What is Whispering Good Counsel

In the third degree, the candidate is taught that:

...you might whisper good counsel in his ear, gently admonishing of his errors, and in a most friendly manner, seek to bring about a reformation.

What does that mean to us as masons? It seems to mean that if you see a brother failing to live up to the moral standards, rules, regulations, traditions, constitution and edicts of Freemasonry that you should whisper good counsel to the brother.

Seems pretty straightforward, doesn't it? What then is a brother to do when his whispered counsel is not well received. What do you do with a brother, that instead, chastises a brother for daring to correct what he sees as an error, when he is raked over the coals and held up to public ridicule?

As brothers, we are called to correct, aid and assist our brethren. Before we do so, we should ask ourselves four things:

1. Is the counsel correct, and more, is it going to be useful? In some Grand Jurisdictions, it is against the masonic code to sell alcohol, or be a part of a business that distributes alcohol. Would it be useful to tell a brother in another jurisdiction where it is NOT against the code that it is unmasonic to do so?
2. What is the purpose of the counsel? Are you trying to truly help a brother by pointing out something he may have missed, or are you trying to show moral superiority by doing so. Masonic charity is not just giving money and time to the lodge and the brethren, it is about an attitude of BEING charitable. If the purpose of whispering good counsel is to aggrandize yourself, remain silent. Whispering good counsel is supposed to be a friendly act, not an assault.
3. Will the counsel be received? If you know that whispering good counsel will not be received by the brother, if you recognize from his past deportment that he not only KNOWS his actions are not in keeping with masonic law and custom and that he is deliberately carrying out the act, prudence dictates you follow the lesson of the first degree and maintain silence with that brother.
4. Last, will the counsel be helpful? This seems pretty straightforward, but it can be a serious consideration. In California, the obligation specifically requires a brother to give due and timely notice of approaching danger, but if the approaching danger is something the brother cannot avoid, then whispering counsel to him would be a waste of time. Only the brother can make that judgment, and it should be seriously reviewed.
5. The counsel should be private, just between the two brothers, otherwise it is not whispering.
   

There was a situation years ago that a Junior Warden faced. He had been given information "on the square" to be held in the faithful repository of a faithful breast. It did not concern murder or treason, or even at that time, felonious conduct, but he was given this information as due and timely notice of approaching danger. In California, the Junior Warden of a lodge is the one that receives masonic complaints/charges and then investigates and if necessary, prefers the charges through the lodge.

Was he obligated to warn the brother who was the subject of the information or keep the information as a secret given to him in trust? Was he required to whisper good counsel to the brother in question? Did he have an obligation to the lodge that superseded his obligation to the brother?

These were serious questions. The Junior Warden kept the secrets that had been entrusted to him, and did not warn the brother at the center of the issue, for in doing so, he would have violated the trust. The Junior Warden did not warn the lodge, since that too would have violated his obligation to keep the secrets entrusted to him.

Events unfolded over the fullness of time, and it all worked out it should according to masonic tradition and rules.

The internet is an interesting animal all on its own, and present challenges to our obligations as well. For some reason, people on the internet like to try to hide behind online aliases, some just like them but sign their real names and affiliations along with the nicknames. This is mentioned not as a criticism, implied or explicit, but as a manner of noting that because of the nicknames, some brothers say and do things on the internet they would never do in person.

How does this apply to whispering good counsel? A PhD brother recently noted, correctly, that 93% of communication is non verbal, that is, intonation, body language, facial expressions and so on. As a result, we are reduced to the medium of simple words here, the remaining 7%. Due to this, the opportunities for miscommunication abound. As an example, remove 93 out of every 100 letters in this article, and you will see that you are left with little.

Couple the opportunity for miscommunication endemic in written only communication with the relative anonymity of the internet, and it becomes very difficult to "read" a brother, to understand him. Internet interactions therefore, are very challenging, and if you couple THAT problem with personal issues that some brothers may carry with them, and the tenets of freemasonry can become pretty darn tenuous.

