The longer a man stays away, the heavier the door gets.
Two recent conversations proved this to me, from entirely different ends of the Masonic experience.
A man reached out to me recently. Years ago, he became an Entered Apprentice. He had just returned from Iraq, his life was falling apart, and he was struggling badly with alcohol. At one point, he needed somewhere to stay.
A Brother took him in. He didn’t ask if the young man had earned it or had his life figured out. He saw a Brother who needed help, and he provided it.
Shortly afterward, the young EA left town. He never finished his degrees. Years passed.
Today, that man has been sober for nearly a decade.
He has built distance between himself and the hardest period of his life. He remembers the Brother who helped him. He remembers the kindness. For years, he has wanted to reach back out. But he hesitates. Alongside the gratitude is shame. He remembers who he was then. He remembers his behavior. He wonders what that Brother must think of him.
I told him something that is obvious from the outside: He is judging himself far more harshly than that Brother ever did.
If we treated other people the way we treat ourselves, we would be in prison. We grant other people context. We look at a man and think: He was young. He had just come back from war. He was struggling.
But when the person in question is us, context disappears. We turn our past mistakes into hard evidence. We take the worst season of our lives and quietly sentence ourselves to being that man forever.
Meanwhile, the Brother who gave him a place to stay remembers a young man in need. Hearing, “Brother, I have been sober for ten years, and I never forgot what you did for me,” would be one of the best phone calls he has received in his life.
I encouraged him to make it. That Brother deserves to know his kindness mattered. And the man he helped deserves to discover that the door he fears opens easily from the other side.
Shame builds one kind of heavy door. Time builds another.
The second conversation was about a third-generation Mason, a Past Master of my own lodge. He was prominent in my raising. But he has not been to lodge in years.
A mutual friend encouraged him to come back. His answer was hard to hear. With real emotion, he said that all the faces were different now. He did not know anybody anymore.
I understand that. We treat a lodge like it is just a room. But a man remembers particular voices. Particular handshakes. The man who coached him. The men who were young alongside him, and the older men he assumed would somehow always be there.
Then he comes back twenty years later and discovers time kept moving while he was gone. Men moved. Men died. New men came through the door and built memories of their own.
When we tell an absent Brother, “Nothing has changed, come on back,” we tell him something he knows is false. Things have changed. The faces really are different. But we emphasize the wrong thing.
A few days after that conversation, we learned this same Past Master had been hospitalized with cancer, three hours away from our lodge. By coincidence, one of our newer Brothers happened to be in that same city. He had never met this Past Master in his life. But when he learned a Brother from our lodge was lying in that hospital, he insisted on going to see him.
Put those two realities side by side.
“I don’t know anybody there anymore.”
And somewhere three hours away:
“I don’t know him, but he’s my Brother. I’m going to see him.”
That is the answer. Brother, you might not recognize the faces anymore. But they know what you are. There are men sitting in the lodge today who do not know your stories. They cannot remember the lodge as you remember it, because they had not even arrived yet.
But some of them will still drive across town to your hospital room simply because somebody told them a Brother is there.
We spend a lot of time talking about inactive members. We count them, look at rosters, and wonder why they stopped coming. But a membership roster makes absence look simple. A man appears on a spreadsheet as “inactive” while carrying an entire private argument about whether he is still welcome.
From inside the lodge, we see a wooden door with a handle. From outside, he sees ten years of absence, guilt, unfamiliarity, unfinished business, and an explanation he thinks he owes everyone in the room.
Every year he stays gone, the door gets a little heavier.
That is why simply saying “the door is always open” fails. A heavy door needs someone to open it. Sometimes a Brother inside must walk outside, pick up the phone, and push it open for him.
And if you are the Brother standing outside that door, carrying ten years of your own judgment, understand something. The fraternity does not keep score on absence. You have changed. The lodge has changed. The men inside have changed. But the brotherhood remains.
The Entered Apprentice does not need to become the man he was all those years ago to call the Brother who helped him. He gets to call as the man he became. The Past Master does not need to walk back into the lodge of twenty years ago. He gets to walk into the lodge that exists today. And the Brothers there get the privilege of knowing him now.
A man can disappear for years. Life can beat him up. He can lose his way. He can convince himself that too much time has passed. And somewhere, on the other side of that impossibly heavy door, a Brother is still standing there, saying:
Come in. We’ve got a seat for you.
-Brother Rob
Robert W. Linn
Writer of Square ThoughtsEssays on Freemasonry, leadership, and the work of building institutions that last. Explore my books at Bosley Press.
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