On the Level: Freemasonry Should Abolish the Title “Past Master”

Theodore Roosevelt had been President of the United States for nearly eight years when he prepared to leave the White House in 1909. He was one of the most recognizable men in the world, a former governor, soldier, author, reformer, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient. He was also a Freemason. Yet Roosevelt saw nothing about having occupied the highest political office in the nation that entitled him to permanent elevated status after he left it.

Writing to Melville E. Stone on December 2, 1908, Roosevelt explained what he believed should happen when a president's term ended:

“when the President leaves public office he should become exactly like any other man in private life. He is entitled to no privileges”

Roosevelt was not diminishing the presidency. He was protecting the distinction between the man and the office. The office carried extraordinary authority, and the man temporarily entrusted with it exercised that authority. When his service ended, however, so did the privileges associated with the position. The experience remained. The history remained. The service remained. What did not remain was a continuing claim upon the authority or privileges of the office.

That principle sounds remarkably Masonic, and it raises an uncomfortable question for Freemasonry: Why don't we do the same thing with the Master of a Lodge?

The Office Is Worshipful. Is the Man?

Freemasonry teaches a Mason repeatedly to distinguish internal worth from external distinction. Wealth does not make the Mason. Social position does not make the Mason. Titles do not make the Mason. The fundamental symbolic garment of the Craft is not a crown, chain, medal, or elaborate uniform. It is the apron. The Level reinforces the same principle. Albert Pike summarized its symbolism succinctly when he associated “the Level” with “Equality.”

Yet Freemasonry does something curious after a Brother serves as Worshipful Master: it makes the distinction permanent. The Brother leaves the East, but he does not entirely surrender its title. For the remainder of his Masonic life he may be addressed as “Worshipful Brother.” He may wear distinctive regalia identifying him as a Past Master. Introductions emphasize the office he once held. Protocol, conversation, and sometimes the culture of the Lodge itself reinforce the distinction. What began as a temporary office gradually becomes a permanent identity.

There is nothing inconsistent with Masonic equality in having a Worshipful Master. A Lodge requires government. Someone must preside, make decisions, maintain order, appoint officers, administer the Lodge, and assume responsibility for what occurs during his term. The Master possesses authority because the Lodge has entrusted him with an office.

But the office has a term.

Why doesn't the title?

Washington Steps Aside

George Washington offers an especially powerful example because he was not merely the first President of the United States. He was also a Freemason who had served as Master of Alexandria Lodge No. 22. Washington therefore understood both kinds of authority at issue here: the authority of the presidential office and the authority of the Oriental Chair.

On March 4, 1797, Washington attended the inauguration of John Adams in Philadelphia. The ceremony marked something the young republic had never experienced before: the voluntary transfer of presidential authority from one elected president to another. Adams became President. Thomas Jefferson became Vice President. Washington, who only moments earlier had held precedence over both men, was now a private citizen.

At the conclusion came a small act whose symbolism exceeded its size. Washington yielded precedence to President Adams and Vice President Jefferson. He had outranked both men that morning. He no longer did. Rather than continue receiving precedence because of what he had once been, Washington stepped aside for the men who now held the offices.

For Freemasons, the symbolism should be difficult to miss. Freemasonry teaches through physical acts. We move from one place to another. We stand in particular positions. We receive and surrender objects. We wear emblems whose meaning exceeds their material value. Physical actions communicate moral principles. Washington's decision to yield precedence therefore offers an extraordinarily Masonic image: when the office passes to another man, step aside and let him go first.

Washington carried that principle into retirement. When the citizens of Alexandria welcomed him home and praised his public service, he replied, “In the character of a private Citizen, I have the honor to receive your address.” Later that year he referred to private citizens as “the class in which I now move.” He had surrendered the presidency without surrendering his experience, dignity, reputation, or history. He simply understood that none of those things entitled him to continue occupying the position he had relinquished.

Perhaps that is what leaving the East should look like.

Adams Became a Brother Farmer

John Adams was not a Freemason, which perhaps makes his example even more useful. The principle was not peculiar to Washington or Roosevelt. It reflected a broader understanding of office in which authority belonged temporarily to the officeholder rather than permanently becoming part of his identity.

After losing the presidential election of 1800, Adams knew what the expiration of his term would mean. On December 28, 1800, he wrote François Adriaan Van der Kemp that after the third of March:

“I am to be a private Citizen and your Brother Farmer.”

There is something wonderfully simple in those words. Adams had been the nation's first Vice President and its second President. Yet when his presidency ended, he anticipated becoming a citizen, a farmer, and a brother. His presidential service would remain part of his history, but it did not have to become a permanent rank.

Perhaps Freemasonry should consider doing likewise.

Experience Is Not Authority

A Brother who has served as Master may know far more about Lodge administration than another Brother. He may understand ritual better. He may have encountered difficult questions of jurisprudence, finances, personalities, discipline, or protocol. A wise incoming Master would be foolish to ignore that reservoir of experience.

But experience and rank are not the same thing, and experience is not necessarily current knowledge.

Time matters. A man who served as Master ten or fifteen years ago served a Lodge that may no longer exist in quite the same form. Lodge culture changes. Grand Lodge legislation and Masonic jurisprudence can change. Administrative requirements change. Ritual instructions and interpretations of floor work can change. Even customs once regarded as unquestionable may be reconsidered. The former Master therefore possesses something potentially valuable—experience—but that experience must continually be measured against present circumstances.

“That is how we did it when I was Master” is historical information. It is not, by itself, evidence of how something should be done today.

The permanent honorific makes that distinction more difficult. Advice sounds different when it comes from “Worshipful Brother” rather than simply “Brother.” The title lends institutional weight to the speaker before the accuracy of what he says has been examined. A younger officer may hesitate to challenge him. A newly installed Master may defer to him. Other Brethren may accept his recollection because the title itself appears to certify expertise.

There is an irony here. The title never ages, but the knowledge behind it can.

A man remains “Worshipful” twenty years after leaving the East even though the rules, practices, culture, and Lodge he remembers may have changed substantially. His experience may remain enormously useful, but it may also contain assumptions that no longer apply. The honorific provides no way of distinguishing between the two.

That can produce something more consequential than excessive deference. It can produce influence without responsibility.

The sitting Master must make decisions and live with their consequences. He is accountable for the Lodge he governs now. He bears responsibility for its officers, administration, ritual, meetings, and decisions. A former Master may strongly influence those decisions while carrying none of the present Master's responsibility for them. He can retain some of the social authority of the East without bearing the burden that properly accompanies that authority.

Authority without responsibility is problematic in any organization. Influence without responsibility may be even more difficult to recognize because it operates informally, through reputation, title, longevity, and deference rather than constitutional power.

Masonry Already Separates the Chair From Its Authority

Curiously, Freemasonry already contains an example demonstrating that the lessons associated with the Master's Chair can be separated from actual authority.

Within the American York Rite, the Royal Arch Chapter confers the degree of Past Master, commonly distinguished as Virtual Past Master. The degree developed from the historical requirement that a Mason ordinarily had to be an installed or Past Master before receiving the Royal Arch. As Royal Arch Masonry expanded, requiring every candidate actually to have governed a Symbolic Lodge became impractical. The solution was to permit a candidate ceremonially to pass the Chair.

The distinction between an Actual Past Master and a Virtual Past Master is important. The Virtual Past Master receives the degree and its instruction without thereby acquiring the actual authority or standing of a man who has governed a Symbolic Lodge. Contemporary York Rite explanations are explicit that the degree does not confer actual rank upon its recipient.

Hidden inside that old Masonic accommodation is an important principle: Masonry already knows how to separate the lessons of the Chair from the authority of the Chair.

A Virtual Past Master may receive instruction concerning leadership, responsibility, government, and the Master's station without acquiring authority over a Symbolic Lodge. Knowledge of the Chair does not create authority. Symbolic possession of the Chair does not create authority. The title of the degree does not create authority.

Actual authority belongs to the Brother who has actually been entrusted with responsibility.

The comparison works in the opposite direction as well. The Virtual Past Master may possess the lesson without the authority because he never bore the actual responsibility. The former Master should be able to retain the experience without continuing authority because he no longer bears the responsibility.

In both cases, the principle is the same: authority should follow responsibility.

The Shadow East

The failure to maintain that distinction creates one of the most recognizable problems in Lodge culture. Every Lodge is supposed to have one Master, yet a Lodge may contain five, ten, twenty, or more men permanently carrying a title derived from having once occupied that office. Most former Masters handle that distinction with humility. Many become invaluable mentors. Some understand instinctively that the new Master must be permitted to govern, succeed, fail, learn, and eventually surrender the chair himself.

Institutions, however, should not depend entirely upon individual restraint.

Former Masters may gather together in a familiar part of the Lodge room. From there may come corrections, instructions, objections, whispered consultations, reminders of precedent, and declarations about how things have always been done. Individually, any one of those interventions may be helpful. Collectively, however, they can create what might fairly be called a Shadow East.

The Lodge then develops two centers of authority. One is formal and visible: the Brother presently occupying the Oriental Chair. The other is informal but powerful: men carrying the permanent distinction of having occupied that chair before him. The current Master possesses the authority of office; the former Masters possess the influence of title, longevity, experience, and accumulated social standing. In the worst case, the man sitting in the East can find himself presiding over a meeting that is effectively being governed from somewhere else in the room.

This does not require bad intentions. Indeed, that is what makes the problem difficult. A former Master may genuinely believe he is helping. He remembers difficulties encountered during his year. He sees a younger Master approaching what appears to be the same mistake. He intervenes because he wants to protect the Lodge. Yet assistance can become direction, direction can become correction, and correction can become informal governance. The former Master may not even recognize how much additional weight the word “Worshipful” places behind his opinion.

Washington's gesture in 1797 offers a different model. Once Adams was President and Jefferson was Vice President, Washington did not insist upon walking before them because he had once been President. He stepped aside and allowed the current officeholders to precede him. He did not cease knowing how to be President. He did not surrender his experience, reputation, or wisdom. He simply recognized that experience acquired through yesterday's authority did not entitle him to exercise today's authority.

