Devolution of the Craft

Brethren

Dare to surrender all that we have around us called craft masonry? 

Are we ready to declare the time and effort required of freemasonry is inclined toward retired gentlemen or men of such means but doesn't accommodate the worker? That would pinch the shoes of working members wanting to participate, finding it a breath taking pace to balance home, work and lodge.  Is this how masons begin to drift away from our sworn obligations and the lodge comes last?

No wonder we see freemasonry defined as a service club. On so many levels it is simpler than a mystery school.  

Of course our Grand Lodge could never ask "volunteers" to produce a high quality.  We would be guilty of making them quit, or so the conventional thinking goes.  Perhaps these are the men who ought not to have been allowed entrance in the first place.  Perhaps it is not they but us who are not realizing what we have come to demand- irrational schedules that isolate by removing the very quality of life that we strive to acheive philosophically, spiritually and functionally.

The recruiters among us are unrestricted,generating revenue streams of candidates that enter by one door and make hasty exit at the other.  We are the problem not they. We have no clear idea of a successful lodge or the limited quality of the experience of new masons.

We are generations of materialists who bow to wealth and celebrity; that have exchanged our masonic  birthright for short term gain; quanity without quality; reduced to avoiding the costs of enduring structures that once great better with age, tolerant of a lower quality craftmanship stripped of heart and soul by our machinery.

We don't have much choice.  In the future, no one is going to examine our accounts. Do we accept what we have become or pay a price to regain our rightful place in history?