People joining a lodge sometimes ask what the offices involve. The answers they get tend to be vague and slightly grand. So here is an honest account of mine, which is the least mysterious office in the building.
The summons
Before every meeting a summons goes out to the brethren. Date, place, business, an expectation of attendance. It is short and it explains nothing, because it assumes the reader already knows what he is being called to.
I write it. I check the list. I send it. When somebody does not receive it, I hear about it, correctly, because that is my fault and not his.
The minutes
Somebody has to write down what happened. The record has to be accurate enough that a man reading it in fifty years can reconstruct the evening.
This is less romantic than it sounds while you are doing it and more important than it sounds afterwards. Every piece of lodge history anybody writes, including the articles on this website, exists because a Secretary somewhere took the trouble to write a dull paragraph properly. The ones who did not are the reason there are gaps.
The correspondence
Notices from the District. Returns. Forms. Fees. Queries about a visitor’s credentials. A brother in Malaysia writing to ask whether he may attend in March. Another lodge asking to borrow something. Somebody’s address has changed and nobody told me.
None of it is difficult. All of it has to be done by a particular date and none of it does itself.
The part that is not administration
Then there is the part nobody lists in the office description.
You are the one who notices that a brother has missed three meetings. You are the one who telephones him. Sometimes he is busy and pleased to be asked. Sometimes he is unwell and has told nobody. Sometimes he has had a bad year and has quietly decided the lodge would rather not be troubled with it, which is always wrong and needs saying out loud to him.
Keeping the roll is a clerical task. Keeping the men on it is not. The two arrive on the same desk.
What it is really for
I took this office expecting paperwork. What I did not expect is how much of the lodge passes through it.
The Master governs the lodge and does so for a year. The Secretary is the continuity between one year and the next. He is the one who remembers what was agreed two Masters ago, where the charter is kept, which brother has the key, what we did last time this came up and why we stopped doing it the other way.
That is not a distinguished role. It is a useful one, which is a different thing and in some ways a better one.
If you are thinking of joining
You will be told that Freemasonry involves ritual, philosophy and self-improvement. It does. What you will find in practice is that it also involves a great many small obligations that fall on ordinary men who agreed to take them on.
The room is well kept because somebody keeps it. The meeting happens because somebody sent the summons. The lodge that has stood since 1946 has stood because for eighty years a series of men did the dull parts properly.
If that sounds like a warning, it is not. It is the most reliable thing I can tell you about what membership is actually like.