By Brother Oppong Clifford Benjamin.
Master- Elect of Excelsior Lodge No. 7670 EC. (to be installed 18th March, 2017)
I have visited them twice. It means I have really being educated and enjoyed twice from their Master Masons forum. And I dare say this has become a ceremonial ritual for Plateau Lodge No. 89 in the register of the Grand Lodge of Ghana. And I must congratulate the Worshipful Master and Brethren of the lodge for a wise initiative taken to repair the neck of Freemasonry from breaking off its long and antiquated body.
Though the Master Masons Forum is not a novel of Plateau Lodge (it is already in practice among lodges elsewhere), it can boldly be labelled on their banners as the originators of the initiative in Ghana.
The Lodge meets on certain Saturdays, and on all Fridays predating those Saturdays, in the evenings (at about 7pm), bottles of assorted beers, chairs and silent faces of Master Masons and very revered senior Masons would be arranged in circle with a lonely table placed at the centre and bottles of whisky on its smooth surface such that every brother present is equidistant to the whisky from the circumference. And very loud of the setting is the atmosphere of sedate oneness that filled the air in Right Worshipful Brother Lawyer Kwaku Baah's living room. ( Plateau meets in an inbuilt temple in his home and his large living room is the venue for the forum).
In this busy world, especially in our 'change has come' Ghana, just to be frank, Freemasonry is becoming less and least attractive to the modern society. With new pressures, lifestyle choices, technology a today young man has so many and so much to keep him playing in life so much that he no longer can differentiate day from night. It has therefore become not only necessary but also, I am afraid to say, very crucial for Masons to adopt measures in recruitment, retention and retrieval in accordance with the giant generational difference. It is in view of this fact that Plateau Lodge held and holds the Master Masons Forum to shred off titles and ranks to a common level of Master Masons the better to enable a free and sincere environment of discussion. A discussion of how to meliorate our system of morality, how to lift the veil carefully in order not to naked our allegory and symbols but high enough to retain the young Masons under, hear the problems of the MMs and most importantly for the Master Masons to take emotional strength from the stories about the patience and industry that have kept some Senior Masons in the order for decades and still counting. Master Masons get a chance of vomiting their hearts out, and the Senior Masons pick and fix them.
In the evening of the immediate past Friday, the rulers embraced new ideas to make Freemasonry as dynamic as the world from the Master Masons, who in exchange were advised to have patience and move in the faith of our fore fathers. And to climate it all, when Right Worshipful Brother Lawyer Kwaku Baah (an octogenarian) who was quiet in his seat all the while was invited to speak, his words were brief and precise and he said and I quote " In Masonry nobody is going to teach you anything but you acquire the Masonry yourself".