A former Worshipful Master could hardly ask for a more appropriate symbolic lesson.

Brother Should Be Enough

The history of every Lodge should record its Masters. Their photographs may hang upon its walls. Their accomplishments should be remembered. A Past Master's jewel or apron can commemorate service. A Brother who governed his Lodge exceptionally well should be thanked for that service, and the Brethren who follow him should take advantage of whatever wisdom he acquired while doing it.

None of that requires a permanent honorific.

Freemasonry already has a perfectly adequate way to describe the historical fact: a Brother served as Master. The Lodge minutes record it. The annual proceedings record it. The Lodge history records it. Nothing is lost by saying, “Brother Smith served as Master in 2016.” That statement preserves both the Brother and the accomplishment without transforming the accomplishment into a permanent rank.

Consider how unusual the practice appears when applied elsewhere in the Lodge. We do not normally address a man for the rest of his life as Past Senior Deacon. We do not announce Past Treasurer Brother Jones when he enters the dining room. A Brother who served brilliantly as Junior Warden does not receive a permanent honorific commemorating that station. Those were offices. The Brother served in them, completed his work, and another Brother took his place.

Why should the Oriental Chair operate on an entirely different principle?

Perhaps the answer is tradition. But Freemasonry should be particularly cautious about allowing tradition to escape examination merely because it is tradition. Our symbols exist precisely to make us examine ourselves, and one of the most persistent of those symbols is the Level.

What Does Another Apron Add?

That brings us back to perhaps the most difficult symbolic question. Freemasonry places extraordinary significance upon the white lambskin apron. It is presented to the Mason before he has become a Warden, Master, Grand Lodge officer, or anything else. Its significance does not depend upon office. The Mason does not earn it by reaching the East. He receives it because he has become a Mason.

Then we decorate aprons to indicate offices and accomplishments. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Regalia can communicate function and preserve history. The problem begins when decoration is interpreted as elevation in Masonic worth.

If the plain white apron already represents the essential dignity and honor of the Mason, what can a Past Master's apron possibly add to that dignity?

It can add history. It can represent service. It can remind its wearer of responsibility once carried. But it cannot make the Brother beneath it a better Mason. If it does, then we have contradicted the symbolism of the first apron. The Past Master's apron should therefore tell us something about what a Brother did, never something about what he is.

The same must be true of the title. When “Past Master” merely records service, it is history. When “Worshipful” causes one Brother's opinion to carry greater weight because of an office he once held, it has become status. When that status allows a Brother who no longer carries the responsibility of office to exercise disproportionate influence over the Brother who does, the Craft should ask whether its customs have begun working against its symbols.

Abolish the Title, Not the History

Perhaps Freemasonry should therefore do something radical precisely because it is traditional in spirit: abolish “Past Master” as a permanent honorific while preserving everything worthwhile that the term currently represents. Keep the records, photographs, jewels, and commemorative aprons. Preserve the history. Seek the counsel of experienced former Masters. Honor extraordinary service. Nothing about abolishing a permanent title requires forgetting a Brother's work.

But when a Master's term expires, let the title expire with it. Yesterday he was Worshipful Master. Today he is Brother. Nothing meaningful has been taken from him. The experience remains. The lessons remain. The friendships remain. The record of his service remains. What disappears is only the suggestion that yesterday's office confers today's elevated status or that yesterday's knowledge carries authority simply because of the title attached to the man who possesses it.

Theodore Roosevelt believed that leaving the presidency meant becoming “exactly like any other man in private life.” George Washington, himself a Worshipful Master, surrendered the presidency and physically yielded precedence to the men who now occupied the offices of President and Vice President. John Adams looked beyond his own presidency and saw himself becoming a “private Citizen” and “Brother Farmer.” Within the York Rite, the Virtual Past Master degree itself preserves the distinction between possessing the lessons associated with the Chair and possessing actual authority to govern.

These examples point toward the same principle. Knowledge may survive office. Experience should survive office. Wisdom should survive office. Respect should survive office. But authority and responsibility belong together, and when responsibility passes to another Brother, the authority associated with it should pass with it.

A Mason enters the Lodge as a Brother. He may advance through its offices and eventually be entrusted with the Oriental Chair. For a season, the Brethren call him Worshipful Master, not because he has become inherently greater than they are, but because they have entrusted him with greater responsibility. Then his season ends. He steps down from the East, another Brother assumes the chair, and the former Master meets him upon the Level.

Perhaps the final lesson of the Oriental Chair is not learning how to acquire a title, but learning how to surrender one.

You Can Only Tap Your Helmet So Many Times: Baseball and Judgment

Baseball gives you time to think. There is space between pitches, between batters and between innings, and during all that apparent inactivity, decisions are constantly being made. Swing or take. Send the runner or hold him. Charge the ball or play the bounce. Challenge the umpire or save the challenge for later. Baseball is filled with judgment calls, but judgment rarely ends with a single decision. One call changes the circumstances of the next, and that decision changes what is possible after that. A questionable choice may not reveal itself immediately; sometimes its consequences only become apparent several decisions later, after the effects have compounded. Get a little off course early enough, and by the time you recognize it, you may be a long way from where you intended to go. That is the difficult thing about judgment: you have to make the call when the call is yours to make, knowing that what you decide now may determine what choices you still have later.

Of the 26 baseball games I’ve seen this season, this was my third at Angel Stadium. Along the way I’ve been to Dodger Stadium, seen the Fresno Grizzlies, the Tower Buzzers, the Rancho Cucamonga Quakes and the Lake Elsinore Storm. Major League, minor league—it hasn’t mattered much. I’ve watched a lot of baseball and had a good time doing it. Somewhere along the way, though, I’ve also started appreciating the pace of the game differently. Baseball gives you enough time to watch something happen and then sit there and think about what you just watched. Spend enough time in a ballpark and eventually you start seeing a little bit of life reflected back at you.

My third trip to Angel Stadium turned out to be a pretty good lesson in judgment, and the first call happened before I ever left home. My new favorite ticket app has become SeatGeek. I had been buying most of my tickets through MLB, but lately I’ve started going back and forth between the two, watching prices and waiting until fairly close to game time before buying. There is some risk in that. The seat you want can disappear. The price can go down, but it can also go up. You can wait yourself into a bargain or wait yourself right out of one.

In fact, I was sitting in a Zoom meeting with SeatGeek open, keeping an eye on the tickets. I found a seat I liked, and there was a similar one available for $21 less. I didn’t jump on it right away. By the time I went back, the cheaper seat was gone, so my hesitation had cost me $21. It wasn’t exactly a catastrophe. I still ended up with a great price and the best seat I’ve ever had at Angel Stadium: a field-level aisle seat about six rows back, just to the right-field side of home plate, with a clear view all the way down the first-base line. Even after paying the extra $21, I paid about what an average Dodger ticket might cost me in the upper part of the loge.

SeatGeek also came through on preferred parking. What normally costs around $35 cost me $12. So before the first pitch had even been thrown, I had already seen both sides of waiting. Waiting had gotten me a terrific seat at a terrific price, while waiting just a little longer had cost me another $21. Neither fact cancels out the other. That is often how judgment works. The decision itself may be reasonable, but timing matters, and sometimes the consequence of waiting another minute is simply that the circumstances change.

The weather certainly helped. After all the heat we’ve had, Southern California finally cooled off, and by the end of the game it was probably around 69 degrees. Sitting six rows from the field on a cool September evening watching baseball is about as pleasant as it gets.

My ticket included access to the Diamond Club. The food itself wasn’t included, but I deliberately arrived about an hour early because I wanted to look around, see what the club was like and enjoy the stadium before the game. There was a buffet, although I never really investigated it because I saw somebody eating a hamburger that looked really good. I made another judgment call and ordered one.

I sat at the bar with my hamburger and a draft beer and discovered that the bar itself offers a remarkable view. It snakes around toward the field, and at the end you can sit almost sideways and look directly out over the stadium. I probably could have stayed there for the entire game and been perfectly happy. Instead, I stayed about 45 minutes and watched the pregame activities. The beer was fabulously cold, and the hamburger justified my decision. It was exceptional. The fries did not. They were warm rather than hot and weren’t particularly crisp, apparently having spent some time under a heat lamp while the hamburger was freshly prepared. Overall, I gave the meal an 8.5. Not every part of a decision has to work out perfectly for the decision itself to have been a good one.

The pregame activities included a Masons for Mitts presentation, making this the second one I’ve happened upon this season. I saw the other at Dodger Stadium, and I hadn’t bought either ticket because of Masons for Mitts. I simply happened to be there both times. After dinner, I bought a bag of peanuts, found my seat and settled in for the game.

Two guys sitting behind me appeared to be about my age, and they were serious statistics guys. They quietly discussed the numbers on virtually every player who came to the plate. It was like having two additional broadcasters sitting directly behind me, and I actually enjoyed listening to them. Baseball has always been a game for people who like numbers, history, arguments and judgment, and there was plenty of judgment to go around that night.

The Mariners demonstrated that early with the ABS challenge system. By the end of the third inning, they had used both of their challenges on ball-and-strike calls, and they had lost both. At the time, each challenge presumably seemed worth making. A batter believed the umpire had missed a pitch, and he had a mechanism available to question the call, so he used it. Twice Seattle made that judgment, twice the umpire was proved right, and the challenges were gone.

The interesting thing was that those decisions didn’t appear especially important when they were made. It was early in the game. There was plenty of baseball left. But judgment has a way of rolling forward. What you decide in the third inning can determine what options you have in the eighth, even though you have no idea in the third what the eighth inning is going to look like.

By the eighth, Seattle could have used those challenges.

