Building Builders!: Random Building Thoughts

-------------- CRAFT FAILURE --------------

When you continuously fail to nurture a man,
it is delusional to think that inviting him back
for more of the same
shall do anything more than annoy him
and eventually entrench him in resentment.

What is your lodge doing to prevent this?

-------------- MASONIC EDUCATION --------------

-------------- HUMOR --------------

-------------- COACH'S CHALLENGE --------------

You've been the lead person on the grand lodge
named "masonic education committee"
for near to 25 years.
It's clear that what the committee has been doing
is not helping to retain members.
If anything, the more it makes effort to stress
what it calls "masonic education" as the cure
for the dreaded "Freemasonic Attrition Disease",
the more everyone sees members' eyes gloss over,
instant yawns and agitated disinterest.
Further research reveals that you are not alone in this observation
and that this very same disease has been
infecting the Craft for over 100 years.
You decide to take a different approach to Masonic Education.

Your Task:

1) Explore what doesn't work and hasn't worked well, ever.
What steps do you take?

2) Put together a poll for current members
and past members to find out what initially attracted them
to the organization and what eventually repelled them.
What questions would you ask?

3) Restructure membership education to address what repels members
and enhance what attracted them in the first place.
What changes would you make?

-------------- MYTH --------------

"A mythological pantheon is fluid and as the needs and the realizations of the society change, so do the relationships and the gods. Deities are really time- and space-conditioned; they are shaped from inherited ideas, inherited traditional imageries, but they are put together in terms of a local context of time and space.

"One of the great disadvantages of a literary or scriptural tradition like the biblical one is that a deity or context of deities becomes crystallized, petrified at a certain time and place. The deity doesn’t continue to grow, expand, or take into account new cultural forces and new realizations in the sciences, and the result is this make-believe conflict we have in our culture between science and religion. One of the functions of mythology is to present an image of the cosmos in such a way that it becomes the carrier of this mystical realization, so that wherever you look it’s as though you are looking at an icon, a holy picture, and the walls of space and time open out into the deep dimension of mystery, which is a dimension within ourselves, as well as out there.

"This dimension can open through the science of today even more wonderfully than it opened through the science of the second millennium B.C. There is absolutely no conflict between science and the religious mood or the mythological realization—but there IS a conflict between the science of the twentieth century A.D. and the twentieth century B.C."

Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine, p.107

-------------- LIGHT --------------

You Want the Light?
You Can't Handle The Light!

-------------- TRUE FOCUS --------------

For Further Light:
http://www.coach.net/TCU.htm

-------------- PHILOSOPHY --------------

It's most unfortunate
that some people characterize
the Seven Liberal Arts & Sciences
as the medieval equivalent of
a Complete Education,
which it certainly was not.

It was not offered as a Complete Education
at that time.
It was offered as a required Foundation
that made Further Serious Studies possible.

In other words,
the Seven Liberal Arts & Sciences
was not considered Complete Education;
it was considered the Basis of Further Learning.

-------------- BLAME --------------

For Further Light:
http://www.coach.net/TLG.htm

-------------- TRAVEL --------------

I've been brow-beat
and guilted untold times
for Traveling
by those who prefer staying put
in a dungeon of darkness.
I won't condemn those who enjoy darkness.
I however like the Light
and shall continue to Travel
to wherever I know it Exists.

For Further Light:

The Journeyman Papers - Uncommonly Grimm Lessons

-------------- FOLK LORE --------------

Many Knock and Find a Wall
Some Men Knock and Find a Stall
Others Knock and Find a Haze
Few Men Knock and Find a Maze
I have Knocked and Found a Gnome*
His Treasures Rich are now my Home.

* a legendary dwarfish creature supposed
to guard the earth's treasures underground.

Task: Investigate what Gnomes Guard

-------------- FACT VS ALLUSION --------------

Metaphors and allegories are verbal or visual vehicles
designed to deliver underlying truths about ourselves
and what we deal with.
When you take such vehicles as factual
rather than the truths they are intended to convey,
you lose all insight into what they were intended to communicate
and use them to pursue things that never existed.

-- The Craft Perfected! Actualizing Our Craft