A "Fallen Brother"

Yesterday at a Lodge I visited the Master of that lodge who spoke about a text he has been meditating on and has for some time. He read a portion of it and now he has me thinking about it as well. He has been taking one of the Scottish Rite free online courses. So, this is from Morals and Dogma by Albert Pike. I will not post the entire paragraph but enough that you get the point.

“When we condemn or pity the fallen, how do we know that, tempted like him, we should not have fallen like him, as soon, and perhaps with less resistance? How can we know what we should do if we were out of employment, famine crouching, gaunt, and hungry, on our fireless hearth, and our children wailing for bread? We fall not because we are not enough tempted! Wisely are we directed to pray that we may not be exposed to temptation.”

When he first read this, it really hit home, and I wanted to read and think about it some more. What is Pike really saying? Well, it sure appears to me he is saying in “modern, not so dry speech”. Get off your high horse, pedestals are meant for Wisdom, Strength, Beauty…not for us to park our 4th point of contact on. But here is the thing. We do it. We are all guilty of it. Pike is telling us that compassion rules the day.

As I am writing this my mind went back to a story my nephew told me about when he was in Air Force Advanced Training. He was a Load Master on C-130s and since he was on the flight crew he had to attend SERE Training. For those that do not know SERE stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape. In the short term it is POW School. They take you out to a point in very harsh conditions, grin and tell you to get home. Oh ya, and don’t get caught. Of course you’re going to get caught. That’s a part of the program. They know right where you are and can pick you up anytime, they wish.

He was captured and they tried to extract information from him. He resisted until the time it became too much, and he couldn’t. He finally broke. This bothered him greatly and when he came home from training you could tell he was mad at himself when he talked about it.

His SERE instructor talked to him and told him not to worry about it. Everyone breaks, it’s the point of the training. It is knowing when you are going to reach the “breaking point”.

I have heard people talk and say, “By God, they couldn’t break me, it’s all mind over matter”. Of course it is. It is all about mental toughness. But have you ever taken a stress test where you ran, did pushups, etc. to the point of exhaustion? That happens to us mentally too.

We all have our point. In the story of my nephew the instructor was the stimuli. He was promising something all the students wanted, freedom and release from their current condition. He was tempting the cadets for a specific outcome to make them fall. Being a temptation, he knew just how to do it.

The same thing happens with us. Go out to dinner and set a glass of whiskey in front of an alcoholic early in recovery. They may shun the glass but there is a good chance in time they will break and drink it. Maybe someone is unemployed, and their family is homeless and hungry. Under normal circumstances this person would never do anything wrong. But they commit a crime just to feed their family. It breaks their heart they did it. But what hurts more? The crime, or looking in the eyes of your wife and kids to know they were hungry?

We all have that one thing, maybe more than one, that will trip us up. Maybe we need to extend a little Grace to those we look at and perceive as “fallen Brothers”. For in someone else’s eyes, we have fallen too.

I love you and may we govern ourselves accordingly