From where I was sitting, the home-plate umpire suddenly seemed very generous to the Angels pitcher, and I wasn’t alone in thinking so. Pitches that looked clearly outside the strike zone were being called strikes, and people throughout my section were reacting to them. Three times I watched a Mariners batter instinctively reach up and touch his helmet to signal a challenge, only to remember that there were no challenges left. The gesture itself told the story. Hand toward the helmet, hesitation, realization. Something decided five innings earlier had just changed what he could do now.

It also seemed to me—and this is nothing more than the perception of one guy sitting six rows behind the plate—that once Seattle had no challenges remaining, the umpire became a little more comfortable widening the strike zone to his own comfort zone. Maybe the electronic system would have upheld every one of those calls. We’ll never know, because the Mariners had already used their opportunities to ask the question.

That may be one of the most interesting things about the ABS challenge system. Baseball itself is still getting accustomed to the idea that the umpire’s judgment on balls and strikes can be questioned in real time. For generations, the umpire called the pitch and that was essentially the end of it. You could complain, but eventually you had to get back in the batter’s box. Now technology gives a player a limited opportunity to ask whether the umpire got it right.

The obvious lesson would be to use your challenges wisely, but I don’t think that means simply saving them. A challenge that is never used isn’t worth anything either. Maybe those two early pitches really did look wrong to the Mariners hitters. At that moment, with the information they had, challenging the calls may have seemed exactly right. You cannot make a third-inning decision with eighth-inning information.

That is the problem with judgment. You have to use it before you know everything you would like to know.

The consequence comes later. Use a challenge now and you don’t have it later. Pass on an opportunity now and it may not exist when you come back. Make a small correction early and perhaps nothing more comes of it. Fail to make one, and like an airplane traveling a degree or two off course, the farther you go, the greater the distance becomes between where you are and where you intended to be. The original error may have been tiny. Distance compounds it.

That doesn’t mean the lesson is to become afraid of making decisions. Quite the opposite. The Mariners had challenges for a reason, and at some point they had to decide whether to use them. Judgment isn’t about somehow knowing the future. It is about making the best call you can when the call is yours to make, understanding that the decision will become part of the circumstances surrounding the next one.

And once the challenges are gone, touching your helmet doesn’t bring them back. You still have to stand in the batter’s box, deal with the strike zone you’ve been given and play the next pitch. There isn’t much value in spending the eighth inning wishing you had made a different decision in the third.

Judgment continued to shape the game. There was a hot ball down to third that I thought the third baseman should have handled, but the official scorer didn’t give him an error. Later, a ball got out to center field and bounced off the wall when I thought the center fielder should have picked it up. That play helped the Mariners score their one run. Were they errors? I thought so. The official scorer apparently didn’t. They were more judgment calls, the sort of small decisions that fill a baseball game and help shape what happens next.

That is part of the pleasure of watching baseball from a great seat. Television gives you instant replay, multiple camera angles, a strike-zone box and professional commentators explaining what they think happened. Six rows from the field, you get something different. You see the play develop in front of you, hear everybody around you react and make your own judgment about what you just saw. Sometimes the official scorer agrees with you, sometimes he doesn’t, and sometimes an entire section appears to disagree with the home-plate umpire.

From that close, though, you don’t just see baseball differently. You hear it differently. I could hear every pitch slap into the catcher’s mitt. Television microphones pick up that sound, but from six rows away it has a sharpness and immediacy that a television speaker simply doesn’t reproduce. At one point Mike Trout broke his bat, and the crack of the wood was incredible. It wasn’t the familiar sound of bat meeting ball. It was the unmistakable crack of wood breaking under tremendous force, and from where I was sitting it seemed to explode into the stadium.

There is also something about that part of Angel Stadium that seems to collect sound. Sitting near home plate felt almost like being at the bottom of a canyon. The sounds didn’t simply come from one direction and disappear; they seemed to swirl around that part of the ballpark. When the crowd cheered, the sound rolled around you. When thousands of people booed an umpire’s call, you were sitting inside the boo. When something went wrong and the crowd collectively groaned, the sound seemed to come from everywhere at once.

That collective reaction is part of what makes being at a baseball game so different from watching one on television. Thousands of people can see the same pitch or the same ball leave the bat and, within a fraction of a second, reach the same judgment. Nobody organizes it and nobody gives a signal. Thousands of individual reactions become one sound that rolls through the stadium. Television can show you a baseball game, but at the ballpark you are inside one. You hear the mitt, the breaking bat, the cheers, the boos and the groans. You hear the statistics guys behind you and the people around you disputing the strike zone. For three hours, thousands of strangers become a temporary community watching the same patch of grass and dirt and deciding what they think just happened.

The Angels eventually won the game, ending it with a double play. One moment the Mariners still had possibilities, and a few seconds later two outs had been recorded and everybody was getting up to leave. All those little decisions, pitches, swings, calls, challenges and plays had accumulated into a final result.

Then it was my turn to make one more judgment call.

I’ve parked in that preferred lot before, and normally I leave the same general way I came in. I know the route. It takes me toward the freeway, down and around, and eventually back to the 57. This time, however, I saw a stream of cars taking what appeared to be a shortcut. They were getting out faster than I was, and I decided they must know something I didn’t.

So I followed them. It actually did get me out of the parking lot faster, but unfortunately it dumped me onto Orange Grove going away from the 57. Instead of simply leaving the way I knew worked, I had to go completely around the stadium to get myself pointed back toward the freeway. Nobody made me follow those cars, and at the moment I made the decision it looked perfectly reasonable. Other people appeared to know a quicker route. Then reality supplied some additional information.

Driving around Angel Stadium, I realized I had made my own version of an unsuccessful ABS challenge. The Mariners thought two pitches had been called incorrectly and used their challenges. I thought a line of cars knew a better way home and followed them. Earlier, I thought I could wait a little longer to buy my ticket and watched the cheaper seat disappear. None of those decisions was ridiculous when it was made. Each was a judgment based on the information available at that moment. What made them interesting was what happened afterward.

Maybe that is what baseball has been giving me time to think about during these 26 games. Judgment doesn’t happen as a series of isolated choices. It rolls down a line. One decision alters the circumstances of the next. A small mistake may not look like much when it happens, but its effects can compound. Sometimes you don’t even recognize the importance of the first call until several calls later, when you discover that an option you once had is no longer available.

Good judgment, then, cannot mean always making the right decision. Nobody has enough information to do that. It means making the best call you can when the decision is yours, recognizing that the call will have consequences, and paying attention to where those consequences are taking you. If you discover you are a degree off course, correct it while the correction is still small. If the decision cannot be undone, stop trying to relitigate it and make the next decision from where you actually are.

That may be the lesson worth taking out of the ballpark. Use your challenges when you believe they matter because challenges are meant to be used, but understand that every challenge spent changes what you will have available later. If you use one and you’re wrong, learn something from it. If you use them both and they’re gone, quit reaching for a challenge you no longer have. Adjust to the strike zone, stay in the batter’s box and play the next pitch.

That is one of the things I’ve come to enjoy most about baseball this season. The game moves slowly enough to let you notice how many small judgments are constantly being made. Swing or take. Run or hold. Challenge or save it. Charge the ball or play the bounce. Call it a hit or an error. Buy the ticket or wait another few minutes. Follow the crowd out of the parking lot or stick with the route you know. None of those decisions seems particularly profound by itself, but put enough of them together and they determine a baseball game. Put enough small judgments together, and they have a way of determining a life, too.

Maybe that is why baseball gives us so much time between pitches. It gives us a chance not merely to think about the last one, but to notice where all the previous ones have brought us before the next one comes.

As for my third trip to Angel Stadium, I got the best seat I’ve had there, a good hamburger, an exceptionally cold beer, a beautiful September evening and an Angels victory. I heard every pitch hit the mitt, heard Mike Trout break a bat, sat inside the cheers and boos of a baseball crowd, questioned the umpire and the official scorer, watched the Mariners use up their challenges and then wish they had them back, and finally made my own bad call trying to get out of the parking lot.

I even paid an extra $21 for the lesson.

Third time’s the charm.

Six Voices from the Sidelines: The Problem with Masonic Prompting

“I thought Brother Williams knew his ritual rather well tonight.”

“He did.”

“Then why were six Past Masters whispering every word from the sidelines?”

“Quality control.”

That was the joke in a recent installment of my Two British Guys series. Like most good Masonic humor, it works because there is enough truth buried inside it to make us uncomfortable. If you have spent much time in a lodge, you have probably witnessed some version of it. A Brother pauses during the ritual. Somewhere on the sidelines a Past Master whispers the next word. Then another Brother does the same. Perhaps a third joins in with a slightly different word. Within seconds, the man who may simply have been taking a breath is receiving assistance from half the room.

You can watch the original Reel here:

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1605239444582930

The comments that followed the Reel made something clear: Masons recognize the problem. We laugh because we have seen it, and some of us have probably done it. But there is more going on here than a joke about Past Masters. There are questions about how we learn ritual, how we teach it, when assistance becomes interference, and ultimately how the Master and officers coach exercise leadership in the lodge.

Why Good Ritualists Whisper

I don't believe most sideline prompting is an attempt to show off. Quite the opposite. Usually the Brother whispering the word is trying to help. Think about how we learn ritual. We repeat it. We say it aloud. We retrieve it from memory and say it again. After enough years, listening to another Brother perform a familiar passage can become almost impossible without following along in your own head. Sometimes your lips move. Sometimes the words come out.

A ritualist who knows the work well may follow another Brother word for word, anticipating what comes next because he has said those same words hundreds of times himself. When the ritualist hesitates, the instinct to supply the next word can be almost automatic. Most of the time the Brother on the sidelines is right. Sometimes he isn't, and that is where the trouble begins.

A Pause Is Not a Plea for Help

One of the first things we should teach an officer is that silence is not failure. A Brother may pause because he is gathering his thoughts, controlling his breathing, deliberately slowing himself down, or allowing an important sentence to settle before continuing. He may simply need another second to retrieve the next phrase. The experienced ritualist on the sidelines recognizes the hesitation and thinks, He's lost it. Then comes the whispered word.

