Part I: Dan Brown Introduces His Readers to Freemasonry

The attention of the Freemasons everywhere was piqued when Dan Brown announced that his next book would be about our fraternity. Masonic discussion groups lit up with theories and information on what he might be writing about and -when the book finally launched- many Masons rushed out to pick up a copy and read it as quickly as possible to assess our fictional fate. (This author picked up a copy at 4am and had finished it on his lunch hour the following day.)

True to his word, Mr. Brown penned a story about our Fraternity. The Lost Symbol, in fact, uses Masonry as a foundation for the plot and also injects characters with many traits based their view of The Craft. Every main character in the book is closely connected to Masonry:

Robert Langdon (Protagonist) has a disinterested, favorable, view of Masonry (see below) Mal’akh (Antagonist) joins Masonry in an attempt to discover The Lost Symbol Peter Solomon (friend to Robert Langdon) is a 33rd degree Scottish Rite Mason...

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Have Fun!

There is a very easy way to tell if your lodge is in trouble.

Listen to what is going on when you walk into the Lodge room.

A winning team or Lodge has a certain hum of success. People are happy with what they are doing and the conversation is upbeat. It is the same way you can tell who is winning in a football game. You do not have to see the score board just look at the sidelines. The winning team is all smiles, they are relaxed and telling jokes and the losing team is glum. Frustration is evident on their faces and in there muttered conversations. No one points fingers in a winning team but they always seem to look for someone to blame when they are losing.

If you feel that same feeling of frustration when you sit in your Lodge or attend a team meeting you know you have a problem.

I like what Erma Bombeck had to say about having fun: “Humor is a spontaneous, wonderful outburst that just comes. It’s unbridled,...

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  “If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person's point of view and see things from that person's angle as well as from your own.” . . .Henry Ford.

Having once decided to leave the committee format and go with actions teams the first thing you must decide is how you will proceed. My recommendation would be - begin with you! In Hamlet, by William Shakespeare, Lord Polonius gives the following advice to his son: “This above all: to thine ownself be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.” Good advice then and good advice now. Before any other member of the team can be chosen you have to take a long hard look at what your own strengths and weaknesses are. Think of it as performing a SWOT analysis on yourself. The more time you spend looking at your own shortcomings the easier it is to understand what kind of people you need to create a balanced team. Henry Ford used to say “Coming together is a beginning. Keeping...

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Around 1650 French author François de la Rochefoucauld wrote: "The only thing constant in life is change". It is as true today as it was almost 400 years ago. Life is an ongoing process and what worked ten years ago will not necessarily work as well today, and in ten years from now might not work at all.

In Challenges in Volunteer Management Matthew Liao-Troth explains the current situation which existed in American society as we entered the 21st century as it relates to volunteer organizations such as fraternal benefit societies. Some of the assumptions used will be familiar to everyone who has been in Freemasonry for any length of time, some may come as a surprise.

Only one out of four Americans work for companies which encourage active participation in volunteering which means 75% of the work force has no training on how to work within a 100% volunteer organization such as Freemasonry. There is a perceived estrangement between young people and adults which is seen as growing....

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