Alferian's · Journal

"Respect your elders" --  I have heard that my whole life.  I say it to my daughter, who is eight.  But the phrase took on new meaning for me recently during an after dinner speech at a mason's table lodge (dinner, drinking, toasts, off-color jokes, that sort of thing).  The speaker remarked how the younger generations of  masons must take up the burden of running the lodges and growing the fraternity, of making it relevant to a new time and new culture.  As I entered the Masonic fraternity, I first saw the octogenarians in the lodge as simply admirable old men.  I didn't know their stories and merely exchanged polite introductions, myself feeling like such a humble newcomer that I was rather shy.  I did not fully internalize till listening to our speaker, a brother who is deputy grandmaster of Minnesota,  that these old men were once my age and have been keeping the lodge running and solvent and relevant to their lives for the past half century and more.  We have so much to learn from such elders as Waldo Emerson in our lodge.  He may seem now frail with his walker, but he has been carrying the lodge and it is for him and Max and the other Elders that we need to take on that burden and keep our lodge excellent.

At age (almost) 47, it is hard enough to grasp what it is like to be 80.  One has to stop to realize that these elders are the ones whose work and money build our lodge, the lodge I am so enjoying now.  The numbers of freemasons are declining overall mainly because this great generation of grandfathers is passing on.  There is an urgency that I feel now that I am beginning to get to know the brothers better.  I have plenty of time to learn and grow and serve, but not so much time to get to know the old ones and hear their stories.  That is something that I was not properly taught to do.  My grandparents lived far away; my grandmothers died when I was young, and my paternal grandfather when I was still a boy.  By the time I was 23 my maternal grandfather was gone too, and my uncles and aunts were all far away too.  American society is spread so thin.  We are scattered.  We don't benefit as youngsters by spending time with our elders and realizing our place in the genealogy or the meaning of age.  That is one reason, I suspect, that young people (myself included) imagine that they know so much.  We are given the impression in school that we know far more than our grandparents ever did and become puffed up with self-importance.  We fail to fully realize how we stand on the shoulders of giants and that those giants are our own grandfathers, not just famous scientists like Newton, Einstein, or Boyle.

In Druidry, the problem is similar.  Druids honor the ancestors and honor the tribe, yet we still usually live in this disconnected culture in which we spend more time with a computer and e-mail than we do talking to real people, even our spouses, much less our grandparents.  I have not had the chance to meet and get to know the Elders within my own druid order.   Philip is only a little older than me.  He knew Nuinn, and there are certainly some older druids in the Druid circle of the order.  I met some last summer at Glastonbury but did not have time or daring enough to even get to know all their names, let alone the time needed to learn their personal stories.    I move ahead  largely without guidance from them.  I wish that I had one or a dozen mentors of seventy or eighty.  The druids who have been druids since the 1950's for example, the ones that were my age when I was born.  I find men of 23 (half my age) looking to me for guidance, but I crave men twice my age to guide and advise me.  On what?  On matters of how to develop organizations, how to build an endowment, how to build a campus, a retreat center.  Sifu Ray is perhaps one such, older than me by a few years, but still not of my father's generation.  I lack fathers in my life, much less grandfathers, and that is beginning to feel very strange.

So, that is one reason I have turned to local fraternal organizations.  Some day, whenI am 80 perhaps my grove, Geal-Darach Grove will provide something like the kind of fraternity of brotherly love and trust that the mason's provide.  But really, there can be no comparison until Geal-Darach Grove has lasted through 90 years, as Lake Harriet Lodge has.  We grieve at the passing of the elders, but it is thorugh the passing of generations and the continuance of institutions across that threshhold of death that we humans build our wonders.  The handshake that links every mason today back through a hundred handshakes to those masons forming the United Grand Lodge of England in 1717, is a symbol of the power of collective talent, energy, devotion, and love.  Druids will do well to pay attention to their handshakes too.  I'm not sure if modern druid orders have actually passed on that handshake from one generation to the next from the beginning -- if for example, my handshake with Philip can be traced back through Nuinn to George MacGregor Reid, to the earlier chiefs back to Blake and Stukeley.  Yet it is wonderous to imagine that they do and looking to the future we do well as we grow older to attend to our own stories and tell them to those younger than ourselves.  And in the middle ages, where I dwell, we do well to set down and remember the stories of our elders, to remember what they have built and how hard they worked to give us the institutions we enjoy today.