Not every silence needs to be rescued.

An unsolicited prompt can actually create another problem. The ritualist was searching his own memory, and now someone has inserted a word into that process. If another voice supplies something slightly different, the Brother suddenly has to decide which voice to trust while simultaneously trying to remember where he was. What began as assistance becomes interference. Six knowledgeable Past Masters do not make six times the prompter; they make six competing voices.

Start by Getting the Words Right

The long-term solution begins well before the degree. When I served as an officers coach, I believed in doing a read-through. Take the officers somewhere appropriately private, sit down, and read through the degree together. This is not the time to demonstrate how much anyone has memorized. It is the time to make sure everyone understands what the words actually are.

Let the younger officers hear experienced ritualists pronounce unfamiliar words correctly while they see the words themselves. Work through unusual vocabulary and awkward phrases before someone spends weeks committing an error to memory. The objective is to establish a sound foundation before the individual work of memorization begins. Once something has been memorized incorrectly, correcting it means undoing work that has already been done.

After that, memorization belongs primarily to the officer. An officers coach can help, answer questions, listen, and correct, but he cannot put in someone else's hours. When I coached officers, I wanted rehearsal time spent largely on the things that required us to be together: floor work, positioning, timing, coordination, presentation, and the relationship between the words and the movement. Memorization required many hours of individual work, and that work was part of accepting the responsibility of becoming an officer.

One Prompter

The immediate solution to sideline prompting is considerably simpler: designate one prompter. I've done this both as Master and as an officers coach. Before the work begins, everyone should know who the prompter is. More importantly, the officers performing the ritual should know where that Brother will be sitting and how to ask him for assistance.

When I need a word, I look at my prompter. That look means something: I need you. Until then, leave me alone. I may know exactly where I am. I may deliberately be pausing. I may be taking a breath because I know that I have a tendency to speak too quickly. Give me the opportunity to continue before deciding that I need to be rescued.

This should be practiced during rehearsals as well. Teach the officer that getting momentarily lost is not a catastrophe. Stop, look at the designated prompter, receive what you need, and continue. If officers learn that process during rehearsal, there is considerably less reason for panic when it happens during a degree. More importantly, everyone in the room understands who is responsible for helping and when that help should be offered.

Knowing the Ritual Is Not the Same as Knowing How to Prompt

Experience taught me something else: the Brother who knows the ritual best is not automatically the best prompter. I have asked very knowledgeable ritualists to prompt and discovered that they could perform the work beautifully themselves but had difficulty helping someone else through it. Knowing the work and following another person closely enough to help him at exactly the right moment are different skills.

A good prompter must follow another person's delivery closely enough to know exactly where he is while distinguishing between an intentional pause and genuine distress. When assistance is actually requested, he must know precisely what comes next and provide only enough information to get the ritualist moving again. This becomes especially difficult during longer lectures. Let your attention drift for a few seconds, and the lecturer may choose precisely that moment to look at you for help. Now there are two Brothers trying to remember what comes next.

That is why choosing the prompter deserves more thought than simply asking who knows the ritual. The question should be who can follow another Brother's work patiently, remain attentive, recognize when assistance is genuinely needed, and provide that assistance without becoming part of the performance. The best prompter may be the Brother you barely hear all evening.

Teach Officers How to Be Prompted

We spend considerable time teaching officers what to say and where to stand, but we should also teach them what to do when something goes wrong. Prompting should not be an emergency procedure invented in the middle of a degree. It should be part of rehearsal.

An officer should know that if he loses his place, he can stop, collect himself, and look toward the designated prompter. He should also learn that a moment of silence is preferable to panic. There is nothing inherently wrong with pausing for a second or two. In fact, an officer who knows that silence will not immediately produce a chorus from the sidelines may become a better ritualist because he becomes more comfortable with deliberate pacing.

There is a corresponding lesson for the sidelines. Experienced Masons need to learn that knowing the next word does not create an obligation to say it. Sometimes the discipline demanded of the man listening is every bit as important as the discipline demanded of the man speaking.

Then Enforce It

Of course, announcing that there is one prompter does no good if six other Brothers continue whispering from the sidelines. This is where the problem stops being principally about ritual and becomes a matter of leadership. The Master and officers coach have to establish the standard and enforce it consistently.

That does not require embarrassing a Brother in front of the lodge. Most of these men are sincerely trying to help, and their experience should be respected. My preference has always been an old leadership principle: praise in public and criticize in private. If a Brother continues prompting after someone else has been designated, speak with him afterward. Tell him that you know he is trying to help, but several people supplying words creates confusion and undermines the system the officers have practiced.

The correction respects the Brother's intention while addressing his behavior. But the standard has to mean something. If the Master announces one prompter and then allows everyone else to continue prompting anyway, he has not established a system. He has merely made an announcement.

When Help Becomes Interference

There is a larger leadership lesson hidden inside this very Masonic problem. Organizations are filled with knowledgeable people who want to help, and a lodge should treasure the Past Masters and experienced ritualists sitting on its sidelines. Their knowledge represents years, sometimes decades, of accumulated experience. The question is not whether that experience has value. The question is how and when it should be used.

Good leadership establishes who is responsible, when assistance is appropriate, how that assistance will be requested, and who should provide it. Everyone else then has a responsibility of his own: trust the system and allow the person doing the work the opportunity to do it. That can be difficult for someone who knows exactly how he would perform the task himself, but restraint is also a form of discipline.

This raises a worthwhile question beyond ritual. How often in lodge life does well-intentioned help become interference? A Past Master may have years of experience to offer, but there is a difference between making that experience available and stepping into another Brother's responsibility. Sometimes leadership means getting more people involved. At other times it means helping good people understand when their involvement is making someone else's job harder.

Six Voices from the Sidelines

Which brings us back to those six Past Masters. Every one of them probably knows the ritual. Every one of them probably wants the officer to succeed. Every one of them probably believes he is helping. That is precisely why the joke works, but it is also why the problem deserves more than a laugh.

Good ritual requires preparation from the officer, attention from the prompter, discipline from the sidelines, and leadership from the East. The officer has to do the work necessary to know his part. The prompter has to remain attentive without inserting himself unnecessarily. The experienced Brothers on the sidelines have to resist the natural temptation to help simply because they know the words. And the Master and officers coach have to create a system in which everyone understands his role.

There is a lesson in that for all of us who have accumulated enough years in the Craft to know most of the words. Experience gives us something valuable to contribute, but perhaps experience should also teach us when contribution is unnecessary. There are times when the younger Brother needs our instruction, times when he needs our encouragement, and times when he simply needs enough room to find the next word for himself.

Sometimes the most helpful word a Past Master can offer during ritual is the one he decides not to say.

Lost on the A Line

Somewhere between San Dimas and South Pasadena, I began to wonder whether we had boarded the Metro A Line or somehow wandered onto the set of Lost.

There was an eclectic collection of people sharing the train that Labor Day morning, the sort of assortment that made Maria and me joke that if the train suddenly stopped on a tropical island, we already had the cast. We weren't lost. We knew exactly where we were going. But looking around the car, Lost seemed like a pretty good description of the company.

Oddly enough, the tropical-island part of the joke wasn't far from my mind either.

Labor Day began with humidity.

The remnants of Hurricane Marie had brought Southern California plenty of moisture. It had rained much of Sunday, but by Monday the rain was mostly gone, leaving behind heavy, damp air that Southern California usually doesn't know what to do with. The moment we stepped out of the car at the San Dimas Metro station, I felt it.

For a moment, I wasn't in San Dimas anymore.

I was back in Saint Kitts.

I spent about two years living in the Caribbean, including roughly a year in Saint Kitts, and there is something about tropical humidity that the body remembers before the mind does. It is not merely heat. Southern California knows heat. This was moisture hanging in the air, settling against your skin and making even an ordinary walk feel vaguely tropical.

At the time, I didn't realize that Saint Kitts was going to follow me through much of our Labor Day excursion.

We had no particularly ambitious plan. We got to the station around 10 in the morning and decided to take the train to South Pasadena, walk around, find someplace for lunch and see where the day went. That is one of the pleasures I have discovered about taking Metro: not every trip needs to be about getting somewhere important.

Sometimes the ride itself is the point.

Labor Day also meant weekend rules, including free parking at the station. Then there was the fare. With our senior status—and I still find the phrase senior citizen slightly ridiculous when applied to me—the trip cost 35 cents.

Thirty-five cents from San Dimas to South Pasadena.

It is difficult to complain about that.

I've become increasingly comfortable using the train to get around Los Angeles. In fact, while sitting aboard the train in San Dimas, I pulled out my phone, opened SeatGeek and bought tickets for the Dodgers game that evening. So I already knew that South Pasadena wasn't going to be the end of my rail travels for the day. By the time Labor Day was over, I would make four separate train trips.

People sometimes tell me they are afraid of riding Metro. I understand that perception, but I also think that if you believe riding a train from San Dimas into Los Angeles constitutes genuine danger, you probably haven't spent much time around actual danger.

Metro can certainly be interesting.

You share the train with everybody. Occasionally that means knowing when not to make eye contact, when to move to another part of the car and when simply to mind your own business. Riding public transportation exposes you to a cross section of humanity that you don't encounter sealed inside your own automobile.

Our particular cross section that morning was what had prompted the Lost comparison in the first place.

Then the doors opened in South Pasadena, and we stepped back into the humidity.

South Pasadena was quiet. It was Labor Day, after all, and many of the businesses were closed. We walked several blocks from the station, eventually reaching Fremont Avenue near the post office, where we found a place called Piccadilly Grace.

There was that word again: Piccadilly.

And suddenly Saint Kitts came rushing back for the second time that morning.

In Basseterre, the capital of Saint Kitts, there is a famous meeting place called the Circus. At its center stands the Berkeley Memorial clock, surrounded by the traffic of downtown. When I lived there, if I needed to meet a client or arrange to connect with a contractor coming onto the island, the Circus was the kind of landmark everyone understood.

