(20230611) Канада: ВЛ Манитоба: Новини

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(20230611) Канада: ВЛ Манитоба: Новини
Volume 13 | 2023

 

 
 

 

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That’s a good question ?

 

What are Winding Stairs ?

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In the First Book of Kings (vi, 8) it is said: “The door for the Middle Chamber was in the right side of the house; and they went up with winding stairs into the Middle Chamber, and out of the middle into the third.” From this passage the Freemasons of the eighteenth century adopted the symbol of the Winding Stairs, and introduced it into the Fellow Craft’s Degree, where it has ever since remained, in the American Rite. In one of the higher Degrees of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite the Winding Stairs are called cochleus, which is a corruption of cochlis, a spiral staircase.

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The Hebrew word is lulim, from the obsolete root lug, to roll or wind. The whole story of the Winding Stairs in the Second Degree of Freemasonry is a mere myth, without ansr other foundation than the slight allusion in the Book of Kings which has been just cited, and it derives its only value from the symbolism taught in its legend.

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It is only when the portals of the grave open to us, and give us an entrance into a. more perfect life, that this knowledge is to be attained. “Happy is the man,” says the father of Iyric poetry, “who descends beneath the hollow earth, having be held these Mysteries: he knows the end, he knows the origin of life.” The Middle Chamber is therefore symbolic of this life, where the symbol only of the Word can be given, where the truth is to be reached by approximation only, and yet where we are to learn that that Truth will consist in a perfect knowledge of the G. A. O. T. U.

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This is the reward of the inquiring Freemason; in this consist the wages of a Fellow Craft; he is directed to the Truth, but must travel farther and ascend still higher to attain it. It is, then, as a symbol and a symbol only, that we must study this beautiful legend of the Winding Stairs. If we attempt to adopt it as an historical fact, the absurdity of its details stares us in the face, and wise men will wonder at our credulity. Its inventors had no desire thus to impose upon our folly; but offering it to us as a great philosophical myth, they did not for a moment suppose that we would pass over its sublime moral teachings to accept the allegory as an historical narrative without meaning, and wholly irreconcilable with the records of Scripture, and opposed by all the principles of probability. To suppose that eighty thousand Craftsmen were weekly paid in the narrow precincts of the Temple chambers, is simply to suppose an absurdity.

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But to believe that all this pictorial representation of an ascent by a Winding Staircase to the place where the wages of labor were to be received, was an allegory to teach us the ascent of the mind from ignorance, through all the toils of study and the difficulties of obtaining knowledge, receiving here a little and there a little, adding something to the stock of our ideas at each step, until, in the Middle Chamber of life—in the full fruition of manhood—the reward is attained, and the purified and elevated intellect is invested with the reward in the direction how to seek God and God’s Truth. To believe this, is to believe and to know the true design of Speculative Freemasonry, the only design which makes it worthy of a good or a wise man’s study. Of the legend we may admit its historical details are barren, but its symbols and allegories are fertile with instruction.

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Bro. Mackey

 
 

 

 

 

 

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Thought for the Day

by Albert Einstein:

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“Education is not the learning of facts but the training of the mind to think”.

 

 

 

 
 
 
 

 

 
For those asking what SMIB means , here is an explanation.

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“So Mote It Be”

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How familiar the phrase is. No Lodge is ever opened or closed, in due form, without using it. Yet how few know how old it is, much less what a deep meaning it has in it. Like so many old and lovely things, it is so near to us that we do not see it.

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As far back as we can go in the annals of the Craft we find this old phrase. Its form betrays its age. The word MOTE is an Anglo-Saxon word, derived from an anomalous verb, MOTAN. Chaucer uses the exact phrase in the same sense in which we use it, meaning “So May It Be.” It is found in the Regius Poem, the oldest document of the Craft, just as we use it today.

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As everyone knows, it is the Masonic form of the ancient AMEN which echoes through the ages, gathering meaning and music as it goes until it is one of the richest and most haunting of words. At first only a sign of assent, on the part either of an individual or of an assembly, to words of prayer or praise, it has become to stand as a sentinel at the gateway of silence.

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When we have uttered all that we can utter, and our poor words seem like ripples on the bosom of the unspoken, somehow this familiar phrase gathers up all that is left – our dumb yearnings, our deepest longings – and bears them aloft to One who understands. In some strange way it seems to speak for us into the very ear of God the things for which words were never made.

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So, naturally, it has a place of honor among us. At the marriage Altar it speaks its blessing as young love walks toward the bliss or sorrow of hidden years. It stands beside the cradle when we dedicate our little ones to the Holy life, mingling its benediction with our vows. At the grave side it utters its sad response to the shadowy AMEN which death pronounces over our friends.

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When, in our turn, we see the end of the road, and would make a last will and testament, leaving our earnings and savings to those whom we love, the old legal phrase asks us to repeat after it: “In The Name Of God, AMEN.” And with us, as with Gerontius in his Dream, the last word we hear when the voices of earth grow faint and the silence of God covers us, is the old AMEN, So Mote It Be.

