The Artificer

Every Sunday school student knows Cain was the son of Adam and Eve. Beyond Cain Biblical genealogy is well-defined, but not such common knowledge. For the record, the sons of the generations following Cain were Enoch, Irad, Mehujael, Methushael, and Lamech.

Lamech, was the first known polygamist. His first wife was Adah and his second was Zillah, with whom, he had a son and a daughter. Their daughter's name was Naamah.

Naamah's brother was a man who gets sparse mention in the Masonic ritual, yet who is familiar to all Master Masons. His name was Tubalcain, an eighth generation descendant of Adam himself.

So who was this man we've all heard about? There are several ideas about the origin of his name. Some believe the second part of his name merely suggests his lineage in the line of Adam's son Cain. Others claim the first part to be derived from ybl (Y-B-L), meaning "to produce." The second part stems from the Aramaic qainaya (Q-A-I-N-A-Y-A ) meaning "metalworker." There are other suggested origins, but these seem most likely since they refer to his occupation, that of working with metals.

Living up to his name, Tubalcain became a metalworker, forging tools out of bronze and iron. He is said, in fact, to have been the inventor of the forge, indicating he was the first skilled artificer in metals. The Bible also says he was an instructor of other metal craftsmen.

Tubalcain's father Lamech was a follower of Cain's wicked and murderous ways. Genesis 4:23-24 tells us a young man committed a seemingly small offense against him and Lamech not only killed him but bragged about it to his wives. Knowing God marked Cain with a sign and promised seven times vengence on anyone who killed Cain for murdering Abel, Lamech boasted God would likewise protect him seventy times seven, a claim which, unlike with Cain, did not come from God, but from Lamech's bloated ego.

Any vengance upon the wicked sons of Cain, including Lamech, did not pass to Tubalcain, who significantly impacted history with his discoveries in the art of metalworking. His cultural contributions are said therefore to be an illustration of the grace of God at work.

Tubalcain… you might simply say he was the eighth man from Adam, and the first known artificer in metals.

For the Whence Came You podcast, this is Steve Harrison with the Masonic Minute.

They Paved Paradise

Masonic education is all the rage with the crowd I run with; and this is, by the way, a good thing. I seem to hear more about Masonic education now than ever before ("ever before" being defined as since I joined the Craft 19 years ago).

We may not always stop to think that "Masonic education" is a broad term that can take many forms. It can be a deep, spiritual, esoteric subject that, frankly, sometimes winds up being over my head. Or it can be something lightweight – maybe an account of something a Brother did or even a funny anecdote. Usually the subject falls somewhere in between. Doesn't matter. Whatever form it takes, Masonic education is the hot topic du jour. Hallelujah. When we are new to the degrees and are asked what it is we want, we respond that we want light, and progressively more of it. In other words, our Masonic journey is a search for enlightenment; and the path for that journey is education. Keep it coming.

However, I hear a lot of dissent about some of the other things we do: "Oh, man, not another bean dinner," or "what's with all the service projects, what are we, the Rotary?" (No offense meant to the Rotary, a fine organization, but different than the Freemasons).

See, I like those things, too. The bean dinners, the meals before the meetings and all the social events give me a chance to get together with my Brothers and informally kick things around. Those conversations usually aren't very heavy but they're enjoyable. The social interaction we have with our Brothers is an important part of what our fraternity is. We don't want our organization to be all joking and no substance but I also wouldn't want to exclude it. All work and no play makes Hiram a dull boy.

Also, there are the service projects. In my area we help with the Child Identification Program (MoCHIP) which, in the past decade has helped return at least eight missing or abducted children to their homes, out of about a quarter million registered. That and other projects give the Brothers a sens of fulfillment. You know, it's the old, "it is better to give than receive" thing. Community service – let's have more of that, too.

So, recapping, when we get together as Brothers, we're doing a broad range of things: We have social interaction at our events; we help make our communities better places through our service projects; and we seek enlightenment.

Freemasonry needs all of these. In fact, couldn't we call our social interaction Brotherly Love, our community service Relief and our quest for enlightenment a search for Truth? Brotherly Love, Relief and Truth. Where have I heard that before?

We are more than Masonic education, and that is outright blasphemy to some. During this scary epidemic when we sit cooped up in our houses held hostage by a tiny unseen enemy, that fact may be more apparent than ever before. We have books and Internet and can have just about as much Masonic education as we want to dig out on our own. Those Lodge service projects are more or less on hold; and those social events, apart from a few online meetings for some, are non-existent. What is truth without its close companions brotherly love and relief? And now, at least temporarily, those companions are out of reach. We miss them. As the song says, "They paved paradise and put up a parking lot. Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till it's gone?"

Meet, Act, and Part — Denslow

My appearance on the Meet, Act, and Part podcast April 6, 2020:

A Tipping Point

Several months ago I wrote a piece for the Midnight Freemasons blog entitled, "The Meeting." In that article I speculated what it would be like in the future to visit my Lodge and attend a meeting in a virtual reality setting. There I saw old friends who were doing the same thing from afar, and for our Masonic education that night we got nothing less than a walking tour of the Loge des Neuf Sœurs as it appeared when Benjamin Franklin was in attendance. While some of the technology needed to do that is available today, it's not at the level I discussed in the article. We'll have to wait awhile before we can do things like that… or will we?