We'll meet at the Circus.

No elaborate directions necessary.

One of my favorite places nearby was an upstairs, open-air restaurant overlooking the activity below. The restaurants occupying those spaces may change, but I remember the experience: sitting on a veranda in the Caribbean heat, ceiling fans moving the humid air, having breakfast with a client at nine in the morning with an omelet and a cup of hot coffee.

Yes, hot coffee.

I have never understood why hot weather should prevent anyone from drinking hot coffee.

Now, decades and thousands of miles away, I was sitting outside Piccadilly Grace in South Pasadena on a humid morning, drinking another cup of hot black coffee.

Travel sometimes produces connections that would be impossible to plan.

Piccadilly Grace has a Mediterranean influence, and our lunch turned out to be excellent. Maria had a breakfast croissant sandwich, which she thoroughly enjoyed. I had a cup of turkey chili and black coffee, and we shared the hummus plate.

The hummus itself had an interesting orange color, apparently from carrot blended into it, along with seasoning that gave it a little more character than the standard version. It came with warm flatbread—somewhere between pita and naan—along with marinated olives, cucumber and tomatoes. Everything was fresh, simple and very good.

The service matched the food. You order inside and they bring everything to your table, and our meal arrived quickly. Everyone was friendly and attentive without making a production of it.

We sat outside, where there was just enough breeze to make the humidity pleasant.

And again, I thought about the Caribbean.

There are meals that are memorable because they are spectacular, and there are meals that become memorable because of where your mind travels while you're eating them. This was the latter. A little café in South Pasadena had somehow connected itself to breakfasts in Basseterre and coffee in the Caribbean.

Eventually we walked back to the Metro station and paid another 35 cents for the trip home.

As we reached the platform, the train was already there. We hurried toward the last car just as the doors were closing. The operator saw us standing outside and reopened them long enough for us to climb aboard.

A small kindness, but one I appreciated.

The air-conditioned train felt especially good after walking through the humidity. The return trip supplied another assortment of Metro characters, including a gentleman whose behavior suggested he was struggling with mental illness and who, for reasons known only to him, was traveling with a watermelon. He briefly tried to engage me.

There are moments on public transportation when the wisest response is simply to look elsewhere and continue with your day.

So I did.

Nothing happened. The train rolled east. The watermelon continued on its mysterious journey. We eventually arrived back in San Dimas.

And that was our Labor Day afternoon.

No airport. No hotel reservation. No rental car. No carefully constructed itinerary. We drove a few minutes to the Metro station, paid 35 cents, rode to another town, walked through neighborhoods we don't normally walk through, found a restaurant we'd never visited and had a very good lunch.

Yet somehow, for part of the day, I also traveled back to Saint Kitts.

That may be what I increasingly enjoy about these little excursions. A day trip doesn't have to be grand to qualify as travel. You don't have to cross an ocean. Sometimes you merely need to leave the car behind and give yourself permission not to know exactly what comes next.

Get on the train. Pick a stop. Walk around.

Have lunch somewhere you've never eaten before.

And pay attention to what the humidity reminds you of.

For 35 cents, you never know how far you might travel.

The Ticket Was for Baseball. The Trip Was the Adventure

I’m getting close to two dozen baseball games this season, spread across six different ballparks, and Friday night brought me back to Dodger Stadium for the sixth time this year and, for the fourth time, by train. By now there are parts of the trip that have become familiar, but this one was different almost from the beginning. I bought my ticket through SeatGeek, which I had never used before. I wasn’t particularly thrilled about putting yet another app on my phone, but I liked the way it helped identify the better values around the stadium instead of simply presenting a sea of available seats.

As it turned out, I stumbled into a very good deal. Someone had listed four seats together in Section 9 on the field level, on the third-base side and only slightly off home plate. Another buyer purchased three of them, leaving behind a single seat—the aisle seat. I found it while hunting around for the best combination of location and price and paid $100 including the fees. Later, the woman sitting beside me told me she had paid $181 apiece, plus fees, for the other three seats. Row P put us only a few dozen rows from home plate. These weren’t merely good seats; they were fabulous seats, and apparently there are advantages to being the guy shopping for one leftover ticket.

There was another bargain involved this time. Since my previous train trip to Dodger Stadium, I applied for and received the senior fare, which reduced my $1.75 ride to 75 cents. There are, apparently, some financial compensations for getting older. It also changes the economics of a trip to Dodger Stadium. Parking alone is $45, and getting there and back probably consumes another $15 worth of gas, even before calculating the actual mileage cost of operating the car. Call it $60 just to drive and park. Looked at that way, taking the train meant that, comparatively speaking, about $40 bought the baseball ticket and another $60 bought the privilege of sitting in traffic and parking my car. For less than the price of a cup of coffee, the train seemed like the better bargain.

I left home around 4:30 and rode to the Chinatown station. From there, it is roughly three-quarters of a mile to the stadium entrance, with most of that distance going uphill. Fortunately, Southern California had cooled considerably during the week, so the climb wasn’t particularly difficult. Near the entrance to the parking lot at the bottom of the hill, I stopped for about ten minutes and talked with two members of the security staff, one a retired police officer and the other retired from corrections. Then I finished the walk up the hill and into the stadium.

My ticket also included access to the Stadium Club, someplace I had never visited before. I asked an usher where it was and, after she pointed me in the right direction, I asked whether it was any good. She laughed and told me she didn’t know, but I could come back and tell her. So I went upstairs to investigate. It was packed, even though the game was still an hour away, and the buffet was $70. The food looked good and smelled even better. I’ve eaten in the Dugout Club before, where the food is fabulous, so I have little doubt that the Stadium Club buffet was very good as well. If I had been there with someone, sitting down for dinner might have been worth the wait and the price. Alone, though, I decided that a draft beer, a Dodger Dog and some peanuts sounded more like a baseball game anyway.

I took them down to my seat and spent much of the next hour doing something I have increasingly come to enjoy: watching a ballpark slowly become a ballpark. When you arrive early enough, most of the seats are still empty. The grounds crew is working, players and stadium employees are moving around, ushers are getting into position, and people begin arriving first in ones and twos and then in streams. The noise gradually builds as this enormous empty place fills with people and takes on an entirely different personality. There is something satisfying about simply sitting there with a beer and a hot dog and watching the whole thing happen.

Eventually, the woman who had purchased the other three tickets arrived with her children. She was pleasant, and occasionally she would ask me about a play or something happening on the field. One of the kids wanted to be closer to the dugout, and I pointed out that where we were sitting had another advantage: we were in prime foul-ball territory. We didn’t catch one, but several came close enough to send people around us scrambling. That is part of the entertainment of sitting that close. You aren’t simply watching the game from a distance; every once in a while, the game comes looking for you.

The Dodgers beat the Washington Nationals 5–3, although they seemed determined to make the ending more interesting than necessary. The game itself, however, probably won’t be what I remember most. I was glad to see Will Smith back behind the plate. They call him America’s Catcher, and I have always thought catchers deserve more credit than they receive. A baseball team can run a parade of pitchers to the mound, but somebody has to crouch behind home plate and catch all of them. During last year’s seven-game World Series, the Dodgers used plenty of pitchers, but Will Smith caught every pitch. From where I was sitting Friday night, I was close enough to watch him work, and that is one of the things great seats give you that television cannot quite reproduce. You begin noticing the work inside the game.

The best example came during the seventh-inning stretch. Tens of thousands of people were standing and singing while the Nationals took the field, but down near the Dodgers’ dugout was Mookie Betts, who was due to bat. While almost everybody else was participating in the spectacle, Betts was working. He took practice swings, settled into his stance, stretched, swung again and prepared himself for his next at-bat. With all that noise and activity surrounding him, he appeared to have blocked out everything except what he was about to do. Sitting that close, I found myself watching him prepare rather than watching the seventh-inning entertainment. We tend to notice talent when someone performs, but sometimes you have to get close enough to notice all the preparation that comes before it.

After the Dodgers finished off the Nationals, the stadium prepared for a drone show and opened the outfield so fans could go onto the field. I decided I had seen enough and started back toward Chinatown. The return walk is considerably easier because gravity is finally on your side, and I made it from Dodger Stadium to the station in 18 minutes. By then it was completely dark. The route crosses the freeway on a pedestrian bridge and winds down a corkscrew-shaped ramp that compensates for the considerable difference in elevation between Dodger Stadium and Chinatown. There was a homeless man sleeping along the way, but there were also plenty of other people making the same walk back toward the train.

When I reached the platform, something clearly wasn’t right. A train headed toward downtown was sitting motionless on the tracks with passengers aboard. Four police officers were gathered toward the south end of the platform, and then I saw another four coming from the north. One of them was a Detective III, identifiable by the insignia on his uniform. You can take the cop out of the department, apparently, but you can’t stop him from noticing things like rank insignia. Then came the announcement that train service had been stopped because of police activity.

Soon the officers divided into teams and went down onto the tracks. A police helicopter appeared overhead, followed by fire engines and additional emergency personnel. Eventually, we could see what all the commotion was about. A man was perched on one of the structures near the tracks, and initially, from the platform, the whole thing was frustrating. Everyone had someplace to go. The trains were stopped, people had just spent hours at a baseball game, and the natural reaction was to wonder why the police didn’t simply go down there and get him off whatever he was sitting on. Then it became apparent why they weren’t doing that. He was threatening to jump.

Once we understood that, the scene looked considerably different. Police officers were negotiating with him while firefighters positioned equipment nearby. A ladder truck arrived, and eventually they inflated one of those enormous rescue cushions underneath him—a giant firefighter bouncy house, for lack of a more technical description. Whatever impatience existed on the platform had to yield to the reality that, for the man down there, this was not an inconvenience or an interruption to his evening. Whatever had brought him to that pillar had brought him to the edge of something much more serious, and the police and firefighters were going to take whatever time they needed to try to bring him down safely.

