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To whet your appetites before the Masonic Restoration Foundation Symposium this weekend, budget about an hour and a half to watch this new episode of the Masonic Improvement podcast. Pete Normand, a past president of the MRF, converses with co-hosts Justin Jones and Dennis Yates on the topic of the best practices set to labor in St. Alban’s Lodge 1455 in College Station, Texas.
Normand helped establish this lodge in 1992 with the specific goal of curating a certain Masonic experience, one far away from what was typical in that area at that time. An antidote to the deleterious mix of tedious meetings, non-Masonic activities, uninspired food, and lackadaisical attire that are the hallmarks of lodges that have given up.
Pete does about 99 percent of the talking in this interview, but it’s all instructive to the attentive ear. Listen to him recount how he explored Freemasonry for years before even learning how to petition for the degrees. How he recognized the lodge experience he inherited was not optimal. How he discovered the components of what some today call an “Observant lodge,” and the smart way to incorporate them into lodge culture.
Some of these ideas later became Grand Lodge law.
To Pete, it’s just common sense “best practices,” and he communicates it in recollections of how St. Alban’s accomplished it. The best kind of lesson.
Find Masonic Improvement on YouTube and your favorite podcast platforms. Feel free to skip the first sixty seconds to spare yourself the grating theme song, and enjoy the conversation.
