Templar Edification

An old memory recently came to mind at our Summer Bible Study on miracles. Forgive me if you’ve heard me tell it to you before. The summer after seventh grade, my family moved. The basement of our new house had yet to be finished, so we stored a lot of the boxes that we hadn’t yet gotten through down below, including quite a few packed-up books. Alas, when autumn came around, we learned that our fresh, clean, concrete basement had been built over a seasonal spring, and the whole thing flooded. We came home on the evening of my birthday to find three feet of standing water working its way up the stairs. My mother waded waist-high through the deluge, taking stock of the damage, when, looking down, she spotted something yellow and rectangular on the bottom. She reached underneath, soaking her entire arm, pulled the object up, and immediately grew pale. Our home congregation, which I’d attended ever since my birth and baptism, used bright yellow Good News Bibles for Sunday School and Youth...

By: Companion Eric Thiem In the Select Master Degree, we are informed of items of significance that are placed in the Ark of the Covenant to be discovered by future generations on their return from Babylon; or in the case of York Rite Masonry to be discovered previously in the Royal Arch Degree. One of those items to be placed in the Ark is an omer of Manna. Doing research; one finds that an omer was an ancient unit of measurement, which is one tenth of an ephah, roughly equivalent to 1.5 to 2 quarts worth. Another definition is the amount of manna it would take to feed one over a period of time, roughly seven weeks or the time between Passover and Shavuot (1) . The Old Testament describes manna as being a fine flake like bread that tasted like wafers that were made with honey. In Exodus 16:19-20, Moses instructs the Israelites not to keep the manna more than a day and when the Israelites disobeyed Moses and kept it and they discovered the manna to be full of maggots and have a pungent...

The Society of the Holy Trinity (STS) is a pan-Lutheran Order dedicated to helping pastors to fulfill our ordination vows. We gather, pray, learn, eat, celebrate, and worship together, through both the Liturgy of the Hours (i.e., offices of prayer at regular hours of the day) and the Divine Liturgy of Word and Sacrament. We hold these retreats quarterly, with our local Chapters each assembling three times a year, and the General Retreat of the entire Society convening annually. For over a decade, our General Retreat took place at Mundelein Seminary outside of Chicago, a lovely spot reminiscent of Narnia. This summer, however, will be our first at Saint Meinrad Archabbey in Indiana. I had to look up the legend of St Meinrad. As the story goes, Meinrad of Einsiedeln was a ninth-century Benedictine priestmonk in modern Switzerland, known ever after as the “Martyr of Hospitality.” He established a hermitage on the slopes of the Etzel Pass, only then to move deeper into the wilderness due t...

By: Eric Thiem In April’s education on the history of Cryptic Council, a small portion of the article mentioned degrees that were initiated in a Council of Cryptic Masons that were no longer performed. One of those, the Knights of the Round Table was discussed in detail and presented in the August 2025 Beauseant and Buckler. I decided to delve into another of the “Dead Degrees,” the Order of the Garter and determine if I could uncover the history of this degree. A garter is a functional piece, or band of clothing of an elastic nature designed to hold up another piece of clothing, usually a stocking or a shirt sleeve (1) . They were typically tied to the stocking just below the knee. With advances in modern clothing, they have lost their use as a functional piece of clothing. The history of a garter being a functional piece of clothing dates back to at least the Middle Ages, if not earlier. For most of history, they have been associated with a bridal tradition; symbolizing luck at the c...

I saw a post online the other day, which claimed that 49% of Minnesotans—less than half—say that they believe in God. Now, I don’t put much weight behind such polls, however they gather their data. I remember reading recently that 30% of self-identified atheists also affirm that they believe in God. Try to make that one make sense. But the very notion of “believing in God” is something of a category error, a confusion of terms. Most people who deny belief in God are thinking of a god; that is, of a powerful yet limited supernatural or spiritual creature of some sort, akin to what Jews and Christians might call angels, or even fae. Yet God is not a god. God, in the classical sense—as understood by the great monotheisms, including Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Baháʼí, Zoroastrians, Platonists, and, I would argue, certain strains of Buddhism—is not a part of Creation, not a being within the universe, not even properly an object of belief; because God is not an object, not a th...

Years ago, I saw a little miracle. After a funeral, in the bleak midwinter, we set out to the cemetery for a graveside committal. The wind whipped up something wicked, lashing at our coats and scouring any exposed flesh. The air temperature, without windchill, had plunged into the negative 20s. The family proved reluctant to get out of their cars, but soldiered on, following my lead. You should’ve seen the grimaces on the faces of the men when I took off my hat to pray, knowing that they ought to follow suit. Not that I could blame them. Have pity on the bald. Graveside committals typically don’t take terribly long. If one follows the Occasional Services book, we’re only out there for five to 10 minutes. At one point, the officiant—that would be me—pours out a cylinder of sand, the symbolic first handful of grave dirt, whilst intoning, “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” Given that we were standing exposed in what felt like a wind-tunnel, I fully expected the sand, fine and...