When is a Man a Mason?
When he can look out over the rivers, the hills, and the far horizon with a profound sense of his own littleness in the vast scheme of things, and yet have faith, hope, and courage which is the root of every virtue.
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When he knows that down in his heart every man is as noble, as vile, as divine, as diabolic, and as lonely as himself, and seeks to know, to forgive, and to love his fellow man.
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When he knows how to sympathize with men in their sorrows, yea, even in their sins knowing that each man fights a hard fight against many odds.
When he has learned how to make friends and to keep them, and above all how to keep friends with himself.
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When he loves flowers, can hunt birds without a gun, and feels the thrill of an old forgotten joy when he hears the laugh of a little child.
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When he can be happy and high-minded amid the meaner drudgeries of life.
When star-crowned trees and the glint of sunlight on flowing waters, subdue him like the thought of one much loved and long dead.
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When no voice of distress reaches his ears in vain, and no hand seeks his aid without response.
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When he finds good in every faith that helps any man to lay hold of divine things and sees majestic meanings in life, whatever the name of that faith may be.
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When he can look into a wayside puddle and see something beyond mud, and into the face of the most forlorn fellow mortal and see something beyond sin.
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When he knows how to pray, how to love, how to hope.
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When he has kept faith with himself, with his fellow man, and with his God; in his hand a sword for evil, in his heart a bit of a song — glad to live, but not afraid to die!
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Such a man has found the only real secret of Masonry, and the one which it is trying to give to all the world.
Diana by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia
Diana is 13 feet/4 meters tall, and is made of hollow copper, covered with 180 square feet/16.7 square meters of gold leaf.
P.S ~ I see so much more, when I look at Her.
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Walk the path of righteousness in Knowing Thyself or be doomed to suffer the regret of not shining as bright as the star you were born to be.
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“One does not walk into the forest and accuse the trees of being off-center, Nor do they visit the shore and call the waves imperfect.
So why do we look at ourselves this way?”ㅤ
– Lao Tzu
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We are fractal beings of nature.
We have five extremities, each having five fingers or five toes. Our heads have five openings, two nostrils, two ears, and one mouth. The essence of five creates (phi)ve. The Fibonacci Sequence. The Golden Mean, Divine Proportion, 1.618….
Ubiquitous in nature, this ratio is the seed of life and the key to understanding how nature operates. With an understanding of how the Universe manifests itself into form, we can come to terms with our own innate divinity.
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Man is born of the stars. With the 5 extremities from his torso and his 5 material senses, he is a living representation of the geometric symbol of the star, the pentagram.
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Every man and every woman is a star.ㅤ
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You and I are not merely separated from the stars by unimaginable immensities of space; We are literally made from stars. We are their descendants. The only difference between us and stars is time. All matter is made of atoms that were created in the center of stars, thus when stargazing our eyes are actually looking back in time at the very things that created them.
In Birkenhead: A beautiful rustic-looking Master’s chair that belongs to Mersey Lodge No. 477 (founded in 1841), covered in hand painted and hand carved Masonic symbols.
