What Nobody Tells You About Your First Year as a Freemason

The night I was initiated, three men shook my hand and told me it was the beginning of a great journey. Then everyone went home, and for six weeks absolutely nothing happened. That gap, between the ceremony and the next thing, is where most new Masons quietly lose their footing, and nobody warns you about it.

So here is the honest version of a first year, from someone still close enough to remember being lost in it.

§1. The anticlimax is normal

Your initiation is a genuinely moving evening. The next meeting is a minutes reading, a discussion about the boiler and a raffle. Both are Freemasonry. If you expected every night to feel like the first one, you will conclude something is wrong within two months. Nothing is wrong. The ritual is the frame and the ordinary evenings are the picture.

§2. You will understand about a third of it

The language is old, the choreography is unexplained and everyone else appears to know where to stand. This lasts longer than you expect and it is not a sign you are unsuited. Ask afterwards, over a drink, and ask the same question of two different men. You will get two different answers and both will be useful. Structured study helps enormously here, whether through your lodge's own scheme or a resource such as MasonicCourses.com.

§3. Memory work is harder than you think and easier than you fear

You will be asked to learn a section of catechism before you can progress. Grown men who run companies are humbled by this. The trick is not intelligence, it is repetition in small daily doses. Ten minutes every morning beats two hours on a Sunday, every time.

• Learn it out loud, standing up, not silently in a chair
• Record yourself and listen to it in the car
• Rehearse with your mentor rather than alone
• Accept that you will dry up in front of the lodge and that nobody will mind

§4. The drink after the meeting is not optional

I do not mean the alcohol. I mean staying. The lodge room gives you ritual and the hour afterwards gives you the men, and it is the men who keep you coming. The brothers who left before their third year were, almost without exception, the ones who went straight to the car park.

The meeting makes you a member. The hour afterwards makes you a brother.

§5. Somebody will ask you to do something too soon

A small office, a job in a ceremony, the raffle, the collection. It will feel premature and you should say yes anyway. Being given work is the fastest route from visitor to member, and a lodge that asks nothing of you in the first year is a lodge that will not miss you in the second.

§6. Your family notices the evenings

Between meetings, rehearsals and the odd social, the first year takes more evenings than the years after it. Talk about it at home before it becomes a source of quiet resentment. Bring your partner to whatever the lodge holds for families. Membership that runs against the household does not last, and every Past Master reading this knows a man it happened to.

§7. The costs arrive in an uneven lump

Joining fee, regalia, dues and the first formal dinner tend to cluster in the same few months, which makes the first year feel more expensive than the fraternity actually is. Plan for it rather than being surprised by it, and see How Much Does It Really Cost? for the full breakdown.

§8. Progression is not a queue

Some lodges move you through the three degrees in a year, some take three. It depends on the lodge's calendar, its number of candidates and your own memory work. Comparing your pace to another man's is the fastest way to sour something that is not a competition. What each degree involves is described in What Happens During the First Degree.

§9. The lodge you chose matters more than the fraternity you joined

This is the one I wish I had understood before petitioning. Whether your first year is a pleasure or a slow disappointment depends almost entirely on whether your lodge has a mentoring habit and a culture of noticing new men. If you are still choosing, read Signs a Masonic Lodge Is Right for You carefully. If you have already joined and your lodge is not looking after you, say so out loud to the Worshipful Master. Most will fix it immediately.

§10. It gets much better in year two

Once the memory work eases, the faces are familiar and you have a job to do, the whole thing settles into the rhythm described in What Does a Freemason Actually Do Every Month?. Almost everyone who reaches year three stays for decades. The trick is simply arriving there, and the honest conversations at MasonicFind are full of men saying exactly that.

The whole of the fifth step inside The First Step Roadmap is a month by month plan for this year, written because so many good men drift out of it for want of one.

And if you are reading this before your initiation rather than after it, How Do You Know If You're Ready? is the better place to start.