Yesterday, day four of my 100 Day Plan to learn the ritual before going into The Chair. The idea of this 100 Day Plan is being word perfect when installing the Officers and closing the Lodge at my Installation meeting, and also to get a good grip on the rest of the other rituals for the coming year. Over the last four days I’ve read through and become familiar with investing the Immediate Past Master, then investing the Senior Warden, the Junior Warden, and the Lodge Admin Team, today, it’s onto…
Learning Masonic Ritual, Day 5 of 100: Investing the Senior Deacon
Crikey, already a twentieth of the way through…! 😉 It’s Day 5 of 100, and I’m looking at Investing the Senior Deacon (pages 229-230 in my book of Emulation Ritual).
The Deacons require more work to invest than the Chaplain, Treasurer, Secretary, Almoner and Charity Steward (two of which don’t have any official ritual to learn for their investiture), but luckily less than the Wardens. Quite a bit of the investing of the Senior Deacon should be familiar to any Mason who has held the office during their Masonic career.
There’s a few extra bits (such as the ceremonies the Senior Deacon leads the candidate in and the presentation of the wand) that do require some work, so don’t get complacent! I also took some time to run through what I’ve been learning over the last few days. I must admit that I wasn’t word perfect – but I’m not expecting to be at this point in time. If I could get word perfect this would be a 10 day plan, not 100! The good news is I was quite accurate, a few hesitations here and there, a handful of times when a quick glance at the book was needed, but only a couple of times when my brain froze completely.
It appears that most of the problems were in the investing of the Junior Warden (the longest piece learnt so far) so I know I need to spend some extra work here. Over the course of the next 95 days we’ll be going over of the Installation ceremony a couple more times, starting with familiarisation, rehearsal, and finally getting it to the point that I don’t even need to think about it, and can concentrate on the presentation.