News + Public Announcements

Hello My Brothers,     “What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.”—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1888.     In 1888, Friedrich Nietzsche a German philosopher, wrote as is literally translated from German, “Out of life’s school of war—what doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger.”     In his book Ecce Homo, Nietzsche refers to select individuals as “nature’s lucky strokes . . . among men,” and says of such a person, “knows how to turn serious situations to his own advantage; that which does not kill him makes

Greeting Brothers,     The pandemic has taught us that nothing is for sure. We’ll never know what the Grand Architect has in mind for us and it can be a humbling experience. Mrs. Gump taught her son Forrest in the 1994 film Forrest Gump about uncertainty when she explained, “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get”. Masonically, we have the lesson of the Hour Glass teaching the same principle of uncertainty and it adds

Greetings Brothers,     This is my last column as your Grand Master. The year is finishing so much differently than it started. It seems like ages since we have last sat together in a lodge room whether in a stated meeting or degree. I have to say that the social meetings via Zoom that many lodges and districts are having, when working well, are quite satisfying.  Chatting with our Brothers, remarking how our hair is longer or how we are creatively getting

Greetings Brothers,     These days of isolation from being with our Brothers in person due to COVID-19 seem to test the limits of our principle tenets of Brotherly Love, Relief and Truth.        Our lodge Wellness Committees are allowing the lodges to be in better touch with some of our Brothers than they have ever been with the calling efforts being done. The virtual social meetings are permitting some remote Brothers and others that do not travel, to converse with their Brothers

Greeting to all my Brothers,     So much has happened since I last wrote this column. COVID-19 was a concern for many last month, but no widespread warnings in our own backyard. We prayed for those in China, in Italy, in Spain and elsewhere, and prayed that we would be able to avoid those extreme conditions ourselves. I’m referring to our times now as the “Un” days. You see it in the news every day, these days are “unprecedented”, “uncertain”, “unexpected”,

Greeting Brothers, The best times for a Grand Master are whenever he can be visiting with our Brothers and their families.  We do this by attending degrees, lodge picnics, ladies table lodge dinners, celebration dinners, youth group events, and the list goes on and on.  An important event on that list is when a Grand Master can go visit with those Brothers, family members and widows of our departed Brothers that now reside outside Wisconsin.  They’ve spent some part of their life in

Greetings Brothers,     Like many of you, this past month my Lady Barbara and I went to see the final episode of the Star Wars saga and lamented about it being the end of the series, the end of an era, its story complete. I started thinking about Freemasonry, the state of our lodges, not wanting to see our story ever be complete, but for them to continue on for generations to come.        The previous Friday I had been in the