lodge when I joined it often had difficulty making a quorum. The officers and a few members showed up in time for dinner and left the temple as soon as the meeting was over. We did not otherwise see or talk to each other in between stated meetings. The turning point in the renewal of my own Lodge was when I became aware of the number of Brethren who met socially outside of meeting nights. The fraternal ties were strengthened and deepened by living, breathing acts of simple friendship. True friendship doesn't happen at a distance; you need to be able to shake a man's hand for a friendship to be grounded. Anything short of that is merely a step on the journey towards friendship.
We all have the opportunities to enrich our fraternal lives through friendship. The challenge is to take advantage of the gift Masonry offers each of us to seek the good. May the God of all look down upon each of us, and bless our fraternal friendships.
Thank you. |
