Lost Loyalties, But.....

Cleaning out the store-room after a death in the family, in the very back corner was hidden a large, framed, formal document.  Elegant script and decorations, it was a 33rd degree Masonic certificate.  That degree is given as a special recognition, I discovered, not like the earlier earned degrees.  The certificate told no story of what was recognized, or what the holder of that degree had done or contributed to generate the honor.  But it did generate the curiosity!

Digging a bit, I found that my ancestor had been a "withdrawer" from several things.  He withdrew from the local medical association after a bitter malpractice contest in which he supported a woman badly burned by a competitor/doctor who had improperly used X-Ray when it was a totally new technology.  He retained membership in the AMA.  His medical work was a passionate commitment for him, over and over again.

He had withdrawn from the church, upset over the inter-locking of city government and church leadership, and what he felt was a lack of ethics in the group controlling both.  But the withdrawal was not from boredom, but from a passionate expectation of better things from the organization.

And the Lodge?  he had moved his membership from his East Texas town of residence, returning to the very small town of Moscow, over similar issues.  And in Moscow, there was a Masonic school (back in the prosperous times), which he highly supported.  Was that the source of the 33rd Degree?

Almost no way to answer the questions.  By 1950, the school had been disbanded.  By 1980, even the oldest men who played dominoes on the front porch of the old, closed pharmacy no longer played there.  The town, shrinking away, held no memories of the great and passionate civic efforts of the 1920's and earlier.

But the today's ghost town was once a place where lumber brought wealth, the money flowed, and there was a passion for education.  Bits and pieces remain.  But the biggest heritage of the town is that inherited passion.  (There are families who have impacted Texas:  Hobby for one!)  There are unknown practitioners of various professions who would now be the third-generation inheritors of the passions that built the Masonic School.

There are grandsons now grandfathers whose whole perspective on the world has been shaped by those who passionately withdrew from one allegiance for the sake of forming and honoring another allegiance.  History sometimes harvests slowly, but it does come to the harvest day.

Thank God for loyalties that found a new home one day, and generated an entire new wave in the process.

The Big Thankful

We are grateful for privileges so fundamentally "ours" that we think them to be rights.  Which they are, so long as we maintain them.

I am grateful today for freedom of speech.

A key understanding of the American Revolution is this oft-repeated and oft-modified fundamental:

"I despise your opinion but will defend to the death your right to speak it."

Is freedom only for my friend?  Is freedom of religious expression only for those who agree with me?  Some of those who came to these shores long ago immediately set up governments that would guarantee their own freedom, and suppress the free expression of conflicting views.  The founding fathers saw the thing more wisely.

I defend freedom. I like people who disagree with me, 'cause it challenges me to think more thoroughly.

But we live in a time when people who disagree may be ostracized, or ignored.  Or suffer at least the "rolling of the eyes and making of strange sounds", the social separation that creates peer pressure.

The defense of freedom begins with the receptive listening to people of different opinions.

And when it gets really good?  I am absolutely committed to the defense of freedom of speech for people with whom I disagree politically and theologically!  I WANT them to be on radio, on talk shows, writing books, and articles, having  maybe their own television shows.

Why?  Because I truly believe that the open expression of all the opinions lets everyone see for themselves where the truth lies.  The longer you listen, the more the false falls away.

Under it all, I believe God made it that way when He designed human nature.  It's not up to any select group to suppress opinions - - truth will out, and thank God for that!