For the rest of us, that meant waiting. We stood on the platform for about an hour with no real idea when the trains would begin moving again. People started arriving from Union Station because they had apparently been told that trains weren’t running there either and to walk to Chinatown. Eventually, I noticed people drifting toward a train that had originally been headed in the opposite direction. I asked what was happening and learned that they were going to reverse it and send it back toward Pomona. Since San Dimas was in that direction, that became my ride home.

By then, of course, everybody needed the same ride, so the train was packed. It also seemed to be moving extraordinarily fast. Maybe that was only my perception because I was sitting backward and watching the world rush away in the opposite direction, but it felt as though the operator had decided all of us had already waited long enough. Something else had changed during that hour on the platform, too. People were talking to one another. Many of us had just attended the same baseball game, and then we had stood together watching the same strange emergency unfold. By the time the train finally started moving, we had acquired a shared experience. Strangers who normally would have sat quietly staring at their phones were talking about the game, the delay, what had happened at the station, where they were going and how they were getting home. For much of the 45-minute ride, conversations bounced around the car among people who probably never would have spoken to one another otherwise.

I finally walked through my front door about seven minutes after midnight. I had left at 4:30, so I had been gone almost eight hours for a baseball game. Yet when I thought about the evening, there wasn’t much to complain about. I had found a terrific field-level aisle seat for $100, taken the train for practically nothing, walked through Chinatown and up the hill to one of America’s great ballparks on a beautiful, cool Southern California evening, eaten a Dodger Dog with peanuts and a draft beer, watched Will Smith work behind the plate and Mookie Betts prepare for an at-bat, and watched foul balls sail into the seats around me. The Dodgers won 5–3, and then getting home became an unexpected adventure of its own.

That may be part of why I have gone to nearly two dozen baseball games this year instead of simply watching them on television. Television gives you a better view of almost every pitch, along with replays, statistics and commentators explaining what you missed. What television cannot give you is everything around the game: the train ride, the walk, the people you meet, the retired cops you talk to on the hill, the woman beside you who paid almost twice as much for her ticket, the kid hoping a foul ball comes his way, or the chance to notice Mookie Betts quietly taking practice swings while nearly 50,000 other people are singing. It certainly cannot give you an unexpected hour on a Chinatown train platform followed by a midnight ride home with a car full of strangers who, because of what you have all just experienced together, aren’t quite strangers anymore.

None of that was part of the plan when I bought the ticket. I thought I was going to Dodger Stadium to see the Dodgers play the Nationals, and I did. But somewhere during this season of ballparks, trains, long walks and baseball games, I think I have begun to understand that the game is only part of why I keep going. There is something to be said for leaving the house, going somewhere, and allowing the evening to become whatever it is going to become. Sometimes you get a great seat, a cool night and a Dodger victory. Sometimes the train home gets stopped for an hour. Sometimes you spend the ride back talking with people you didn't know two hours earlier.

You buy the ticket for the baseball. The rest is the adventure.

Working With Time: The Tools of a Finite Life

The Level: The Finite Life

Freemasonry introduces the Twenty-Four-Inch Gauge early in the Entered Apprentice Degree, and because it explicitly deals with the division of time, it is easy to regard it as Masonry’s principal lesson in time management. We are given twenty-four hours. We are taught that those hours have different purposes. The obvious lesson seems to be that a well-ordered man should budget his time accordingly.

But perhaps Masonry’s more important lesson about time comes later. The Twenty-Four-Inch Gauge tells us how time might be divided; the Level eventually forces us to confront the fact that the amount of time available to us is finite. The Level teaches equality, and we normally understand that equality socially and morally. Yet there is another equality that no wealth, office, reputation, education, or accomplishment can overcome. We are all upon the level of time.

That realization becomes increasingly difficult to avoid as we progress through the degrees. The lessons move us from the possibilities of a life before us toward an increasing awareness of mortality. By the Third Degree, mortality is no longer an abstraction. The master craftsman himself is cut down before the Temple is completed. Yet the Temple is completed after his death.

There is something profound in that distinction. The craftsman is finite, but the work need not be. We naturally become attached to the things we build and sometimes imagine ourselves indispensable to them. We speak of our lodge, our career, our business, our organization, our charitable work, our family, our project. Yet eventually someone else will pick up the tools. The work may continue without the workman.

That is what gives the Twenty-Four-Inch Gauge its urgency. The Gauge will measure twenty-four inches today and twenty-four again tomorrow. What it cannot tell me is how many more times I will be handed the Gauge. The Level tells me the number is finite. The Gauge asks what I intend to do about it.

The Twenty-Four-Inch Gauge: Categories, Not a Time Card

Once the Gauge is placed beside the Level, its lesson changes. It becomes less useful to think of its divisions as a Masonic time card. The three divisions do not require three mathematically equal portions of eight hours each, nor does life permit such an allocation every day. They are better understood as broad categories into which a finite life must somehow be ordered.

There are seasons for different allocations. During harvest, the farmer may rise before daylight and continue working until dark because there is a harvest to bring in. At another time, illness or exhaustion may require far more refreshment and repose than usual. There are moments when the need of a family member, a Brother, or another human being properly displaces almost everything else. Life cannot be lived successfully by insisting that every day must look exactly like the day before it.

The question presented by the Gauge, then, is not whether I divided today's twenty-four hours equally. It is whether, given the season of life in which I presently stand, I have measured my finite time wisely.

This is also where Masonic symbols can begin to interact with one another. I am not suggesting that the ritual formally assigns the meanings or relationships developed here. The ritual does not tell us that a particular pillar corresponds to a particular division of the Gauge or that one working tool must always be interpreted through another. Rather, this is one of the possibilities that emerges after learning Masonry across its degrees. We learn the symbols separately, but eventually we can place them beside one another and ask whether one illuminates another. We learn Masonry by degrees, but eventually we must begin to understand it as a whole.

Service: Making the Interior Life Visible

The first broad category is service: service to God, assistance to a distressed worthy Brother, and service to our fellow creatures. These need not always be understood as unrelated obligations competing for separate blocks of time. The Entered Apprentice is taught to look beyond distinctions between the high and low, rich and poor, and recognize a common relationship under one Almighty Parent. That common origin carries with it obligations toward one another—to aid, support, and protect.

Service to God, therefore, need not end when prayer ends. There is a sense in which service to God's creation becomes an expression of service to the Creator. Caring for a family member, helping a Brother, feeding someone who is hungry, teaching someone who needs knowledge, serving a community, or simply giving another human being the time he needs can all make an interior moral commitment outwardly visible.

This is where the pillar of Beauty becomes interesting. Again, the ritual does not specifically assign Beauty to this portion of the Twenty-Four-Inch Gauge. I am putting two Masonic teachings beside one another and asking what happens when they are allowed to speak to each other.

The Greek concept of kalon gives us a useful way to think about Beauty. Beauty need not be confined to physical attractiveness or ornamentation. It can reach toward what is fine, noble, admirable, and worthy. That suggests a formulation useful to our Masonic purposes: Beauty is goodness made visible.

Brotherly Love can remain an interior conviction. Relief can remain an abstract principle. Truth can remain something we profess. But service gives those principles form in the world. It allows another person to experience what otherwise exists only within us. If the principles of Masonry have actually shaped the man, then somewhere beyond the lodge room there ought to be visible evidence of that transformation.

Perhaps, then, one test of the service portion of the Gauge is a simple question: What beauty does my use of time make visible?

Refreshment and Repose: Maintaining Strength

Refreshment and repose are often reduced to sleep, but that seems unnecessarily narrow. Human beings require restoration in many forms. Sleep certainly matters, but so do food, exercise, recreation, companionship, contemplation, recovery, and occasionally simply doing nothing productive for a while. These activities are not necessarily interruptions of useful life. They maintain the instrument through which useful life is accomplished.

This allows another conversation between Masonic symbols. Strength can illuminate refreshment and repose. Again, this is an interpretive connection rather than a ritual assignment. Strength cannot simply be expended indefinitely. It must be restored. A man who continually consumes his physical, emotional, and intellectual resources without replenishing them eventually discovers that determination alone cannot overcome exhaustion.

Refreshment and repose therefore need not represent weakness or withdrawal from our obligations. Properly measured, they make the fulfillment of those obligations possible. Strength is not merely demonstrated by how long we can continue working. Wisdom may sometimes require us to recognize when continuing the work will diminish the quality of the workman.

Vocation: When Knowledge Becomes Wisdom

Vocation is similarly broader than employment. A job may provide income, but vocation can become the place where knowledge is repeatedly tested against reality. The inexperienced craftsman learns rules. The experienced craftsman learns why the rules exist. He begins recognizing problems before they fully develop. He learns which apparent shortcuts create greater problems later and which efficiencies are the legitimate products of experience. He acquires judgment.

Knowledge is essential, but knowledge alone is not wisdom. Experience places knowledge under pressure. Mistakes reveal deficiencies. Correction produces understanding. Repetition develops judgment. Over enough time, knowledge tested by experience may begin becoming wisdom.

That gives us another possible relationship between the Gauge and the pillars. Wisdom can illuminate vocation because vocation is one of the great laboratories of practical wisdom. The question is no longer merely what I know, but what experience has taught me to do with what I know.

A job begins becoming a vocation when knowledge, tested by experience, becomes wisdom.

This also reminds us why time cannot be removed from the process of becoming. There are things that can be explained in an hour but understood only through years. Information can be transmitted quickly. Judgment usually cannot.

Opportunity Cost: Every Yes Contains a No

Once we accept that time is finite, an unavoidable consequence follows: every choice has a cost. An hour given to one purpose cannot simultaneously be given to another. Every yes therefore contains a no.

Economics gives us a useful term for this: opportunity cost. The true cost of a choice includes what must be surrendered in order to make it. Applied to time, this becomes a remarkably powerful question. What does this hour cost me?