No one single tenet of freemasonry informs our lives as masons, it is the totality of the craft. We cannot be prudent if we do not temper our words with justice and fortitude. We cannot aid and assist a brother unless we properly understand the meaning of faith, hope and charity. We cannot keep the secrets of a brother as our own unless we have fortitude and prudence, the ability to maintain and prudential silence while reprehending with justice and a faith in the divine in all men.

Moreover, before whispering good counsel, we should practice charity, to give our brother the benefit of the doubt, to always consider that there is more than one side to any story, and that your opponent is rarely a villain in his own eyes. Not that any brother is a villain, but as a means of considering that the way you see it is not always the way it is... there are always facts, interpretations, and viewpoints other than our own.

We ARE called to whisper good counsel. It is our duty, but we must temper that obligation with the rest of what Freemasonry teaches us. Moreover, whispered counsel should be... well, whispered. On the internet, that means using private email, not posting on blogs, forums, or other public areas. In person, it means just between the two brothers. If a third brother is needed, then the advice, which is really what whispered counsel is, may not be well received.

I personally learned these lessons recently. I thought I was whispering good counsel, and posted a comment on a comments section of a blog. Of course it blew up into MUCH more than it was, and the situation cycled WAAAY out of proportion to the actual and real situation at hand. Darn near every one of the five rules posted above were violated in the two sentence note: It was not well received, it was not private, and it's offer was more seen as bullying than whispered counsel.

Yhe point was not made in private, the receiver was embarrassed, which resulted in the normal, human reaction of striking back, which lead to me being embarrassed which lead to a whole series of incredibly stupid, inconsiderate, and conduct unbecoming masons on both sides. Really stupid because one brother did not stop and consider before acting... and that is another problem created by the internet... it creates an instant method of acting that, in normal situations, would be put off until a "better more appropos" time.

The good news is this lesson (unfortunately in retrospect) has been learned. The bad news is there is no way to repair the damage... perhaps a tincture of time and a hefty dose of freemasonry will allow the situation to be repaired. Either way, the lesson can be shared...

Here is another thought though, and related to the first: Every coin has two sides.

The OTHER side of whispering good counsel is receiving it! Implicit in our obligation to OFFER good counsel is our obligation to a brother to hear him out and carefully consider his words when offered good counsel. Charity means that we apply the most charitable ear possible to the words being offered, that the brothering offering it to us has taken time to think about it, has wrestled with his conscience, has carefully considered, and is offering you a precious gift.

Especially if you do not agree, it is our obligation to hear him out, to carefully examine what he is saying, to thank him for taking the time and effort to offer it. Even if you do not agree with him, masonic charity all but demands that you at least thank the brother for coming to you. Masonic Justice also all but demands that you give him the courtesy of thinking about what he brought to you. We are all blind to some things.

Its all about Freemasonry.

May the blessings of heaven rest upon us and all regular masons. May brotherly love prevail, and every moral and social virtue, cement us.

Stephen's Law of Unmasonic analogies

And now, for something different though related.

When a brother acts in a manner inconsistent with Masonic teachings, philosophy, traditions or our obligations, we call this unmasonic behavior. It is incumbent upon us as Masons to act in a MASONIC manner at all times, in our several stations before man and g-d.

Now, we all know Godwin's Law:

Godwin's Law (also known as Godwin's Rule of Nazi
Analogies) is an adage formulated by Mike Godwin in 1990. The law states: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
Godwin's law is often cited in online discussions as a caution against the use of inflammatory rhetoric or exaggerated
comparisons.

The rule does not make any statement as to whether any particular reference or comparison to Hitler or the Nazis might be appropriate, but only asserts that one arising is increasingly probable. It is precisely because such a comparison
or reference may sometimes be appropriate, Godwin has argued, that overuse of Nazi and Hitler comparisons should be avoided, because it robs the valid comparisons of their impact.

