From the Worshipful Master – February 2016

January has passed us and we are looking forward to continuing to our great start to the 2016 fraternal year. At our January stated communication we opened on the Entered Apprentice degree, passed a budget and assigned all necessary committees. I am very proud of Bro. Austin Bennington for standing up to chair a new committee specifically dedicated to visiting other lodges. Washington Lodge has had a long history of reaching out and working with other Lodges, and it is great we are continuing this tradition. We also heard an excellent Enter Apprentice proficiency from Bro. EA Justin Griffin.

We will be opening on the Enter Apprentice degree for our February stated communication. I will be giving a short talk on the 50th anniversary celebration of Washington Lodge in 1919. During this celebration in July at our building on 5th and East Burnside, we paid off the mortgage note to our building and had a “rousing good time” when we burned the deed in the street. I am excited to announce that Bro. Octavio Padilla will be proving up on the Master Mason degree. For this we will be going to refreshment and calling (short-form) to the Master Mason degree.

Please come and support Bro. EA Justin Griffin and the Washington Lodge FC degree team on the 17th of February. The Fellowcraft degree will begin at 7pm. Worshipful Brother Larry Harmon will be conferring this degree and Worshipful Brother Ryan Neal will be giving the Middle Chamber lecture. If you have not seen WB Neal’s quality and care he puts into this lecture, you are truly missing out.

I think it is extremely important that we support our candidates through their degrees, to really show them what fraternal bond we have. I am sure each of you, like me, can remember how powerful it was to come to light and have many brothers there in support. I am sad that in many ways the degrees have just become a means to creating a new dues paying Mason. The foundation of what we are, and the bond which exists between us begins with the three degrees. Please support others the way you would want to be supported.

I understand there was some ambiguity in the budget which was presented on the floor of the January stated meeting. The allocated funds for the Past Master Pictures are not only to finish the extremely important task of collecting and putting up pictures of all of our Past Masters, but also to preserve the many historical glass slides of Washington Lodge. The slides which were recently found are between 1850 and 1925. Many of these photos are of the various buildings Washington Lodge has used over the years and of other Portland Masonic sites. I recently contacted the executive director of the Oregon Historical Society, and he was very excited for the knowledge that glass slides of the history of Portland even exist. Too many of the historical artifacts of Washington Lodge have disappeared over the years, and it is our responsibility to preserve all we can. I am having these photographs digitized and preserved. Once this is completed, I will show them in open Lodge and as a group we can decide which we want to blow up and hang inside the building. Please let me know if there are any questions regarding this issue.

I look forward to greeting each one of you at Washington Lodge soon.

Fraternally,
James Hosmer