Very busy in the quarries

I’ve been out of work now for seventeen days. I’ve interviewed in person for one company, and with one high-powered recruiter, and have been in communication with at least half a dozen other recruiters. While I don’t like being out of work, I’m not discouraged yet. But with all this free time on my hands, my Masonic activity has exploded and I find myself very busy in the quarries. I attended four of the eight Official Visitations of the District Deputy Grand Master to the lodges in my district, and I have since visited two of those lodges in their next Communications, and will most likely visit more.

Saturday, November 14th was Scottish Rite Day for the Northern Masonic Jurisdiction. Every Valley in the NMJ put on the 31st and 32nd Degrees, and communicated the others. I am a member of Boston-Lafayette Lodge of Perfection for the Valley of Boston, but they did not have any work to do for Scottish Rite Day. Instead, they put on a play, but unfortunately, all of the rehearsal days coincided with my Blue Lodge officer’s rehearsals, so I could not participate. Instead, I showed up for the first Massachusetts Consistory rehearsal, intending to be an actor in the degree work. I sat down at the dinner table (all of our rehearsal dinners are catered, most excellently, in fact) with the Consistory Choir. The choir leader asked me if I sang, which I do, and asked me my voice type. I told him I was a baritone. I could tell by his expression that he was pleased with my response. I looked around the table and saw the choir all smiling at me, and knew I wasn’t going to do any acting for the Consistory. Four rehearsals later and I performed the degrees in the choir loft instead of on the stage.

We have a new Worshipful Master at King Solomon’s Lodge, and he, like the rest of the Line, is committed to excellent ritual, so we’ve had a lot of rehearsals. We perform the Entered Apprentice degree for five candidates this Thursday, and I hope the Brethren are pleased with our performance. I’m the Junior Deacon, and I don’t have a lot of lines, so I memorized the three questions for the candidates, and will do something special with the Stewards in their delivery to the candidates.

I sponsored two candidates for the Shrine, which unfortunately had their Ceremonial on Scottish Rite Day. Aleppo Shrine Temple has a rich history (I think we were the 13th Shrine Temple to form) and still has great great Uniformed Units, and exceptional esprit de corps, but we have had membership difficulties. From a peak of 15000 Shriners, we are hovering above 5000. The Potentate has launched a “5K No Way” campaign to form a bulwark against us dropping below 5000 members. That is why it was unfortunate that the Ceremonial was held on Scottish Rite Day, inadvertently forcing Masons to choose between the two Appendant Bodies. Both bodies did not get the number of candidates they wanted, and the Shrine only had about 20 candidates.

Because I was in the Consistory Choir, I spent the morning at The Grand Lodge of Boston’s Gothic Room (the big theater where Scottish Rite degrees are held), ate lunch quickly with a new Scottish Rite Mason from my lodge, and three from a neighbor lodge where I have performed degree work, and then got in the car to drive to Wilmington for the afternoon ceremony at Aleppo Shrine Temple. They had done the closed degree work in the morning, but had an afternoon ceremony called the “Arch Presentation” open to the public. I brought the brother from my lodge to the presentation, donned my fez, and we met my two candidates who were now Shriners. It was really a shame to see how sparsely populated the Shrine Temple was, in comparison with my own Crossing of the Sands. I hope we get a better turn-out in January.

One of my candidates joined the Shrine Clowns, and I am friends with two of the Shrine Clowns who are the Worshipful Master and a Past Master of Somerville Lodge, the other lodge that meets in our lodge building, so we all ended up in the Clown Room after the Ceremonial, enjoying refreshment, and the hospitality of the Clowns. Afterwards, I drove the new AASR brother and one of the candidates home, while the other got a ride from the WM of Somerville Lodge.

I have been doing the Master Craftsman program through the House of the Temple, and I’ve completed 5 of the 6 quizzes. This is an excellent program I would recommend to all Scottish Rite Masons, and not just to those in the Southern Jurisdiction. Although the work is about the Southern degrees and is not always applicable to the Northern Masonic Jurisdiction degrees, it is such a fascinating program that it is worth doing for its own sake. The SJ Monitor is $65, while the Master Craftsman program is $35 and includes the SJ Monitor. What more reason do you need?

I seriously owe the College of the Consistory my paper on the 4th degree, and was hoping to write it in my free time now that I’m out of work. This program, out of the Valley of Guthrie Scottish Rite Temple, is a very in-depth 5-year free program of study of the Scottish Rite degrees, and although quite a commitment, I cannot recommend it strongly enough. If I could persuade 4 other Scottish Rite brothers in the Valley of Boston to join, we could form a campus of the College of the Consistory here in Boston, so please consider it, local Scottish Rite readers.

A masonic magazine has asked me to write a paper for them, and I’ve agreed. The masonic study group I belong to meets in nine days, and I haven’t read “The Way of the Craftsman”, the book for this month. And as Junior Deacon, I have to deliver the Middle Chamber lecture to the WM by the end of the year.

And on top of this, I’m still job hunting. The irony is that I’m a lot busier now than I was when I worked full time.