Many of us get caught up in the day to day running of our Lodges. Ritual work, administration or organisation. Many of us are happy to support our Lodges on meeting nights or on Deputations. I think sometimes we forget the other work carried out by our Almoners, at Lodge level, and the Benevolent Committees at Provincial and at Grand Lodge levels.
I was asked by The Provincial Grand Lodge of Edinburgh to make a visit to a beneficiary of The Scottish Masonic Benevolent Fund of Grand Lodge to complete an Annual Report.
The lady I was to meet is the widow of a PM from a Lodge in our our Province. I knew of her from chats I'd had with the PMs of her late husband's Lodge, but had never met her. Her husband had passed away over 10 years ago. He was a well respected PM of the Lodge.
Completion of the Annual Report became almost secondary as we chatted about mutual friends and her experiences of Freemasonry and how it had affected her life and that of her husband. Her daughter also makes a mean cup of tea! Before I knew where I was almost an hour and a half had passed. She was a delightful lady who, despite the very debilitating illness she suffers from, was in fine heart and spoke with great fondness of her experiences of her husband's Mother Lodge and of Freemasonry in general.
This fondness has continued since her husband's passing. It is a credit to the Lodge that successive Almoner's and the PMs have kept in touch with her and kept her up to date with the happenings in the Lodge. She had been very active in the Social side of the Lodge and indeed had spent over 20 years as part of the team of ladies who provided food for the Brethren on Lodge nights and at Installations. The Lodge provides her with a Benevolent Grant each year as does Grand Lodge which supplements a meagre income. She is very grateful for both.
Not long before I left she relayed a very disturbing story to me. A couple of months back, not long after receiving her Benevolent Grant from the Lodge, she had decided to go to the local shopping centre to do some of her Christmas shopping, the Grant allowing her to do so. This lady is confined to a wheelchair. She was waiting for the return of her daughter, who had queued at the nearby Post Office, when she was mugged by two low lives who stole her handbag. In a busy shopping centre in broad daylight!
Despite this story I can only say that I am a happier man to have met her. Not just because I saw first hand the good that our benevolence does but because I spent some time in the presence of a great lady whose positive outlook of Freemasonry made me proud to be a Mason.
God Bless You my dear.
Thursday, 27 November 2008
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