Are The Degree Rituals Too Long?

Ever since my last lodge meeting, where we raised 5 worthy brothers to the sublime degree of Master Mason, I have been pondering how to improve the camaraderie of the degree nights. Not to say that fellowship does not happen, it does, but we build so much brotherhood during the degree and due to the length of the ritual and the late hour we finish everyone is usually in a hurry to get home afterwards. I have lamented this in the past and now seek a solution and I believe I have one.

Remove the first section, or Stewards lectures, from the degree night and do them instead on the next meeting immediately following the degree. They may be called something else in your jurisdiction but these lectures are a question and answer session between two brothers that rehash the entire degree that just happened and are required to be memorized to be passed on to the next degree. By moving this lecture to the next meeting night it does a few things.

1. From my own experience, after going through the degree it seemed so repetitive to sit and watch an entire play by play of the thing I just went through immediately after I went through it. When I study the candidates/Brothers faces when they watch it, no matter how well it is done, they too seemed confused or bored during the lecture.

2. By moving it to the next meeting it gets the new brothers immediately involved. Usually the meeting after a degree is held on a higher degree and the newly initiated Brothers feel a bit left out when they are told they cannot attend the next meeting of the Brotherhood they just joined because they are only E.A's or F.C.'s. This gets them right back in.

3. It gives the new Brothers time to mull over the Degree they went through without the pressure of memorization. If we tell them after the degree to just take some time to really think about what happened during the degree they can take their first step into really delving into the meaning of the ritual without having to recite it from rote.

4. It slows down the "Get them to the next degree as fast as possible" mentality that hurts the overall meaning of our craft. If we slow down the railroading of candidates quickly through the degrees we build better Brothers and consequently a better fraternity.

And last of all it removes a tangible amount of time from a degree night that can be better spent building upon the actual degree and the ties it forms between the Brethren. Maybe if it wasn't creeping on midnight after a degree more brothers would hang out and spend a little informal quality time with their new Brothers in a way that cant happen during a dinner before hand.

What do you think?

Do you do it differently?

Where's My 24 Inch Gauge

For my twenty or so readers:
When things are going great it becomes even harder to manage time. With the exponential growth of my lodge comes exponential responsibility to the few who do the most. I am proud to say we have already initiated more Brothers in the short time this year than we had done in the past two put together and we still have more waiting. This makes things extremely hard for a married man and father of three who has a hard time saying no to anything and is involved in more things than anyone my wife knows.

Between my blog, lodge, local theatre company, church, regular work and second job, I have been admittedly absent from my family way too much even when in their presence. That is why my posting has precipitously dropped as of late. It was my lovely wife who shed the light on me and I thank her for it. I had been so immersed in all of my extracurricular activities that even when I was home physically, my mind was almost always somewhere else, thinking about the future of my lodge, my next post, memorizing ritual or dialogue from my play. The problem was not in that I was doing all of these things, it was that I was doing these things alone and in my thick skull.

There are some of us who are bound by an even more ancient and important obligation than our Masonic one, you know, the obligation that allows us to wear a ring signifying our membership in the oldest organization in the world, marriage. It is a mysterious and magical union that takes a lifetime to master, and not all can. I call to my mind an image of the night I was installed in the South. The installing officer was a Most Worshipful Past Grand Master of Connecticut and his prompter was not a Mason but his lovely wife sitting on the sidelines with the ritual in her hands. It was reassuring to see even a PGM can miss a line every now and then and even more reassuring to see that his wife helps him with his ritual.

When I joined Freemasonry I had read from many different sources that the only secrets of Masonry were its grips, words, and signs and that the ritual was not a secret. It is my firm belief that that is true. As I started to be asked to perform parts of the ritual for degrees I readily went to my wife for help. I know I could go to any of the brethren for help but it is much more convenient to go to my wife and helping me memorize my ritual helps her to understand that we aren't sacrificing virgins or anything else ominous and evil at my meetings. It also keeps up a dialogue between us that is necessary for a healthy marriage and I can say without a doubt her help is more beneficial than any other method I have tried. When she corrects me I can hear her voice in my head and I wont mess up that part again. For some reason or another I had not been going to her for help. I had been engrossed in reading and writing and all of the other stuff I do. I can trace back my disastrous "G" lecture (read my Fumbling Fellowcraft Degree) directly to not having her help me with that lecture and it was my fault for not asking.

It is all behind me now, and she is currently helping me memorize my dialogue for my upcoming play and all is well on the home front. When I start to prepare for my second attempt at the notorious "G" lecture in two weeks, I am going straight to her and maybe this time wont fumble it all up.

Do you tell your wife what goes on in lodge?