It’s now over a week since I started 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 six days I’ve read through and become familiar with installing the Immediate Past Master, then investing the Senior Warden, the Junior Warden, the Lodge Admin Team, investing the Senior, Junior Deacon, and the Inner Guard. That leaves just one more office to be invested…
Learn Masonic Ritual, Day 8 of 100: Investing the Tyler
After having a shortened session yesterday for the Inner Guard I spent a little extra time this morning to have a run through it again, as well as have a run through of the of the other offices. Maybe it was the early (ish!) Monday morning but I was quite startled to discover some chunks that I thought I knew had dropped away. Instead of panicking I know that I have over 90 days to nail it, and in reality what I missed represents only a small percentage of all the Ritual I’ve been shovelling into my brain over the last week or so.
Obviously we’ll be re-capping it a few times over the coming weeks so onwards. Day 8 is Investing the Tyler (sometimes known as the Outer Guard, pages 234-235 in my book of Emulation Ritual). Investing the Tyler is a little longer than the Inner Guard, and the majority of place and duties is taken from the Lodge opening, but again, the duties are a little more expanded and not directly lifted, so care does need to be taken to ensure these extras parts are not missed out, or worse, the origin of a long pause followed by a prompt in the ceremony. Also, ensure you are familiar with presenting the sword to the Tyler, the book gives directions to which hands to use and the orientation of the sword.
You’ll probably have a chance to practice it in a rehearsal ahead of the actual ceremony, but by then you want to be focusing on how you delivering the ritual, not juggling a heavy sword. So, that’s the last part of the Installation ceremony we need to learn (the rest is done by the newly invested IPM and other Lodge members. We started with investing the IPM on page 214, and finished with investing the Tyler on page 235. That’s over 20 pages of ritual we’ve learnt in just 8 days. Ok, a couple of those pages are for the IPM, but that’s still a heck of a lot to go through. Don’t worry if you aren’t word perfect, we have time on our side, look at the positives at what you have achieved so far and realise that at this pace it’s in the bag.
Oh, and we haven’t finished learning everything you need to learn for the Installation ceremony, as you’ll find out tomorrow.