That question is more demanding than asking whether an activity is worthwhile. Many things are worthwhile. Work is worthwhile. Masonry is worthwhile. Family is worthwhile. Service is worthwhile. Exercise is worthwhile. Recreation is worthwhile. Study is worthwhile. The difficulty of a finite life is that worthwhile things compete with other worthwhile things.

The question therefore becomes not simply, “Is this good?” but, “Is this sufficiently good to justify what I cannot do because I have chosen to do this?”

That is where the remaining working tools become useful. The Gauge has established that the resource is limited. We now need instruments for deciding what deserves that resource.

The Square: Test the Decision by Virtue

The Square provides an intellectual test. Masonry teaches us to square our actions by the Square of Virtue, and the four cardinal virtues give us a useful framework through which to examine the choices competing for our time: Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and Fortitude.

An action rarely exists in only one moral dimension. Something may appear courageous while being profoundly imprudent. Something may seem prudent while requiring injustice. Something may be pleasurable but lack temperance. Something may appear temperate only because we lack the fortitude to do what circumstances actually require.

The Square therefore invites us to test our proposed use of time from more than one direction. Does this action demonstrate prudence? Is it just? Is it temperate? Does it require or display appropriate fortitude? We need not claim that satisfying two virtues mathematically guarantees the other two. Rather, the more completely an action stands square against the virtues, the greater confidence we may have in the judgment that produced it.

The Square asks: Does this use of my time square with the kind of man I am attempting to become?

This is primarily an intellectual exercise. We examine the action, consider consequences, compare it with virtues, and determine whether the angles are true. But intellectual justification is not sufficient. A man can become remarkably skilled at constructing arguments for what he already wants to do. We therefore need another instrument.

The Plumb: Searching for a Standard Beyond Ourselves

The Plumb introduces something exterior to us. A builder does not determine vertical by preference. Gravity establishes the line. The craftsman brings his work to that standard and discovers whether it conforms.

Moral life is more complicated because the correct line is not always as immediately visible as a suspended weight. Nevertheless, the Plumb gives us a powerful way to think about alignment. It asks whether my life is aligned with something beyond my own desires, convenience, or rationalizations.

There are at least two ways we can fail the Plumb. The first is obvious: we recognize the proper line but deviate from it. We know what should be done and fail to do it. Correction means bringing ourselves back toward an established standard.

The second failure is more difficult. Sometimes experience, reflection, faith, or greater understanding reveals that what we thought was the proper plumb line was itself mistaken. Growth then requires more than correcting our conduct. We must correct our understanding of the standard against which the conduct is being measured.

That possibility requires humility. We are not only imperfect builders; we are imperfect interpreters of the plans. The search for the correct Plumb may itself be part of the work.

The Plumb therefore asks a different question from the Square. The Square asks whether I can intellectually justify my action according to virtue. The Plumb asks: Am I actually aligned with a standard greater than my own preference?

The Compasses: Boundaries That Concentrate Passion

The Compasses introduce another dimension. If the Square is largely intellectual and the Plumb concerns alignment, the Compasses deal with boundaries. They remind us to circumscribe our desires and keep our passions within due bounds.

It is easy to understand boundaries merely as restrictions. But boundaries can do something more interesting: they can concentrate energy. Water spread indiscriminately across the ground may become a swamp. Confined within banks, it becomes a river. A lens concentrates scattered light. Discipline can do something similar with human passion.

A man interested in everything may accomplish very little. Vocation often develops through progressive narrowing. We discover what deserves our attention, eliminate distractions, deepen our knowledge, accumulate experience, and focus our passions within increasingly meaningful boundaries. Proper circumscription does not necessarily weaken passion. It can intensify it.

The same principle applies to good things. Work requires boundaries. Recreation requires boundaries. Service requires boundaries. Masonry itself requires boundaries. Something can be intrinsically worthwhile and still occupy more of the Gauge than it properly deserves. A noble activity allowed to expand without limit can crowd out other legitimate obligations.

The Compasses therefore ask: Where does this good thing properly end?

That may be one of the hardest questions in a finite life. Our greatest problems do not always arise from choosing between good and evil. Sometimes they arise from choosing among several goods when there is not enough time to pursue all of them.

The Common Gavel: The Act of Deciding

Eventually contemplation must end.

The Gauge has measured. The Square has tested. The Plumb has sought alignment. The Compasses have established boundaries. At some point the craftsman must act.

Here the Common Gavel becomes particularly meaningful. The Gavel removes what is unnecessary from the stone, but the larger family of Masonic imagery surrounding the gavel also carries the unmistakable quality of decision. The Master's gavel calls attention, marks transitions, directs the lodge, and brings deliberation to an end. Its sound means something has happened. Thought has become action.

The Common Gavel can therefore be contemplated as the act of deciding what remains and what must be removed from a finite life.

This returns us directly to opportunity cost. Some things must be knocked away—not necessarily because they are evil, but because they are not sufficiently important. A finite life cannot contain every possible pursuit. Every additional commitment occupies part of the Gauge. At some point we must decide what belongs in the work and what does not.

There is also a less obvious danger. Indecision itself consumes time. We sometimes imagine that refusing to choose preserves our options. It does not. While we deliberate indefinitely, the Gauge continues measuring. Time spent avoiding a decision is itself an allocation of time.

The process can therefore be reduced to five movements: Gauge it. Square it. Plumb it. Circumscribe it. Gavel it.

Measure the demand upon the finite resource. Test the choice against virtue. Seek alignment with a standard beyond yourself. Establish proper boundaries. Then decide.

The Gauge establishes the limit. The Gavel enforces the choice.

Masonry Is Filled With Time

Once we begin looking for time within Masonry, it becomes difficult not to see it everywhere. The three steps can be contemplated as youth, manhood, and age—not three separate men, but one man progressing through time. The progression itself matters. The man standing upon the final step carries within him the man who once stood upon the first.

Masonry also teaches by degrees. That structure acknowledges something important about understanding: some knowledge requires progression. A man can hear ritual for the first time and understand its words, yet hear the same words decades later and discover something entirely different. The ritual may not have changed. The man has.

That is also why placing symbols in conversation with one another becomes increasingly fruitful. The Entered Apprentice initially encounters one collection of lessons. The Fellow Craft adds another. The Master Mason adds still more. Experience then begins building bridges between them. The Level starts speaking to the Gauge. Wisdom, Strength, and Beauty begin illuminating its divisions. The Square, Plumb, Compasses, and Gavel become ways of interrogating the choices made within the time the Gauge measures.

Even the intellectual journey of the Fellow Craft points repeatedly toward measurement, relationship, motion, proportion, space, and time. Arithmetic considers number. Geometry gives number spatial relationship. Music requires proportion unfolding through time. Astronomy brings measurement, motion, space, and time together on the grandest observable scale. The Mason is continually being asked to understand himself within larger orders and relationships.

We learn Masonry by degrees because we live life by degrees.

The Ashlars: Construction Requires Time

The Rough Ashlar provides another reminder that transformation requires time. No stone becomes finished because the craftsman intends to perfect it. Intention begins the work; repeated labor accomplishes it.

Character develops similarly. One decision rarely transforms a man. Habits emerge through repetition. Judgment develops through consequences. Virtue becomes reliable through practice. Mistakes must be recognized and corrected. Edges are removed gradually. Surfaces are tested repeatedly.

We sometimes become impatient with this process because we can imagine the finished product long before we can create it. We know the person we would like to become. We may even know what must change. Yet knowing the shape of the Perfect Ashlar does not eliminate the labor required to move the Rough Ashlar toward it.

That labor consumes the Gauge.

Character is constructed decision by decision, habit by habit, hour by hour. The uncomfortable reality is that the supply of hours is limited. We therefore cannot postpone the work indefinitely while assuming there will always be another day upon which to begin.

Someone Else Picks Up the Tools

That brings us back to where we began: the Level and the finite life.

The Twenty-Four-Inch Gauge measures the hours available today. The Level reminds us that the number of days upon which we will receive those hours is limited. Wisdom, Strength, and Beauty help us contemplate what our vocation, restoration, and service might produce. The Square tests our choices against virtue. The Plumb searches for alignment with a standard beyond ourselves. The Compasses establish boundaries around our passions. The Gavel requires us eventually to decide.

And then the Third Degree reminds us that even the master craftsman eventually puts down his tools.

Yet the Temple is completed.

Perhaps that is not merely a reminder of mortality but a lesson about the proper relationship between mortality and meaningful work. The fact that I cannot finish everything does not mean there is no reason to begin something. The fact that I will not see every consequence of my service does not make the service meaningless. The fact that another man will eventually occupy my chair does not diminish the importance of how I occupy it today.

Indeed, good craftsmanship may partly consist of leaving work that another craftsman can continue.

A lodge survives its Master. A family survives its father. Students continue after the teacher is gone. Institutions outlive their founders. Acts of kindness produce consequences their authors never witness. Ideas pass from one generation to another. Someone else picks up the tools.

The great Masonic lesson of time, then, may not be time management at all. It may be the disciplined allocation of a finite life.

The Twenty-Four-Inch Gauge measures twenty-four inches every day. What it cannot tell me is how many more times I will be handed the Gauge. The Level tells me that number is finite.

That leaves a more difficult question than how efficiently I manage my schedule.

Knowing that someday I must put down my tools, what deserves the time that remains?

Height Magnifies Deviation: Responsibility Reveals What Already Exists

I was recently working on a Masonic meme built around the Plumb. The words were simple: “Outcome, Not Intention.” The image was equally simple—a plumb suspended beside a stone wall. Yet deciding exactly how that wall should appear raised a more interesting question than the one I had started with. Should the wall be obviously straight? Should it be visibly crooked? Or should it remain ambiguous enough that the viewer had to bring his own experience to the image and decide what the Plumb revealed?

That question stayed with me because of what happens when a wall is only slightly out of plumb. Near its foundation, the deviation may be almost impossible to see. Continue building upward along that same line, however, and the consequences of the original error become increasingly apparent. The deviation itself has not changed. If a wall rises at one degree from vertical, one degree remains one degree. At one foot of height, that error produces a horizontal displacement of only about one-fifth of an inch. At ten feet, it is a little more than two inches. At thirty feet, it exceeds six inches. Nothing happened to the original angle; the wall simply grew taller. Height magnifies deviation.