Unless you just landed on earth from a trip to the planet Neptune or some other far off place in the galaxy, you know that we are living in a strange, historic and even scary time as this Covid-19 menace, the Coronavirus, circulates among us. Many of us live trapped in our residences as we practice "social distancing" to ward off the disease.

We've become a nation of hermits. Every in-person Masonic meeting has been postponed or canceled. The week before this all came to a head I personally had five – count 'em five – Masonic meetings and that, in the following days abruptly became zero. You may have had the same experience and now we're all going through our own series of withdrawal pangs. What to do?

Well, we're a fraternity of intelligent guys who are well-aware of ways to keep up with events, check on our Brothers, friends and their families. This is, after all the age of social media. We also know ways to keep up with our Masonic education with a number of online facilities like the podcast you're listening to, the Masonic Roundtable, and a host of others.

Of course many of these tools put us in a position of practicing our Masonic craft in isolation. Sometimes this is a good thing, but other times, a little goes a long way. In our quest for Brotherly Love, Relief and Truth, the Brotherly Love aspect can fall behind if we can't get together.

So what about that little foray into science fiction I wrote about a couple years ago? Brothers, we're just about there. Oh, we didn't take a group tour of the loge des Noeuf Soeurs but just the other night I sat down in my office in my own home and attended a meeting hosted by the Scottish Rite in St. Louis.

Twenty-nine of us got together and heard a presentation and had a discussion about the Seventh Degree. It wasn't just one Brother presenting and the rest listening. It was all of us participating. We may be trapped at home but there are creative ways for us to get out and share that brotherhood we crave. My hat's off to my St. Louis Brothers for doing this. I understand they plan to make it a regular thing and I think this kind of thing will catch on.

Not only that, this may be a tipping point. I'm guessing these online discussions facilitated by technologies like Zoom and others, will be here to stay as yet another tool in our quest for Masonic education. The technology is there, it's fairly simple to use. Check it out. Set up your own meetings. It's a good alternative as we weather the storm. Stay safe, Brothers, and let's use everything technology offers to keep the social aspects of our fraternity alive for the duration.

St. Patrick's Day

Every school kid learns March 17 is the day we celebrate the life and deeds of Maewyn Succat, the second Bishop of Ireland, who is better known as Ireland's Patron Saint, St. Patrick. Those same school kids also learn Patrick's great triumph was chasing the snakes out of Ireland. It's true, there are no snakes in Ireland; however, that's more likely because there have never been any snakes on the isolated island.

Captured and taken into slavery as a youth, Maewyn, a.k.a. Patrick, escaped to the European mainland. While a slave he had converted from paganism to Christianity, and once on the continent, he sought refuge at Marmoutier Abbey, a French monastery. There, he accepted his calling, which was to convert other pagans to Christianity. With that, he returned to Ireland and became very successful at making those conversions. In a manner of speaking, the "serpents" he figuratively chased from Ireland were the pagan Druids, not actual reptiles.

After a successful ministry, Patrick retired to County Down, where he died on March 17, 461 A.D. Although never officially canonized by the Catholic Church he is, in fact, recognized as a saint; and today we celebrate the Feast of St. Patrick, or St. Patrick's Day, on the anniversary of his death.

However, even in Ireland prior to the late 18^th century, St. Patrick's Day was not that big of a deal. The same was true in North America, where the churches in Boston, with its large Irish population, didn't recognize the day until 1737.

"So, what," you may ask, "does this have to do with the Freemasons?"

About twenty years later, during the French-Indian War, a young Masonic Colonel recognized the morale among his troops was low and decided they needed what today we would call some "down time." It was March, at the end of a long, brutal winter and many of the troops were Irish. It didn't take the Colonel long to figure out the best day to declare a general holiday would be St. Patrick's day.

Several years later, that same Freemason, now a general in the American Revolution, faced a very similar problem. Billeted at Morristown, New Jersey, his troops were discouraged after a long winter of devastating fighting and losses. On top of that, the preceding winter of 1779-80 was brutally cold. That General, George Washington, again had many Irish troops under his command and once again he saw the opportunity of celebrating St. Patrick's Day to boost morale. With that, Washington issued the order giving his troops their first day off in over two years, “The General directs that all fatigue and working parties cease for to-morrow the SEVENTEENTH instant, a day held in particular regard by the people of [Ireland].”

The respite from the ravages of war and winter went over well with the troops, some of whom were said to celebrate with a "hogshead of rum." Washington is credited with establishing the first instances of a secular celebration of St. Patrick's day, a tradition which caught on and has grown to become a major event today, with the hogshead of rum long replaced by freely flowing green beer.

POW/MIA Bracelets

Contrary to public opinion, especially today's unenlightened public opinion, many Vietnam war protests were at their foundation about and in support of the soldiers over there fighting that war. As the war was winding down people began to realize that, while we were about to get our precious young men and women out of there, some might be left behind. We knew there would remain many prisoners of war and also those unaccounted-for and missing.