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How impressively it echoes through the Book of Holy Law. We hear it in the Psalms, as chorus answers to chorus, where it is sometimes reduplicated for emphasis. In the talks of Jesus with his friends it has a striking use, hidden in the English version. The oft-repeated phrase, “Verily, Verily I Say Unto You,” if rightly translated means, AMEN, AMEN, I say unto you.” Later, in the Epistles of Paul, the word AMEN becomes the name of Christ, who is the AMEN of God to the faith of man.

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So, too, in the Lodge, at opening, at closing, and in the hour of initiation. No Mason ever enters upon any great or important undertaking without invoking the aid of Deity. And he ends his prayer with the old phrase, “So Mote It Be.” Which is another way of saying: “The Will Of God Be Done.” Or, whatever be the answer of God to his prayer: “So Be It – because it is wise and right.

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What, then, is the meaning of this old phrase, so interwoven with all our Masonic lore, simple, tender, haunting? It has two meanings for us everywhere, in the Church, or in the Lodge. First, it is assent of man to the way and Will Of God; assent to His Commands; assent to His Providence, even when a tender, terrible stroke of death takes from us one much loved and leaves us forlorn.

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Still, somehow, we must say:” So it is; so be it. He is a wise man, a brave man; who, baffled by the woes of life, when disaster follows fast and follows faster, can nevertheless accept his lot as a part of the Will of God and say, though it may almost choke him to say it:

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“So Mote It Be.” It is not blind submission, nor dumb resignation, but a wise reconciliation to the Will of the Eternal.

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The other meaning of the phrase is even more wonderful; it is the assent of God to the aspiration of man. Man can bear so much – anything, perhaps – if he feels that God knows, cares and feels for him and with him. If God says Amen, So it is, to our faith and hope and love; it links our perplexed meanings, and helps us to see, however dimly, or in a glass darkly, that there is a wise and good purpose in life, despite its sorrow and suffering, and that we are not at the mercy of Fate or the whim of Chance.

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Does God speak to man, confirming his faith and hope? If so, how? Indeed yes! God is not the great I Was, but the great I Am, and He is neither deaf nor dumb. In Him we live and move and have our being – He Speaks to us in nature, in the moral law, and in our own hearts, if we have ears to hear. But He speaks most clearly in the Book of Holy Law which lies open upon our Alter.

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Nor is that all. Some of us hold that the Word Of God “Became Flesh and Dwelt Among Us, Full Of Grace and Truth,” in a life the loveliest ever lived among men, showing us what life is, what it means, and to what fine issues it ascends when we do the Will of God on earth as it is done in Heaven, No one of us but grows wistful when he thinks of the life of Jesus, however far we fall below it.

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Today men are asking the question: Does it do any good to pray? The man who actually prays does not ask such a question. As well ask if it does a bird any good to sing, or a flower to bloom? Prayer is natural and instinctive in man. We are made so. Man is made for prayer, as sparks ascending seek the sun. He would not need religious faith if the objects of it did not exist.

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Are prayers ever answered? Yes, always, as Emerson taught us long ago. Who rises from prayer a better man, his prayer is answered – and that is as far as we need to go. The deepest desire, the ruling motive of a man, is his actual prayer, and it shapes his life after its form and color. In this sense all prayer is answered, and that is why we ought to be careful what we pray for – because in the end we always get it.

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What, then is the good of prayer? It makes us repose on the unknown with hope; it makes us ready for life. It is a recognition of laws and the thread of our conjunction with them. It is not the purpose of prayer to beg or make God do what we want done. Its purpose is to bring us to do the Will of God, which is greater and wiser than our will. It is not to use God, but to be used by Him in the service of His plan.

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Can man by prayer change the Will of God? No, and Yes. True prayer does not wish or seek to change the larger Will of God, which involves in its sweep and scope the duty and destiny of humanity. But it can and does change the Will of God concerning us, because it changes our will and attitude towards Him, which is the vital thing in prayer for us.

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For example, if a man living a wicked life, we know what the Will of God will be for him. All evil ways have been often tried, and we know what the end is, just as we know the answer to a problem in geometry. But if a man who is living wickedly changes his way of living and his inner attitude, he changes the Will of God – if not His Will, at least His Intention. That is, he attains what even the Divine Will could not give him and do for him unless it had been effected by His Will and Prayer.

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The place of Prayer in Masonry is not perfunctory. It is not a mere matter of form and rote. It is vital and profound. As a man enters the Lodge as an initiate, prayer is offered for him, to God, in whom he puts his trust. Later, in a crisis of his initiation, he must pray for himself, orally or mentally as his heart may elect. It is not just a ceremony; it is basic in the faith and spirit of Masonry. Still later, in a scene which no Mason ever forgets, when the shadow is darkest, and the most precious thing a Mason can desire or seek seems lost, in the perplexity and despair of the Lodge, a prayer is offered. As recorded in our Monitors, it is a mosaic of Bible words, in which the grim facts of life and death are set forth in stark reality, and appeal is made to the pity and light of God.

