The Leader
DECEMBER 2020: Officer Installation

Once again, it’s time to ring in a new year—and with it, a new crew of lodge officers. This year’s a bit different, though. Sticking with the unofficial theme for 2020, officers’ installations are going virtual.

For a 300-year-old fraternity, that’s required pivoting to develop a ceremony that’s sufficiently meaningful, as befitting a sacred ritual. Typically, that's not particularly easy: To change even a single word in the Masonic ritual language requires a vote by Grand Lodge at an Annual Communication. Instead, the newly developed virtual installation ceremony has been kept entirely intact. The only difference this year is that there is no floor work during the ceremony. “The idea of making the installation ceremony ritual virtual isn’t as crazy as it sounds,” says Ricky Lawler, the grand lecturer and a member of the Grand Lodge Ritual Committee. “We’ve already found that most lodges are conducting Zoom meetings and gatherings over the internet.”

So, this year, instead of planning an in-person installation ceremony, a lodge simply has to create a Zoom meeting (or any other video-conferencing platform). Because the installation ceremony is ordinarily a public affair, there is no requirement that the meeting be private or password-protected. In place of the floor work, participants will be given the floor—so to speak—over a Zoom call when their part of the ritual comes up. To help create an appropriate atmosphere during the ritual, the ritual committee has put together a PowerPoint slide deck of Masonic imagery, which a lodge can have playing during the ceremony itself. According to Lawler, lodges should reach out to their inspector to get the slides and for any other questions they might have. All things being equal, the event should go off without a hitch, even if it feels a bit different this time around.

If that feels a little too unusual, don’t worry—you won’t have to get used to this whole virtual ritual thing forever. Says Lawler, “This will not become the norm for lodge rituals. If anything, this is an emergency measure we’ve taken.” It is true that an important feature of Masonic rituals are the in-person interactions between participants—and some things are bound to be lost when you translate such a human interaction into an online format. Though, truth be told, there are some benefits to this emergency measure. For one, it offers the perfect time to take advantage of conducting a joint installation with another lodge—say your sister lodge. For instance, on December 16, Riverside Lodge No. 635 and Elk Grove Lodge No. 173 will be hosting a joint installation; two lodges on opposite ends of the state, there’s no doubt they would never be able to achieve this in an ordinary year.

Then again, there’s nothing ordinary about this year.