The North Vietnam government, on the brink of taking over the entire country, had never been communicative about the status of those soldiers; and we had no reason to believe that would change. The prospect of the unified Democratic Republic of Vietnam (actually not democratic and not a republic) controlling the entire country and keeping POWs and MIAs seemed possible, even likely.

That terrifying thought morphed into a movement designed to ensure the POWs and MIAs be remembered and eventually brought home. As a symbolic gesture many of us wore a metal bracelet containing the name of a missing or captive soldier and vowed not to take it off until that soldier or, sadly, his body returned home. My bracelet was in honor and support of Colonel Kenneth Fleenor; Carolyn's bore the name of Major Terry Uyeyama.

Colonel Kenneth Robert Fleenor's F-4 Phantom fighter jet was shot down December 17, 1967 near Hanoi. During his captivity he endured torture, isolation and starvation. After a grueling five years and three months of imprisonment, Colonel Fleenor was released in March 1973. He completed a successful military and business career, retiring from the US Air Force as a Brigadier General. He also served as Mayor of Selma, Texas 1987-1994. He died December 10, 2010 at 81 years of age.

Air Force Major Terry Uyeyama was forced to eject from his plane May 18, 1968, and was captured and taken prisoner of war. He endured the same punishment and torture as other prisoners for nearly five years. A Silver Star recipient, he returned to the US March 14, 1973, and retired from the Air Force in 1980 with the rank of Colonel. Born July 16, 1935 Colonel Uyeyama is now nearly 85 years of age, living in Texas.

Today the Department of Defense still lists 1,587 Americans as missing and unaccounted-for from the Vietnam War. Nonetheless, in March 1973, Carolyn and I both were able to remove our bracelets. They have sat on the desk in my office at home ever since.

Clash of the Titans

I've written a few articles here about an incredible Brother who, in my opinion, was the 20^th century's "Mason of the century." Most Worshipful Brother Ray V. Denslow was General Grand High Priest of the General Grand Chapter during the WWII years. He was the founder of the Royal Arch Mason magazine and served as its editor and publisher from 1942 until his death in 1960, at which time his son William, author of 10,000 Famous Freemasons, took over. Ray Denslow was also the world's foremost authority on international Freemasonry, and published the only complete account of the near-destruction of the Craft in Europe in the years leading up to WWII and its reconstruction following the war.

Those accomplishments are only the tip of the iceberg in Brother Denslow's Masonic resume. He was almost certainly the most famous Freemason in the world at the time, with the single exception of his good friend Harry Truman.

The shortcomings of each of us are borne out in the fact that our rough ashlars will remain so. We as Freemasons work daily toward the goal of the perfect ashlar, which seems always to lie just outside our grasp. The same was true even of a Mason of the stature of Ray Denslow. Immersed in human frailties, he had his share of doubts, conflicts, and battles… and one of those battles went supernova when the two most powerful Freemasons in the country went head-to-head. Their feud lasted for years, in an ugly fight in which Denslow was ultimately stripped of the 33°.

Denslow documents this brutal hostility in his memoirs, albeit from his own point of view; but he lays out the facts objectively enough that we can see both sides of the story. This account is spread over many pages as he tells of issues that cropped up over time. As a result, reading the books, it is difficult to see the intense impact of the story.

So I decided to take each of those incidents and compile them into an article. I intended it for the Freemason magazine here in Missouri and instead of just submitting it, I met personally with the editor and told him, "This is hot stuff. If you review it and decide it shouldn't go into the magazine, I will understand." So the editor reviewed and accepted the story. It was destined to be published for all the world to see.

A couple weeks later, I got a friendly phone call from the Grand Master. He said he liked the article. Then he said, "Steve… Steve… you know we can't publish this." I knew. And just as I had told the editor, I understood.

So I went to work on a revision. I toned some things down and threw in the standard disclaimer saying the article did not necessarily reflect the views of the Grand Lodge, the Missouri Lodge of Research, the Grand Line officers, the magazine, God or any individuals living or dead. By this time there was a new Grand Master. I met with him. He reviewed the article and gave it his blessing to be published. So the on-again-off-again publication of this hot potato was on again.

Then, I met with the Denslows themselves – Ray's granddaughter and grandson, and we talked about the issue. Not surprisingly, they saw things from Ray's point of view. I realized the publication of the article might embarrass or even alienate them after they had been so good in working with me as I edited his memoirs… and I didn't want that. In addition, let's face it, the whole episode was not Freemasonry's finest hour. So I called the new Grand Master and we once again decided not to publish the article. It's not like the story has never been told. I've just never heard it told correctly or completely.

So what to do with this thing? Well, here's what we're going to do. This September at Chicago Masonicon, I'll lay out the whole grisly story. What Denslow did that so offended the Scottish Rite that it yanked his 33°. Who his great and powerful nemesis was, and how this clash of the titans came to its imperfect resolution. I won't publish it, but at that meeting we'll sit down and talk about it… just you and me.