First of all, my apologies to those who have followed the blog in the past, my attention has not been on writing here lately. I enjoy it and would very much like to continue and hopefully get re-inspired to add to the content.
From what I've read and heard expressed by a variety of brothers, our new brothers to the fraternity are hungry to learn as much as they can about this great fraternity.
I've also heard from a variety of brothers that we are dying as an organization or fraternity. My feeling is that we took about a 2 year slow down due to Covid-19 and the shutdowns and precautions taken to help curb the tide as they say. Hopefully the majority of that is behind us now.
At our most recent King Solomon's Club event we had the pleasure of having WB Dirk Hughes from the Library and Museum give us a presentation on the anti-Masonic movement of the late 1800's. He reminded us that during this dark time that the Grand Lodge of Michigan basically ground to a halt for nearly 13 years.....and somehow we rebounded from that.
We should also be reminded that in the Fellowcraft Degree it speaks of the ruthless hand of ignorance and the ravages of war destroyed many valuable treasures but not withstanding Freemasonry has survived. I've said it 100 times before and here is 101....the fraternity is bigger than any of us or anything that can be thrown at it.
Now on to the actual meat and potatoes. I've heard bantered around recently what is the meaning of....As all brothers and fellows have done before. This is something we've heard too many times to count, but it raises a good question, just what does it mean and who are brothers and who are fellows.
Let's start with Fellows. After reading several definitions of the word fellow, I think in our case it can be deduced that a fellow or fellows have similar interests in common, as far as the fraternity goes similar values and beliefs.
Brother is defined as members of a certain group or fraternity. The term brother is widely used today, African-Americans very often refer to one another as brother, some religious bodies call each other brother, but in our case we are Masonic brothers and the term is widely used throuout our ritual.
So.......why is brothers and fellows used in the ritual? If we examine the interrogatories in all three degrees the term brothers and fellows is only used in the EA degree.....but, why?
I feel that the term fellows means that during the "process" of becoming an EA the candidate is a fellow, he's not a brother until the obligation is completed at the altar and at that moment he becomes a brother. Further, if for some reason he becomes disassociated with the fraternity he returns to fellow status because he still has things in common with the brothers but he is no longer a brother.
For the initiate, he is seeking what all brothers and fellows have done before him. Even if a brother becomes disassociated with the fraternity he still had that experience which will be what the initiate will experience.....the the fun begins what will the newly made brother do with what he has received.
