Happy New Year!

And some plans for 2024

I hope that you have a most wonderful New Year holiday, and that 2024 is your very best year ever!

I am thrilled to have you with me here on Emeth, and I look forward to our continuing quest to create truly Legendary Freemasonry!

Photo by Crazy nana on Unsplash

Christmas and New Years have fallen on our normal Rummer & Grapes evenings, so unfortunately, like last week, we’ll not be able to gather as we usually do. Tonight will instead find me at Centralia Lodge, where our new, excited, and very energetic Worshipful Master has declared that we will party. It is important that I support his efforts.

There are two important themes that I’d especially like to touch upon here on Emeth in 2024. Huge themes that will impact all of us throughout the year.

The first is a noticeable shift in the zeitgeist.

The society wide embrace of a new Romanticism.

Over the past months, I’ve picked up on a number of writers who are commenting on this tremendous shift in our culture. Some view it as a good, others as a bad, but either way, our culture has started changing, and we need to understand those changes.

Perhaps an easy way for Freemasons to understand this shift towards romanticism is to look at our own written history. To pick two big names, Anderson (Constitutions of Freemasonry) and Pike (Morals & Dogma) both wrote about Freemasonry, and its mythical history through a romantic lens. While big current publications like Heredom publish works from a much more evidence based perspective. Society is moving back towards the former.

And that could be an exceptionally good thing for Freemasonry. Because Freemasonry has truly thrived during Romantic periods of the past. It exploded in numbers and influence when Anderson wrote, and again in Pike’s time.

This fundamental change is upon us, and I hope to spend some time here writing about it, and discussing it with all of you.

This shift towards romanticism is the greatest opportunity for Freemasonry in generations, we need to ensure that our Lodges have the tools necessary to embrace it.

The second is the division and rancor caused by the current state of partisan politics.

This will only grow worse as we progress through 2024, and it will devastate our society, if we allow it.

A divided people, a people who look at their neighbors and see enemies, can not stand. I think we all know this.

The only people artificial division helps are politicians and the news media that reports upon them. For everyone else, devastation results. As Freemasons, we need to continually recognize that the manufactured political issues of the day are beneath Freemasonry, that Freemasons stand upon fundamental principle, not upon whatever nonsense the political class conjures into existence on any given day. We need to keep our Lodges, indeed all of our Masonic spaces as sacred retreats. We must not forget that Freemasonry is the great peace society of the world.

Peering deeply into the mists of time we can see that Freemasonry has embraced the fundamental issues of the day, we can see that clearly in the competition between Jacobite and Hanoverian Masonry that existed long before our Grand Lodge system, but discernment is the key. Freemasonry is concerned with the big questions, the questions that improve lives, that improve our world, that even improve our understanding of that undiscovered country beyond the grave. But it stands above the noise, nonsense, and manufactured controversies of the day.

It is my sincere hope that Emeth can remain a place of reasoned (and Romantic!) Masonic discourse as our society explodes with nonsensical partisanship over the course of the next year. Indeed, I believe that by doing so, we provide light to the world in an otherwise dark and anger filled time.

In other related, but not so related areas, I think that it might be fun to start offering Tarot classes via zoom. Not boring old classes where I, or someone else tells you what something means, or how to do something, but interactive classes where we all figure it out together.

I also feel compelled, from time to time, to write about the important issues of the day. Not the nonsense fed to us by our political and media classes, but the important things that actually impact our lives.

What I haven’t yet decided is if those things should be a part of Emeth, set off in their own sections so that anyone not interested in them can simply choose to not receive them, or if they should stand alone as completely separate projects, unrelated to Emeth.

If you have any feelings, one way or the other about that, please let me know in the comments below.

Thank you for reading, and for your support of both me and Emeth! I truly appreciate it, and I look forward to an amazing 2024!