Installation Address

I thank you for this opportunity, the respect and honor you have placed upon me to lead this lodge for the ensuing year is deeply humbling – but not enough so that I will not take this opportunity to pontificate to all of you. First, I would like to give my thanks to the past masters and installing officers on their grand performance and lend my congratulations to all of the officers of Henry L. Palmer lodge. I would also extend a thank you to all of our friends and family members whom without their support and understanding we would not find ourselves at this juncture.

Roughly 30 years ago Henry L. Palmer lodge was a formidable lodge. Our numbers ranked in the thousands and we had lodge meetings generally twice a week. Our presence in Wisconsin Freemasonry was known. One year the members elected to wear light blue sports coats and white shoes as a badge of being a Palmer mason. And when the Grand Lodge convened at its annual communication nearly one hundred Palmer members showed up instead of the requisite three. All dressed in their blue coats. Henry L. Palmer was the lodge to be a member of.

For many reasons, perhaps the use of a more modern form of social networking, our numbers, not just at Palmer but in all of masonry, have dropped.  We find ourselves sleep walking through our meetings (well some of us – some are merely sleeping), we sleep walk through our rituals, attend haphazardly to our special events, we shrug off the importance of maintaining relationships with each other, other lodges, our youth groups, our past members who can no longer be active. All the while boasting that freemasonry is about making good men better – so why aren’t we better?

Freemasonry has many purposes but one singular voice is that Freemasonry makes good men better. We provide principles, direction, theosophical thought and more. Freemasonry is that ideal that prepares us to be practicing humble, trustworthy, and charitable men in the hopes that one day when we knock on that celestial lodge we will be recognized for our efforts. We often joke that you will get out of freemasonry what you put into it. I believe we often get this ideal backward – we try to make good men better. The only man that I can make better is myself, granted with the collected wisdom and direction of those masons around me I can improve myself in knowledge but only I can do that – I cannot force others to think or act as myself. I merely provide a model, as do all masons, but what a model we can be.

Plato is known for saying “Whatsoever light I have I will share with others.” From days of antiquity it has been known that “light” means “knowledge” or “wisdom.”  So Plato is saying ‘what knowledge I have I will share with others’ and is this not the mission of every mason? To seek further light? To seek further wisdom? To share their knowledge?

In Mathew chapter 5 we find the words “^14-17 Ye are the light of the world… Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works…”

This is the crux of Freemasonry, dispense with the ritual work, the business acumen, the social networking, what you have left is the archetype of decency. A Freemason is literally a trail blazer to model this decency. By our everyday actions, interactions, and stature we light the path of morality. This is what we can do: we can illuminate or educate through our own work. We can shine by example, we can be charitable not just with funds but with judgment.

Our past members understood that legacy and tradition are important as well as adaptation and progression. It seems as if us modern masons in all of our wisdom have forgotten how all of these pieces fit together to make a fine tuned machine. A friend of mine reminded me that light illuminates but a focused beam of light can shape even the most obdurate of metals and an array of focused lights is a pulsed laser many orders of magnitude greater than its average power. Individually we let our light shine to illuminate a path, collectively we combine our light and we can carve that path.

This ensuing year will find us trying to uphold some of this legacy and tradition as well as move forward. We will begin by having our own special events with our New Year’s Day breakfast which is a tradition from the very first year of our lodge’s existence. In March we have sponsored a table at the Shrine’s annual Sportsmen’s Night, April will see our Spaghetti Dinner and in May we are reviving an old tradition known as the Rose Celebration which we are reenvisioning as a Ladies at the Table Lodge, June brings our Scholarship dinner and our annual picnic, October a Past Masters’ and 25/50 member Table Lodge, November our JW Chili Invitational and December our Pizza with Santa.

This is the gauntlet I put forth to you as masons and friends of masons: let your light illuminate the way. Strive to be that “better” person. And in our own way we can be formidable once again.