VW Thomas Parson
DDGM 3
I have been asked for a brief summary as to how I arrived at the door of the lodge, so here is a brief trip down memory lane…
When I petitioned to join Eifel lodge some twelve years ago, I did not imagine the road this would take me down, and I am humbled by the trust placed in me to assist those lodges in continuing to bring light to their corners of the world.
When I was a teenager, I asked my parents to tell me a bit about my grandfathers, whom I had never met as they both died before I was born. Among all the things they told me the only word I did not understand was one my mother used for her dad: “Freemason”. Internet was in its early stages, but I managed to look up some tidbits of information: weird aprons, collars, references to this “Great Architect of the Universe”, mentions of handshakes and stories of stonemasons of old… Obviously grandad was into something weird. With this arbitrary conclusion set in my teenage mind I went off to do what is important to teenagers, and completely forgot about this “freemason” oddity. The seed had, however, been sown.
A few years later, while at university, I joined my student fraternity where I first got a taste and an appreciation for the concepts of fraternal affection and assistance. That word “freemason” started to reappear, later I would discover that student fraternities and masonic lodges sometimes have loose connections. One day, when helping one of my older fraternity brothers to move house, a box of papers fell over during the move: documents covered with all seeing eyes, triangles, and the abbreviations I had come to learn were masonic, were strewn all over the floor.
I had been thinking a bit about the subject and had first concluded that maybe this was the right move for me. However, I waited to act upon this, and only ended up asking this older fraternity brother how I should go about “joining” once I had reached the feeling that I was right for it. He, after a few long talks, put me in contact with the secretary of Eifel Lodge. Since then, I have never looked back. I found, among so many other things, a fraternity of adults with the same precepts of self-improvement and mutual assistance that I had loved from my student fraternity, yet without the egos and games that were now pointless to the young adult I had apparently become. The shortest summary possible would be my student fraternity was useful to me, my Lodge offered me ways of being useful to others.
I look forward to seeing many more young brothers start their journey with us, however they may find us.
F&S
VW Thomas Parson
DDGM 3
