I haven't said a whole lot publicly about the whole Halcyon Lodge thing up in Cleveland, partly because it isn't any of my business (I'm not a member of a lodge in Ohio), and partly because there isn't really much to be said about a bunch of guys who claim to be Masons, yet have deserted their Grand Jurisdiction, thrown their obligations to the winds, and quite possibly committed fraud and grand larceny in the process.
But putting that to the side, I wouldn't even care about the obvious violations of decency, Grand Lodge code, and state and federal law, if the people involved would just shut the hell up.
Every time you turn around today, it seems like there are minions of the "erased" Jeff Peace (a sad misnomer of a moniker if I ever heard one, as there is nothing of peace about the man as far as I can tell) posting overblown, snide remarks about how they've left mainstream Masonry behind for a new, more fraternal model that they call (at least for the nonce) the Grand Orient of the USA…perhaps better known to some as GOOFUS. In post after often-off-topic post, usually in comments to mainstream Masons' blogs, these GOOFUSes invariably whine about how evil Grand Lodges are, how Halcyon Lodge was only trying to save its building (by stealing it from the other members of the Lodge, who probably would never have let them take over the officer line if they'd known what was going to happen), and how mainstreamers are just a bunch of Scotch-swilling Shriners who don't care about good old Blue Lodge Masonry. (Which they don't, either -- to them it's all about mystery religion, pagan ritual, and tantric sex, with a cat for a Grand Secretary. But I digress.)
Case in point: The other day, WBro. Chris Hodapp posted a story about the Detroit Masonic Temple being saved from the taxman and the wrecker's ball by Mike Illitch of Little Caesar's Pizza fame. First crack out of the box, a Halcyon boy (one who once misrepresented himself as a member of Lodge Vitruvian, which as that Lodge's secretary I can assure you he very definitely is not, and would never be elected to be, even if his petition were to be read in our lodge) delivered himself of a rant in the comments about how this was no different from what the Halcyon boyz did when they stole Halcyon's building from the men who had considered them to be their brothers. WBro. Hodapp, who is normally a very easy-going kind of fellow (I've known him for 30 years, and I know whereof I speak), finally decided he'd had enough of Halcyon comment-jacking, and responded:
The Halcyon incident, while of cataclysmic importance to you, is scarcely a blip in terms of relevance to the grand panoply of Masonic history.Frankly, the Masonic Internet community is weary with your accusations against members of the Grand Lodge of Ohio over what happened in Cleveland, because they don't pass the smell test. And your relentless name-calling and mud-slinging is about as far from decent Masonic behavior as it gets.
You and a tiny clot of fellow bellyachers clutter up the Masonic blogosphere every chance you get, making it appear that you are of greater importance than you really are. You tear down, but you don't build. You make noise, but it's clear that you achieve little else. For a little bunch of boys who are now freed from the supposed shackles of mainstream Masonry, you sure worry a lot about poking your noses back in under the tent flap. If mainstream Masonry offers so little to you and is so repugnant to you and your lodge, the best of luck to you. You won your skirmish, you have your building, and you even have your own brand spankin' new Grand Lodge, er, Orient. Go be a big success. Prove to the rest of the world that you have a better way. But in the meantime, spare us from your ceaseless self-aggrandizing, bomb-tossing, and bedwetting.
Because I am not as nice as WBro. Hodapp, believe fervently in piling on to this kind of thing, and am equally weary of Halcyon and Jeff Peace and all associated yammerheads, I added:
I'll second Chris's motion. You Halcyon guys sound more and more desparate every time you post your whines and rants somewhere.Go play with your Grand Disorient and leave real Freemasons alone.
Now, this doesn't exactly sound nice or brotherly…and of course, it wasn't meant to, because I don't consider these guys brothers. I wouldn't say this about someone I thought was a real Freemason. But anyone who has the gall to be accepted into a regular Lodge of Freemasons and then pull the kind of crap Jeff Peace and his ilk have been pulling since at least 2002 (and possibly earlier, my recollection of the Peace Corps doesn't go back that far) doesn't deserve any Masonic charity from me or any other regular Freemason.
The fact of the matter is, all these guys have walked away and started something new because they want to be Grand Poobahs and aren't willing to do the work it takes to become, if found worthy, a Grand Poobah. At Halcyon, they decided to do that, and in addition, steal property that didn't belong to them from their mainstream brethren. A more megalomanic, self-serving bunch of men (if men they are) I have rarely seen in my life. I know so many young men who have jumped into regular Freemasonry with both feet and proceeded to mold it in their own image of what Masonry ought to be -- and with a full understanding of what that means -- that it absolutely boggles my mind that there are young men like the members of GOOFUS out there who can't think of anything in Masonry beyond themselves.
In today's Masonry, ideas are key. When we started Lodge Vitruvian back in 2001, we weren't sure what would happen. But we worked to create a lodge that was as close to the European Concept ideal as possible while still making it palatable to the powers-that-be in our Grand Lodge and the Masons in our state. (Note that very carefully -- we worked within the mainstream framework, we did not try to break out of it.) The lodge didn't grow -- in fact we lost about half of our members over the first five years -- but we finally figured out why. It wasn't because our ideas were too radical. It was because brethren would come to visit us, take note of what we were doing, and take those ideas back to their own lodges as improvements.
Which was fine with us; if Vitruvian is just a test-bed, and other lodges are benefiting, we're fine with our membership remaining small. In the meantime, we're not storming out into the Scottish Rite Cathedral parking lot and burning our hats because nobody will listen to us.
But the point is that the Peace Corps don't have any new ideas, and very few people in the mainstream care about what they're doing. When all you do is create friction, and claim that you have "secret knowledge" and previously-undiscovered documents that you won't share with the rest of the Fraternity, that oh by the way prove that you are the only "correct" Freemasonry on the planet, you aren't part of the Fraternity, and you are rightly shunned.
I'll freely admit that there was a time I would have loved to have a guy like Jeff Peace in my lodge. He looked at things in a new way, without the baggage of the past shadowing them. He wanted to try new things. He had some great ideas. But he lost any support I might have given him when he walked away from the mainstream and -- worse -- started badmouthing it and airing what he considered its dirty laundry in public, generally acting like he was better than the rest of us because he'd told the establishment where to stick it.
If I were advising Jeff Peace right now, my advice would be identical to what Chris and I wrote in Chris's comments the other day: Shut up about how great you are, and prove it. If your version of Masonry is superior, you won't need to blare that news to the heavens -- because we'll all hear about it from other sources. In the meantime, understand that mainstream Masons like us -- who believe in change and don't have a problem with working from inside the mainstream -- have lost our patience with you, don't intend to tolerate you, and won't be afraid to say so publicly.