Much has changed since then. Our local chapter has become inactive and will probably eventually close. There is sadness in writing those words because anyone who has invested time in a youth organization understands that a chapter is more than a charter hanging on a wall. It is young people and parents, advisors and meetings, dinners and trips, ceremonies and friendships. It is successes, mistakes, lessons learned, and memories accumulated over years.
For a while, I wondered whether an inactive chapter meant there was little reason to continue this blog. I have reached the opposite conclusion. I intend to continue writing here about DeMolay, its history, its principles, its remarkable alumni, and the importance of supporting DeMolay wherever chapters continue to give young men opportunities to grow. A local chapter becoming inactive does not make the ideas behind DeMolay irrelevant. Indeed, watching a chapter disappear has caused me to think more seriously about what the organization was supposed to accomplish in the first place.
Perhaps the best way to measure DeMolay is not simply by counting active chapters or members. Perhaps we should look instead at the men who walked out of those chapter rooms and ask what happened to the lessons they learned there. That brings me to a question I have been thinking about for some time: Did the lessons survive the organization?
The Senior DeMolay Test
Over the years, I have written on this blog about some extraordinary Senior DeMolays. Frank Borman commanded Apollo 8, the first crewed mission to orbit the Moon. Edgar Mitchell walked on the Moon during Apollo 14. Lance Sijan became one of the great stories of courage and resistance to emerge from the Vietnam War. Colonel James "Nick" Rowe survived more than five years as a prisoner of war, escaped captivity, and later helped develop the U.S. Army's survival, evasion, resistance, and escape training.
There have been Senior DeMolays who became governors and members of Congress, military commanders and businessmen, entertainers, athletes, writers, and community leaders. Those are interesting stories, and they are worth preserving. But celebrity is not character, and accomplishment is not necessarily evidence of virtue. The more interesting question is not how famous these men became or how high they climbed. It is what kind of men they became along the way.
That distinction is important because I do not believe we can look at the life of an accomplished Senior DeMolay and simply credit DeMolay for what followed. DeMolay did not make Frank Borman an astronaut, and it did not create Lance Sijan's courage. Human beings are shaped by families, teachers, faith, education, military service, friends, mentors, opportunities, disappointments, failures, successes, and countless other experiences. Ultimately, they are also shaped by their own choices.
The better question is whether something taught during those formative years remained. When we look at the adult man, can we recognize some of the values that were placed before the boy? That, to me, is the Senior DeMolay test.
What Was DeMolay Trying to Do?
DeMolay describes its mission in terms of developing leadership and character in young men. Its educational materials emphasize something particularly important: young men are expected to participate in decisions, plan and carry out activities, accept responsibilities, and learn through actually doing things rather than merely listening to adults tell them how leadership works.
That distinction matters because leadership cannot be learned entirely from a book, and neither can responsibility. A young man learns something different when he has to stand before a room and speak. He learns something when he is responsible for planning an event and discovers that other people are depending upon him. He learns something when he has to work with someone he does not particularly like, and he learns something when the plan he was certain would work falls apart.
Perhaps he learns even more when the adults around him resist the temptation to immediately rescue him.
DeMolay provides young men with increasing responsibilities within the chapter and opportunities to practice public speaking, event planning, parliamentary procedure, committee work, organizational leadership, and service. On paper, some of these may sound like relatively mundane skills. Years later, when the young man is sitting in a business meeting, leading military personnel, running his own company, organizing a community project, or simply trying to resolve a disagreement within his family, they do not seem mundane at all.
What I Have Seen
For me, this is not merely a historical question because I have watched some of it happen. Within our own DeMolay chapter, I watched boys become young men and then begin moving into the adult world in remarkable ways. Some have gone into business and become business owners. One has gone to work in the space program. Others have chosen to serve in our nation's military. Still others have begun careers and lives whose stories are only starting to be written.
I would never claim that DeMolay alone made them the men they became. That would give the organization credit that properly belongs to many people, beginning with their parents. Teachers, coaches, faith, friends, education, mentors, individual experiences, successes, disappointments, and the young men's own decisions all contributed to their development.
But I have also talked with their parents. Two parents in particular have told me that they believe DeMolay played a significant role in forging their sons' character as they made that complicated journey from boyhood into manhood. That has stayed with me because I watched some of that process from the other side of the room.
I watched young men learn to stand before others and speak. I watched them accept responsibilities and work together. I watched them succeed at some things and stumble through others. I watched adult men mentor them without attempting to replace their fathers, and I watched boys gradually become more confident about making decisions, accepting responsibility, and taking their place among other men.
The role of an advisor was never supposed to be manufacturing a young man in his own image. At its best, the adult advisor is a mentor, a resource, an example, and occasionally the person who asks the young man what he intends to do about the problem he has just created. The responsibility still belongs to the young man. In a world in which adults can sometimes be too quick to organize every moment of a young person's life, there is considerable value in simply saying: Here is the responsibility. Let's see what you can do with it.
The Seven Lessons
DeMolay traditionally organizes its moral instruction around seven Cardinal Virtues: filial love, reverence for sacred things, courtesy, comradeship, fidelity, cleanness, and patriotism. The terminology can sound old-fashioned in the twenty-first century, but perhaps that is part of its value. Strip away the ceremonial language and the principles are surprisingly straightforward.
Respect the people who raised you and recognize the debt you owe them. Understand that there are things larger and more important than yourself. Treat other people with courtesy. Be a friend and understand what friendship requires. Keep faith with others and honor your commitments. Exercise discipline over your own conduct. Accept some responsibility for the community and country in which you live.