That is an operative lesson easily understood by a craftsman, but the speculative lesson interests me more. I began thinking about the progression of a Mason through the chairs of his Lodge and eventually toward the East. Each step brings additional responsibility, greater expectations, more complicated problems, and usually more people affected by his decisions. What if the increasing height of a wall provides a useful metaphor for that progression?

What if responsibility works upon character as height works upon a wall?

Greater responsibility does not necessarily create defects in character. It can reveal what was already there. A Mason may possess a measure of impatience when he begins his journey. He may be somewhat disorganized, dislike criticism, have difficulty delegating, desire recognition more than he realizes, or become stubborn when challenged. He may even have a tendency to confuse disagreement with disrespect. With little responsibility, those characteristics may have relatively little effect upon anyone beyond himself. They are small deviations close to the foundation, difficult to see and perhaps easily dismissed.

Then the wall begins to rise. A Mason accepts an assignment. Later he becomes responsible for a degree or committee. He occupies a chair. Other men begin depending upon him. Eventually he may become a Deacon, then a Warden, and perhaps one day Master of his Lodge. With each step, the work becomes more complicated. Decisions affect more people, communication becomes more important, and mistakes carry greater consequences. The character deviation did not necessarily become greater; the structure surrounding it did.

A man who is mildly disorganized may successfully manage a simple task involving two or three people. Give him responsibility for a complicated event involving twenty people, multiple deadlines, money, facilities, and outside organizations, and that same disorganization becomes far more visible. Impatience that once produced an unpleasant conversation may eventually affect an entire Lodge. An excessive need for control may remain largely invisible until a man finally possesses enough authority to exercise it. A sensitivity to criticism may seem inconsequential until leadership requires him to hear criticism regularly and respond to it constructively.

The same principle should also work in the other direction. Increasing responsibility can reveal patience, courage, humility, restraint, generosity, sound judgment, and an ability to bring men together that smaller tasks never demanded. Height magnifies alignment as surely as it magnifies deviation. The point is not that advancement makes men worse. The point is that increasing responsibility places more of the man where it can be seen.

This gives the progressive chairs of a Lodge a meaning beyond advancement toward the East. Each chair can be understood as another course of stone added to the wall and another opportunity for a Mason to discover whether his work remains upright. The Junior Deacon encounters responsibilities he did not have while sitting among the Brethren. The Senior Deacon encounters others. The Wardens confront questions of leadership, judgment, preparation, personalities, and responsibility that were not present earlier. Ideally, each position should reveal something about the man occupying it.

Advancement, then, should not merely prompt the question, “Am I ready for the next chair?” There is another question that may be more important: What has this chair revealed about me that I should correct before I build any higher? If the purpose of progression is partly personal development, advancement without reflection can become a missed opportunity. We can become very good at performing the duties of increasingly important positions without becoming equally skilled at examining what those positions are revealing about us.

This is where the Plumb becomes particularly important. The Plumb does not condemn the wall, nor does it know anything about the intentions of the craftsman who built it. It does not praise him when the work is upright or ridicule him when it is not. It simply establishes a reference independent of the craftsman’s opinion of his own work. He may sincerely believe the wall is straight. He may have worked extraordinarily hard upon it. He may have encountered difficult circumstances while building it. None of those things move the plumb line.

That may be one of the more difficult lessons contained within the symbol because we are remarkably capable of judging ourselves by our intentions. We know what we meant to accomplish. We know the pressures surrounding our decisions, the information available to us at the time, and the reasons we chose one course rather than another. Because we possess all that internal information, we can usually construct a convincing explanation for ourselves. The Plumb possesses none of it. It simply checks the work.

Yet speculative Masonry presents a difficulty that the operative craftsman does not face. We are simultaneously the craftsman and the material upon which we labor. We are attempting to examine character through the very character being examined. If my judgment is part of the problem, relying exclusively upon my judgment to identify the problem presents an obvious difficulty. An external reference therefore becomes essential.

Where do we find that Plumb? Certainly, Masonic teachings provide standards against which conduct can be considered. Experience provides another. Sometimes failure becomes the Plumb because the consequences of our conduct become impossible to ignore. Sometimes the reactions of those around us tell us that something is no longer aligned. Sometimes another Brother becomes the Plumb by telling us something we would rather not hear. The difficulty is not merely finding the instrument. It is developing the willingness to use it when the deviation is still small enough to correct easily.

There is another problem as a Mason progresses toward the East. Advancement itself can begin to look like evidence of alignment. A man is appointed to a chair. He performs adequately and advances. He becomes a Warden. Eventually his Brethren elect him Master. Each successive step can understandably feel like confirmation that the wall must be straight. After all, if something were seriously wrong, why would he continue to advance?

But advancement measures advancement. It does not necessarily measure character.

In fact, increasing authority may make honest measurement more difficult. People often become increasingly reluctant to criticize those who occupy positions of authority. A Brother may recognize a developing problem but decide that confronting it is not worth the resulting conflict. Another may worry that criticism will be interpreted as personal hostility or disloyalty. Others may simply decide to wait because a Master’s year eventually ends. The irony is difficult to miss: at precisely the point where a man’s deviations can have their greatest consequences, the people around him may become least willing to point them out.

Then comes the East. The Master’s chair represents the greatest formal height a Mason reaches within his Lodge, but it also places his character under extraordinary strain. Authority, tradition, personalities, expectations, finances, ritual, disagreements, schedules, candidates, officers, and the ordinary unpredictability of human beings converge upon one position. Decisions that were once theoretical become immediate. Leadership qualities that could once be discussed abstractly must now be practiced in front of everyone.

The chair does not necessarily create arrogance, insecurity, impatience, stubbornness, resentment, or an excessive need for control. It gives those characteristics room to become visible. At the same time, it can reveal strengths that were equally difficult to see before. Patience becomes meaningful when patience is difficult. Humility matters differently when a man possesses authority. Restraint means more when he has the power to impose his preference. Leadership becomes something other than an idea when other men actually depend upon his judgment.

That may be one of the greatest opportunities presented by the East. A year as Master can teach a Mason things about himself that he could have learned nowhere else. If he takes those lessons seriously, the experience becomes much more than successful administration of a Lodge. The East becomes another working place upon the unfinished stone. The danger comes when the authority of the chair is interpreted as proof that the work upon the man occupying it has somehow been completed.

I have come to wonder, however, whether the greater test may come after the East. Becoming a Past Master presents a peculiar challenge. For a year, a man has occupied the highest chair in his Lodge. Men have risen when he entered. He has presided over meetings, made appointments, controlled agendas, rendered decisions, and carried both the authority and responsibility of the office. Custom and protocol have reinforced his position throughout that year.

Then his year ends, and another man sits in the East. The former Master must now learn a different kind of discipline. He must advise without governing. He must disagree without undermining. He must watch another Mason make decisions differently than he would have made them. He may even have to watch a new Master make mistakes he believes he could prevent. Most importantly, he must surrender authority he has become accustomed to exercising and accept the same customs and protocols that now restrain him from continuing to govern.

Perhaps that is where some of the smallest deviations become most visible. The impatient man may discover that he cannot wait for the new Master to learn. The controlling man may struggle to relinquish control. The man who became accustomed to recognition may discover that he misses it. The man who interpreted his year in the East as confirmation of superior judgment may find it difficult to accept that another Brother now possesses the same authority he once held. A characteristic that was barely visible near the foundation may now stand several inches away from the line.

This may also be where a failure to apply the Plumb earlier becomes particularly costly. If nobody ever challenged the deviation—or if the craftsman refused to look when they did—the journey through the chairs may actually reinforce it. Every advancement can be interpreted as validation. Every conflict can be remembered as evidence that someone else was unreasonable. Every criticism can be dismissed as disloyalty. Instead of using increasing responsibility to discover where correction was necessary, the Mason can use his advancement as evidence that no correction was ever needed.

He reached the top of the wall without discovering that it was out of plumb.

There is something particularly unfortunate about that outcome because the journey through the chairs offers so many opportunities for exactly the opposite result. Every new responsibility can reveal something that simpler work could not. Every difficult personality can test patience. Every disagreement can test restraint. Every mistake can test humility. Every success can test ego. Every increase in authority can test whether a man understands the difference between leadership and control. Properly approached, the progression toward the East is not evidence that the work upon ourselves is finished. It provides progressively more demanding work through which we can discover where that work remains.

The Past Master may therefore face one of the most revealing stages of all. He has reached the height, exercised the authority, and completed the formal progression. Now much of the external structure that guided and restrained him has changed. What remains is the man and whatever lessons he chose to take from the journey. If he learned to keep the Plumb beside his work, his experience can become a tremendous resource to those who follow him. If he did not, the very experience intended to develop him may instead have strengthened his certainty that everyone else should continue building according to his line.

The lesson is not that men should fear advancement or that responsibility inevitably exposes some hidden moral failure. Quite the opposite. Greater responsibility offers a remarkable opportunity for self-knowledge. It places our judgment, temperament, discipline, humility, and relationships under conditions that smaller responsibilities simply cannot reproduce. It allows us to see ourselves at greater scale.

The operative craftsman does not wait until the wall is complete before applying the Plumb. He checks as he builds because correction becomes increasingly difficult as additional courses are laid upon an existing deviation. Perhaps the speculative craftsman should approach his own development in much the same way. We should not wait until the consequences of a defect become so large that everyone can see them. We should continually compare our conduct against something more reliable than our own intentions and remain willing to hear when another person sees a deviation that we do not.

There is no shame in discovering that the work requires correction. That is why the working tools remain beside us. The greater danger is continuing to build because the first few courses looked close enough.

We should not fear building higher.

We should fear building higher without keeping the Plumb beside the work.