From the Worshipful Master

This month I asked the pedestal officers to write on the subject of brotherly love in honor of Valentine’s day. But just before I was supposed to post these articles, tragedy struck my family and I was faced with the sudden loss of my father. In the wake of such a devastating family event, I experienced brotherly love like I never have before.

Due to having to travel for the funeral, our Senior Warden stepped up and ran the stated meeting on very short notice. Brothers called me to see if there was anything I needed or if there was anything they could do for me. I was mentioned under sickness and distress during business this month and I was treated as though we all lost a member of our family, and my father was never even a Mason.

This was an eye-opening experience. One in a strange way I will treasure. Yes, the loss of my father has been terribly difficult. But that difficulty has been made easier by the love and affection of the men and women of the entire Masonic family reaching out to me, in some cases daily, just to make sure I was healthy and doing okay. My father would have been proud to know that I have found such a group willing to take care of another just because we share the common bonds of brotherhood.

And for that I will forever be grateful.

Jason Michlowitz
Worshipful Master

From the Senior Warden

I’ve heard that ancient Greek had three different words for love; I can only ever recall two of them. English, on the other hand, has only one, and we use it to express our feelings about a wide array of people, objects, animals, and subjects.

We love a person, we love a movie, we love a dog, we love a song… to quote Richard Dreyfuss’ Playwright in the film adaptation of Tom Stoppard’s excellent Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, “We are tied down to a language which makes up for in obscurity, what it lacks in style.”

But, the single word “love” is what we have, in English, and as Valentine’s Day approaches—a holiday about love, or at least, about supporting the jewelry, flower, and chocolate industries—I thought I would take a moment to speak of my love for Freemasonry.

What I love about Masonry is what drew me to it in the first place: its ideals. Masonry holds ideals of a sort that most “adults” are too cynical to believe in, anymore.
Brotherhood. Equality. Honor. Justice. Charity. Faith. Hope.
And it is these things, first and foremost, that I love about Masonry. Whether “love” is the best word, or not.

Bryan Bullock
Senior Warden

From the Junior Warden

Brotherly Love.

Every true Freemason will show tolerance and respect for the opinions of others and will behave with compassion and understanding to his fellows. I have experience
Masonry classifies this expression of Brotherly Love as Charity.

Charity is the greatest of all virtues. All the great religions Islam, Christianity, Buddhism,
Judaism, Hinduism etc., recognize and encourage the duty of affording relief in
aid of the less fortunate.how do we express it in and out of Lodge? How do we explain this broad concept to a newly initiated Mason’s, our family and friends outside of Lodge? I would say that many of us could communicate the concepts of “Relief and Truth” as it relates to masonic conduct.

In the Masonic sense we must strive to achieve that feeling with our Masonic brethren. We must be willing to overlook or forget petty grievances or peculiarities. We must strive to see the good things in our brethren that will make us love them. We must cast aside our passions and prejudices and remember that, “All men are my brethren.” By the exercise of brotherly love, we are taught to regard the whole human species as one great family; and that we must aid, support and protect each other.

Ben Kruse
Junior Warden