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It is truly a great prayer, to join in which is to place ourselves in the very hands of God, as all must do in the end, trust His Will and way, following where no path is into the soft and fascinating darkness which men call death. And the response of the Lodge to that prayer, as to all others offered at its Altar, is the old, challenging phrase, “So Mote It Be!”

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Brother, do not be ashamed to pray, as you are taught in the Lodge and the Church. It is a part of the sweetness and sanity of life, refreshing the soul and making clear the mind. There is more wisdom in a whispered prayer than in all the libraries of the world. It is not our business to instruct God. He knows what things we have need for before we ask him. He does not need our prayer, but we do – if only to make us acquainted with the best Friend we have.

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The greatest of all teachers of the soul left us a little liturgy called the Lord’s Prayer. He told us to use it each for himself, in the closet when the door is shut and the din and hum and litter of the world is outside. Try it Brother; it will sweeten life, make its load lighter, its joy brighter, and the way of duty plainer.

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Two tiny prayers have floated down to us from ages agone, which are worth remembering; one by a great Saint, the other by two brothers. “Grant Me, Lord, ardently to desire, wisely to study, rightly to understand and perfectly to fulfill that which pleaseth Thee.” And the second is after the manner: “May two brothers enjoy and serve Thee together, and so live today that we may be worthy to live tomorrow.” ~ Bro. Author Unknown

 

 
 

 

A Famous Freemason

 

Ransom Eli Olds was an American automobile pioneer born on June 3rd, 1864 in Geneva, Ohio. When he was a young boy his family moved first to Cleveland, Ohio and finally to Lansing, Michigan.

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In August of 1897, Olds founded the Olds Motor Vehicle Company in Lansing, Michigan. Two years later the company was bought by Samuel L. Smith a copper and lumber magnate. Smith renamed the company Olds Motor Works and moved the company to Detroit, Michigan. Smith became president and Olds Vice President.

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In 1901, the Olds Motor Works factory burned to the ground. The only model surviving the fire was the Curved Dash runabout. It was from it, Olds built his first successful car model. Olds claimed the fire is what made him select the Curved Dash, an almost divine providence. This story is disputed by those familiar with Olds story. It is believed before the fire, Olds had already gotten an order for 300 Curved Dash models and the prototype of the car was not needed to construct new versions since detailed plans already existed.

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The same year, Olds went to the New York Automobile show, having a driver, Roy Chapin, drive the car to New York. During the show Olds pushed hard to make sales. One notable conversation after Chapin had arrived with the Curved Dash model was between Olds and a dealer. The dealer placed an order for 500 cars, Olds said “I would like to see you make this order for a thousand cars. Then the public would drop its jaw and take notice.” Olds was correct, although the dealer only sold 750 of the 1,000 cars, the number everyone remembered was the original order.

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In 1904, Olds left the company he started when Samuel Smith’s son, Frederic joined and eventually removed Olds as the Vice President and General Manager. The Olds Motor Works was bought by General Motors in 1908. The Oldsmobile brand was discontinued by General Motors in 2004, a 96 year run.

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Olds started a new company after leaving in 1904. He started R.E. Olds Motor Company. He changed the name after a lawsuit threat to REO Motor Company. REO being Olds initials. Olds was president of the company until 1925.

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Although Henry Ford is credited with he Assembly line, it was Olds who pioneered the idea. Ford added the idea of the line moving to manufacture the cars. The idea, which he started using at Olds Motor Works took the 1901 cars assembled from 425 to 2,500 in 1902.

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Other businesses Olds started were the Capital National Bank, which was later called the Lansing National Bank and the Michigan National Bank. He was the primary Financier of the Olds Tower which when completed in 1931 became the tallest building in Lansing and still holds the title, although the name has been changed to the Boji Tower.

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Bro. Olds was a member of Capitol Lodge No. 66 in Lansing, Michigan, he passed away on August 26th, 1950.

 

 
 
 

 

 

 

 
 

 

 

 

The Duke of Kent, a first cousin to the late Queen Elizabeth II, has been the Grand Master of the United Grand Lodge of England since 1967, marking one of the longest tenures in the role. He was born in 1935, became a Mason in 1963, Master of that lodge in 1965, appointed Grand Sen. Warden in 1966 and promoted to GM in 1967.

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Looking ahead, the relationship between Freemasonry and the immediate Royal Family seems to be waning, as Charles III, Prince Edward, Andrew, William, and Harry are not Masons. If a Ballot for Initiation was to be held in your lodge, looking at each individual, how would you vote?

 
 

 

 

 

 
 

 

 
 

 

 

 

 
 

 

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