05/06/08

Epilogue 
The Next 100 Years 

RWBro Ed Murray 

Brother Toastmaster, M.W. Sir, R.W. Sirs, W. Sirs, and Brethren All; What a daunting assignment and single honor to be asked to give a toast to the next 100 years of Masonry

       I must admit that after thinking about it, I felt like a rabbit caught in the headlights, unsure of which way to jump. I decided to follow the advice given to another famous rabbit, the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. I just love that line where the white rabbit put on his spectacles and said to the king, “Where shall I begin, please, your Majesty? “ ‘’ Begin at the beginning “the King said gravely, “and go till you come to the end” then stop.

       The beginning for us is where we are today; the future is in five minutes

       As Masons we are taught the proper use of our working tools, but the society we live in has invented many more tools to create, produce and increase things. Men, more especially Masons, are tool using animals. Without tools we are nothing, with tools used properly we are all.

       One of those tools is the computer. The computer age has brought many changes. Let’s take e-mail for example; it may be spelling out difficulties for many organizations; our own included. Apart from the sheer volume, many of which aren’t necessary, it is a system that is unable to convey facial expression, body language or vocal nuance, completely impersonal. That’s not my understanding of what Masonry is all about; in fact it is the exact opposite

       The way people research and learn in the internet age is vastly different than it was only a decade ago, and if any of you have had the pleasure of coaching a young candidate lately you will be made painfully aware of this. While you are getting your trusty little blue book ready, the candidate will probably pull out a complete copy of the degree you’re working in, all obtained on the internet.

       Our membership is declining and is much easier to be critical than to work at ensuring that we will have enough members to be a vibrant part of society in one year, five years, yes even 100 years.

       We’ve been following the beaten path as far as advertising and soliciting for new members, the difficulty is that the beaten path doesn’t seem to be leading anywhere

       Should we lower the age to join? Currently we have young men who may leave De Molay at 18 years but if they do, they are not eligible to join our fraternity till they are 21. How can we keep them interested in the intervening years?

 There are many who believe we’ve lost track of our basic goals; that we fill our days with compulsive behavior and have stopped trusting our fundamental selves. Free Masons don’t believe this. It’s not part of our social institution. The benevolent purpose of our order is to enlarge the sphere of social happiness and its grand object is to promote the happiness of the human race.

One good thing about the future is that it only comes one day at a time. This means, we can break the future into manageable pieces, we can live in the present and focus on the task at hand.

We must have goals, we must plan for the future and just maybe the next five minutes are the most important part of the next hundred years.

Whether our teacher was our father or our mother or professor or clergy we learned our most basic behavior from what they showed us, not what they said to us.

So what we as masons show in the world now will ensure our success into the future. We must live our best and at our best and think our best today, for today is the sure preparation for tomorrow and all the other tomorrow’s to follow.

Robert Louis Stevenson said “to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labor”

We can do that we can travel hopefully and we can labor diligently and our order will continue into the next 100 years. The Kings advice to the white rabbit was to go on till he came to the end, then Stop!

I’ve just come to the end, so I’ll stop and ask you to please rise AND JOIN ME FOR A TOAST “TO THE NEXT HUNDRED MASONIC YEARS".