MEASURING, CREATING; BUILDING, LIVING

In the conventional sense, we should be much smarter, more sensitive, prescient, awareness.  Has science not given 21st Century Man, tools that were only decades ago were the product of an active imagination?  Communication is at our fingertips. Whole libraries can be carried in a pocket. A man with little in his pocket, can have the education that once was the privelege of wealth and power. Poverty and slavery, disease and pestilence continue to haunt the tribes of mankind crossing all boundaries.

With the advantages of modernity where is the balance?  Where is the gain? The masses are entertained mocking the suffering of unfortunate people.  The pious have fallen. Leaders are so human and frail we begin to wonder if standards of good behaviour does matter at all.  

We are compelled to redefine a system that leaves the majority feeling the pain of hunger to support the wealth of a few. Is it greed? Is it advantage? Or is it insight, humanism able to withstand the cynics?  What is left for us if the things we believed when we were boys have run their course? 

Behind the doors of our lodge halls our apprentices expect to find answers to their questions.  Too often he finds he is allocated to the chorus, where he is continuously solicited, to volunteer, make a purchase, to give and give and give.  Did we mean to replace the craftsman with a production line? Did we intentionally replace  the meaning of a life worth living with nervous business models and money? 

How we define the masonic experience is in our hands as it has always been.  If we bend history to serve an agenda, we fail the test of time.  We have done that already. One day, we will understand the process that took us to the crossroads.  Toleration for poor quality work will ruin the reputation of any studio built around the talents of the Master.