Although in one of its early forms Godwin's Law referred specifically to Usenet newsgroup discussions, the law is now applied to any threaded online discussion: electronic mailing lists, message boards, chat rooms, and more recently blog comment threads and wiki talk pages.

I mention this because, recently, on The Burning Taper, a brother coined a new law, Stephen's Law, which is pretty much the same as Godwin's Law, except that in the place of Nazi, we find "unmasonic", and of course, it only applies to Masonic posting. In the case of Godwin's Law, it was a truism. In the case of Stephen's Law, it is an attempt to denigrate any brother who makes an observation as to conduct.

It is my understanding that if a brother errs, it is our duty, our obligation, to whisper good counsel in his ear, in a most friendly manner, to thereby seek to bring about a reformation. Therefore, if we feel a brother is acting in an unmasonic manner, it seems incumbent upon us to TELL them, in a most friendly manner. This is not about browbeating, or putting a brother down, though I guess a brother might feel he is being put upon, being told he is acting unmasonincally.

However, I think that we sometimes act with an excess of brotherly love, and do not call a brother on unmasonic actions, which seems to be in my mind, much worse. As an example, there was a brother in my lodge, a two time past master, and as Senior Warden, on his way to a third year in the east. He was very active in the lodge, and had brought MANY men into the lodge.

Problem was, he was a crook. He used his position as candidate's coach to prevail on candidates to lend him money, or, in some cases, to simply give him money as a mason in distress. Worse, he did the same to other brothers, telling them he was running an internet business and offering them shares in his business as security... problem was, the internet business he was running was a porn site.

Due to an excess of brotherly love, no one called him on it. When they found out that business was a porn business, they often burned the shares or refused to take them. Anyway, it took a former district deputy grand master finding out about the business to bring this all to a head. Unfortunately, he tried to handle it on his own, by leveraging the man to agree not to serve as master and resign as Senior Warden or he would prefer charges with the Junior Warden, which is the process in my grand lodge for preferring charges.

Bad news is the Junior Warden was a man of integrity. He pointed out to the former DDGM that what he was doing was blackmail, and if he continued in that vein, the Junior Warden on his own would prefer charges against him. Ooops. The former DDGM then went to a Past Grand Master, who got into this up to HIS eyeballs by renewing the blackmail threat, and escalating it by telling the man to resign from Masonry entirely or face charges. The Junior Warden was then approached by the brother at the center of all this to prefer chages against the Junior Past Grand Master and the Former DDGM for blackmail and unmasonic conduct.

The Junior Past Grand Master called the Grand Lodge Jurisprudence committee at that point, and the GRAND LODGE preferred charges against the brother in the center of all this. In three months, he was found guilty after ten broters stood up to testify against him. He was found guilty by a jury of brother masons, and the Trial Master sentenced him to expulsion from freemasonry.

How do I know all this? I was the Junior Warden.

So, what is my point? Well, if the brethren had stood up to him and whispered good counsel to him early on, noted his unmasonic behavior, we might have been able to make a difference to him, which was our duty to a brother. But we didn't. The brethern who knew, kept it to themselves, out of anger or humiliation or whatever else. None of the brethren in the lodge who should have said something, and it turns out there were a number who knew what he was up to but said nothing, did say anything.

As a result, we had a masonic trial, and a man was expelled from Masonry, a lodge was split, and many men quit the lodge over the whole situation which had been handled badly from the start by the Former DDGM.

It is our DUTY to tell a brother when his conduct is less than the Masonic standard, our obligation tells us so: aid and assist... to give due and timely notice of approaching danger...to whisper good counsel. So when a brother says: your conduct is unmasonic, it is one of the strongest statements of brotherly love that a Mason can make... not an attack or a slander.

To act as a Mason is the expectation of all who have knelt and taken the obligation. To tell a brother when he is erring is also the expectation. To not do so is to fail your brother.

In my opinion.