The events of a difficult day lead to an unpopular, but beneficial, insight.

I have had better days. Today started off well enough-one of those remarkable days we sometimes get in January in Oklahoma, with a bright blue sky and a temperature in the 60s. The wind was only about 20 miles an hour, which, for us, is nearly a dead calm.
But things had gone rapidly downhill. I fell over the cat on my way downstairs (black cats are hard to see in the morning twilight). I burned the toast. My key jammed in the door of the Grand Lodge building when I tried to go to my office.

During lunch, I went to the supermarket to pick up supplies for the rest of the week, fully intending to buy a corned beef brisket to cook (they were out). My pen ran out of ink as I was writing a check to pay for the groceries. I used the grocery cart to take the things to the van, because I had bought a 40-pound bucket of kitty litter, and, as I turned to open the hatch on the back of the van, the cart-weighted off center by the bucket-started rolling briskly down the incline of the parking lot. I grabbed for it, hit my head on the van hatch, missed the cart, ran it down in the parking lot just before it crashed into another car, hauled it back up the slope, hit my head on the hatch door again, lost the cart a second time, finally got it stacked in the cart-parking slot, and drove home in a less than sunny mood.

The mood darkened further when I turned into the drive. By quirk of topography or the malevolence of the architect, every leaf which falls and every scrap of paper which is loosed in Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico ends up in my back garden. There, caught in the skeletons of last summer's hollyhocks, was a piece of notebook paper. I pulled it free from the hollyhocks and started toward the trash barrel, glancing at it as I went. It was obviously written by a young student in response to a teacher's request that students write about their weekend, and it read: "My weekend was sad and stressful because my father died and I kept thinking about him."

Oh.

So much for jammed keys, and bumped heads, and runaway carts. The incident brought me up short, and made me profoundly ashamed of my pettiness. If you were to ask me to name the most important thing the Scottish Rite does for me, I think I would give that as the answer: It, like the note brings me up short, and makes me profoundly ashamed of pettiness.

When speaking of someone who really annoys me, I have been known to say, in my superior way, "He has an inadequate sense of his own insignificance." But the Rite reminds me that I do, too. To me, one of the most valuable and important aspects of the Scottish Rite is that it runs counter to some of the most cherished mantras of popular culture. For instance, we have become avoiders of death in our culture. We don't like to think about it or talk about it. We would just as soon that people die in hospitals or nursing homes where we can't see it. In many funerals I have been to in the last 20 years, death isn't even mentioned, save in a sort of embarrassed sentence when the date of death is given. As a culture we focus on youth and life, not age and death. And yet the Rite confronts us with images of death at every turn, and it offers us the profound insight that only by overcoming the dread of death, not by avoiding the topic, can we truly learn how to live as free men.

Our culture insists that we must feel good about ourselves-almost that we have a birthright to feel good about ourselves, no matter what we have done or left undone. We must all have a positive "self-image," and woe betide the wight who suggests that that self-image may have feet of clay. But the Rite teaches that we are entitled to a positive self-image only if we have worked long and hard to earn one; that we should always test ourselves against higher standards, build on our strengths and correct our failures. It teaches that a human life is a work in progress, not an accomplished fact. If we do loathsome things, self-loathing is appropriate.

Many pop-culture theologians tell us, "You are a child of God, and therefore you have great rewards." The Rite teaches, "You are a child of God, therefore you have great responsibilities." Pop culture, ultimately, tells us that there really are no permanent values, no real right and wrong, it's all relative (except, of course, for poverty, for the unspoken assumption is that the more wealth a person has, the more worthy he is). The Rite teaches that there are permanent values, that a beggar whose heart is filled with love and charity is of incomparably greater worth than the man of wealth who cares for nothing except adding to his already excessive means.

The lessons of the Rite are not in tune with much of contemporary culture, but they are lessons which I, at least, desperately need to hear. For life will test us, and reality will slam us out of our self-satisfaction and self-absorption. To live truly, we must learn these important lessons-whether these lessons are taught in the Degrees, or written on a scrap of paper held fast by last summer's flowers.

Jim Tresner is Director of the Masonic Leadership Institute and Editor of The Oklahoma Mason. A frequent contributor to the Scottish Rite Journal and its book review editor, Illustrious Brother Tresner is also a volunteer writer for The Oklahoma Scottish Rite Mason and a video script consultant for the National Masonic Renewal Committee. He is the Director of the Thirty-third Degree Conferral Team and Director of Work at the Guthrie Scottish Rite Temple in Guthrie, Oklahoma, as well as a Life Member of the Scottish Rite Research Society, author of the popular anecdotal biography Albert Pike, The Man Beyond the Monument, and a member of the steering committee of the Masonic Information Center. Ill. Tresner was awarded the Grand Cross, the Scottish Rite's highest honor, during the Supreme Council's October 1997 Biennial Session.