Equinox address
EUGEN OVIDIU CHIROVICI
Grand Master, NATIONAL GRAND LODGE OF ROMANIA
Respectable Worshipful Master,
Respectable Past Worshipful Masters,
Respectable Officers,
Beloved Brethren,
We commence a new year of labor and, as we have become accustomed, we try, beyond the noise and the fury of the profane world, to follow unabated our path in the practice of the Royal Art. As I have often said, each commencement has its pleasant aspects, as also its inherent hesitations. Let us try, once more, to reduce the latter as much as is humanly possible.
For me personally, Beloved Brethren, this new masonic year has also a special meaning. My son, Eugen, will be initiated, on the proposal of R.W.Br. David Williamson, in a Respectable Lodge from the Obedience of the United Grand Lodge of England, becoming a brother to us all. It is an important step for him, for me, but, I dare believe, for us all. That because he represents one more bridge in the edification of entirely special relations with the Mother Grand Lodge
of the World.
In January we celebrate 130 years of Regular Freemasonry in Romania. We will try to give that celebration a meaning that is special both for us and for the general public, a public that oftentimes perceives us wrongly.
There are as many ways of perfecting oneself within Masonry as there are Brethren. No one holds some miraculous recipe for happiness, some enchanted elixir that assures our right path. That's why Tolerance and Industry are the irreplaceable ingredients of our Work. Tolerance, to accept your neighbor with his own system of values and beliefs - political, religious, cultural, ethnic - and Industry, to be fully conscious that our Work is never done and to never fall in the sin of haughtiness. Knowing better than the Brother next to you is not a privilege, but an obligation: to share with him that which with the help of God you have gathered. That is why, Beloved Brethren, you should not perceive the differences between us as defects, but as the fundamental premises of progress. Never forget that the slogan "Unity in diversity" was born in the Masonic Lodges.
We are going through a difficult time, but difficult times that have forged great characters. Crises of every kind increase the cohesion of the strong and break up only the weak. Our forerunners shirked neither responsibilities, nor did they hide from History. On the contrary, they were constantly in the avant-garde of change and have often forged History. But history is not an abstract concept. Eternity comprises moments, and no moment should be wasted on the altar of the ephemeral. We have no political or confessional stakes precisely because our illustrious forerunners knew this and had the power to not let themselves be taken by appearances, and to look, always and ever, to the future.
Steel your nerves, do not let yourselves fall prey to quick frustrations, do not forget that you belong to an Order that counts its existence in centuries rather than years. That we have a different sense of Time and that seeds sown today will later reap.
Stand united around me, because we together have always, with the help of God, found, in these last few years, the right path and have overcome the difficulties of each period and lo, today we enter, our heads held high, the most blessed Temples in the world. The stakes that are apparent today will lose their tinsel glint over the years, but the moments we have built together and have lived as such, they, indeed, will last. We have rebuilt in these two decades a Foundation.
Beloved Brethren,
Do not forget this year either, that Masonry must mean, first and foremost, Joy. The joy of being beside those you call Brethren and not merely friends. Try then to banish from your Temples everything that means strife, pride, and haughtiness. They are the darkness that symbolically killed Hiram, the original sin of a world forced to struggle to regain original harmony and perfection. Unity, Temperance, and Wisdom, these must be the Lights that, more than ever, guide us this year.
God bless Romania and all of you, my Brethren.
Copyright Forum Masonic
Email this story
