We are fortunate to live in a time when we benefit from both traditional knowledge and considerable contemporary knowledge; although there are still a lot of discoveries to be made, all the knowledge made available to us puts us in a special situation compared to our predecessors who were often reduced to guesswork.
If today, the audience of Freemasonry is not up to our expectations, despair is not the solution! As you know, the purpose of this site is to help restore Strength and Vigor!
It is possible to do better! Understanding why today we are not playing our role and how to achieve this is the objective of this article!
The initiation process as it usually takes place is left to the initiative of the lodges, which for the most part organize the operation on the basis of a ritual to which is added the presentation of boards of reflection on different topics.
Overall, Masonic work essentially corresponds to self-training!
It is a self-training because essentially it is the personal research work that will allow us to acquire clear thinking, dignified behavior and respectable confidence! Remember that Freemasonry is not an esotericism insofar as we have no spiritual master!
It is also a collective self-training because all the members of the lodge follow the same path with variations of course; there is, to a certain extent, an inter-reaction in particular for the "twins". Moreover, the training sessions organized by the supervisors can have an influence.
This self-training has a ritual character which can be a difficulty when it is not understood.
This self-training feature is very demanding and time consuming and perhaps it is not explained enough!
The history of Freemasonry could be summed up in the history of the biases that made the initial project problematic.
What can be the point today of meeting in an enclosed place?
Ape the religions?
Playing the politicians?
Turn the tables and see the dead appear?
Become zombies?
Predict the future?
Obtain the martingale of success and wealth?
Submit to authority to hope to have the 33rd cord?
Looking for support to get a good place?
There are better things to do!
In our humble opinion, it is the specificity of the Masonic Lodge to offer a place, a method to access Knowledge and Wisdom!
It still has to be done properly.
During that time, the world has changed! Today, chaos reigns! He rules at such a level that survival on our planet is in question!
This world needs Peace and Reason, this is also the meaning of the Masonic approach!
In the definition of Wisdom, universal brotherhood holds a great place!
It is what allows us this benevolent approach, this ability to listen and this respect which encourages us not to feel hatred, to be fundamentally pacifist and to know how to forgive the offenses which could be addressed to us!< /p>
Wisdom is also the search for Peace!
Peace in our thoughts, societal peace too! It is also this societal peace that the initiators of English Freemasonry were looking for and we will come back to this.
If the Masonic approach still has meaning today, after more than three hundred years of existence, it is because the reason for its creation remains. : find social peace between groups in perpetual conflict!
Objectively, we live in 2022 in a prospect that promises to be dramatic: wars, environmental crisis, extreme poverty in certain continents!
This Masonic approach for Peace is all the more necessary!
Initiation is the act that allows you to enter this process! It is a commitment to work to achieve this societal agreement that is so lacking! But everyone is left to their fate!
Becoming a Freemason today has meaning: try to acquire this wisdom that will give meaning to our lives! How to facilitate this achievement is the objective of this reflection!
A prerequisite: a freedom to establish and respect!
Isn't one of the lessons of our own history to see the futility of a dirigisme that would like to be imposed on everyone?
Whether in the lodge or at the obedience level, the search for consensus must be privileged.
Freedom is also accepting different ways of being as long as they respect other ways of doing things.
Several approaches to the initiatory process can co-exist without being contradictory!
The important thing is that everyone advocates this "living together" made of tolerance, a search for harmony and peace.
Improve the functioning of obediences
Each obedience has a history and it is understandable that those and/or those who belong to it want to preserve their specificity.
To bring together the obediences so that a certain pooling improves their operations, it is clear that the federal mode is the most suitable.
A federation of denominations could allow progressiveness, learning and consolidation.
Progress in pooling activities to potentiate solutions!
Learning about mutual knowledge, possible sharing and setting up new collaborative tools.
Consolidation: step by step we can hope that this federal organization will improve trust and the services provided.
Each obedience would retain its organizational chart and only the delegated areas would be managed by the federal structure; a service could be created to manage relations between the different persuasions, propose initiatives and anticipate developments.
The ideal would be that this pooling concern all European persuasions.
Improve the functioning of the lodges
First challenge: the training of lodge officers
This is one of the observations that we can draw from our common history: knowing the crucial role played by the officers of a lodge, it is essential, for a lodge to benefit from a group dynamic, that they are properly trained.
This training could take the form of five training weekends spread over the course of a year.
Second challenge: Study the relevance of collaborative tools intended to facilitate the emergence of collective intelligence.
Third challenge: Study the advisability of creating other forms of Masonic meeting to adapt to social realities. If the Masonic dress with its staging of the ritual is a major moment in our approach, other modes of meeting can be conceived for different reasons:
Getting to know each other better;
To raise methodological technical issues;
Implement training;
Keep a link despite the distance;
Allow pre-membership to better discover what the Masonic approach entails;
Allow post-membership to maintain contact in situations of relative remoteness for medical or other reasons.
Several forms of meeting can be developed, each one would be related to a particular problem.
This approach is also an element of success for societal peace!
The Masonic approach is thus a response to a societal expectation to create the conditions for lasting peace!
The responsibility of those responsible for lodges and obediences: the difficulty of setting up the conditions for this self-learning of Wisdom is obvious!
In this sense, life in the lodge is a test: if those who have the responsibility of animating life in the lodge and in the obedience are not able to create the conditions for productive collective work, it's because they are not in their place and a sentence from the ritual reminds us of this: “Woe to the one who accepts a charge that he or she is unable to assume!”
Many articles on this site talk about the pitfalls in which we can get stuck. In particular:
Make the lodge a place where harmony, Joy and Responsibility must be able to bring out a real consensus and a real fraternity and be a model of social peace such could be the credo of a frank - uninhibited and unveiled modern masonry!
If we accept to consider the Masonic approach as a self-training in Wisdom, it seems to me that this would facilitate personal research, it would avoid sterile polemics and it would encourage sharing and exchanges!
When you follow this path, you quickly realize the importance of respecting irreproachable ethics and you can see how much this is one of the weak points in the functioning of Masonic institutions!
Wisdom, Ethics, Rigor in commitment, three criteria that deserve to be respected!
The weak point of self-training is naturally the difficulty of implementation; it would be necessary at least to have advice and a guide that allows to acquire the basic knowledge essential to develop a personal thought!
Furthermore, it is clear that many sisters and brothers stick to simple ideas, sometimes to simplistic ideas!
Finally, self-training does not necessarily promote exchanges and we observe a relative loneliness! In this solitude the temptation is great to be seduced by commercial Masonic training offers that cannot be intellectually credible!
Faced with these realities, perhaps it would be desirable for Masonic denominations to offer their members the possibility of free access to training cycles that offer real credibility.
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