These are lessons presented to adolescents, but adolescence is not where they are ultimately tested. The real examination comes later, when keeping a promise becomes inconvenient, loyalty carries a cost, responsibility cannot be handed to somebody else, and doing the right thing is considerably more difficult than talking about it.
Lance Sijan and the Meaning of Fidelity
Consider Senior DeMolay Lance Sijan. A United States Air Force pilot, Sijan was forced to eject from his crippled aircraft over North Vietnam in November 1967. Terribly injured, he nevertheless survived alone for weeks before being captured. He briefly escaped, was recaptured, and endured brutal imprisonment before dying in captivity in January 1968. He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.
It would be irresponsible to suggest that DeMolay created Lance Sijan's courage. His family, his education, his training at the United States Air Force Academy, his military service, his fellow servicemen, his personal convictions, and something extraordinary within Sijan himself all contributed to the man who faced those circumstances.
Yet DeMolay had once placed before that young man the concept of fidelity. Years later, fidelity was no longer a word spoken during a ceremony in a chapter room. Under circumstances few human beings will ever experience, the idea of remaining faithful to others and to one's obligations became terribly real. We cannot claim that DeMolay created what followed, but we can recognize something in the adult man that had once been presented as an ideal to the boy.
James "Nick" Rowe and Perseverance
The same caution should apply to Colonel James "Nick" Rowe, another Senior DeMolay whose story I have previously explored. Rowe graduated from West Point and became a United States Army officer. Captured in Vietnam in 1963, he endured more than five years as a prisoner before escaping in 1968. He later used what he had learned under horrific circumstances to help develop training intended to give future American servicemembers a better chance of surviving captivity.
Again, DeMolay cannot claim his accomplishments, nor should it try. What we can do is look at his life and ask whether we see something recognizable in it: service, fidelity, comradeship, patriotism, perseverance, and a sense of responsibility toward those who would come after him.
Perhaps we are seeing nothing more than virtues shared by many good people who never belonged to DeMolay. But that is precisely the point. DeMolay never owned those virtues. It simply tried to teach them to young men at an age when ideas about character were beginning to take shape.
The Problem With Famous Senior DeMolays
There is a danger in telling only stories about men such as Sijan, Rowe, Borman, and Mitchell. We can accidentally create the impression that DeMolay succeeds when a boy becomes famous, wealthy, powerful, or historically important. That cannot possibly be the standard.
For every Senior DeMolay who walked on the Moon, became a general, entered Congress, won an Olympic medal, or built a major company, there were thousands whose names will never appear in a history book. They became fathers and husbands, teachers and police officers, soldiers and mechanics, business owners and accountants, firefighters, clergymen, tradesmen, coaches, and neighbors.
They went to work every morning and raised children. They took care of aging parents. They coached youth sports, volunteered at churches and community organizations, served on committees and school boards, helped friends move, sat beside hospital beds, attended funerals, paid mortgages, kept promises, and tried to leave their communities a little better than they found them.
Maybe that is where the Senior DeMolay test matters most. Character should not require an audience, and if the values of DeMolay mattered only when they produced famous men, the organization would have failed almost everyone who passed through its doors. Its greater contribution may be found in thousands of ordinary lives lived honorably.
Did the Lessons Survive?
There is no scientific experiment that can answer that question. We cannot take a 50-year-old man and separate his DeMolay experience from his parents, education, marriage, career, military service, friendships, faith, triumphs, tragedies, and every other experience that shaped him. Nor should we try.
Instead, perhaps we should look for echoes. Did comradeship become lifelong loyalty and friendship? Did courtesy become respect for other people? Did fidelity become dependability? Did patriotism become service rather than simply a slogan? Did cleanness become self-discipline? Did reverence become humility before something greater than oneself? Did filial love eventually become the adult realization that our parents knew considerably more than we thought they did when we were sixteen?
Those are much more interesting measures than titles or awards because they can be applied equally to an astronaut and an accountant, a general and a mechanic, a governor and a father quietly raising his children.
When the Chapter Is Gone
That brings me back to our own chapter. It is painful to watch something in which people invested so much time become inactive. There will be records somewhere, photographs will survive, and old programs, pins, awards, and pieces of regalia will undoubtedly end up in drawers or boxes. Eventually, someone may take a charter off a wall.
But the young men are still out there.
One is working in the space program. Others are serving their country. Some are building businesses, and others are beginning careers, families, and adult lives that may stretch another half-century into the future. The chapter may disappear, but they will not.
That realization changes how I think about the closing of a DeMolay chapter. If the purpose of DeMolay were simply to perpetuate DeMolay chapters, then every chapter that closes would represent complete failure. But that was never the mission. The mission was the young men.
If they learned to speak when they were afraid to stand in front of a room, something survived. If they learned to accept responsibility after making a mistake, something survived. If they learned that leadership means service rather than possessing a title, something survived. If an adult advisor said or did something that a young man remembered ten or twenty years later when facing a difficult decision, something survived.
The future we talked about when they were boys eventually arrived. We are seeing some of it now.
The Real Senior DeMolay Test
Perhaps the Senior DeMolay test cannot really be administered until years after a young man leaves the chapter. We have to wait until life begins asking the questions for us. What happens when keeping his word becomes inconvenient? How does he treat someone who can do absolutely nothing for him? Does he accept responsibility when something goes wrong? Can other people depend upon him? Can he lead without needing a title and follow when someone else has the better idea? Does he have the courage to stand alone when necessary? Does he contribute something to his family, profession, community, or country?
Those questions are harder than asking whether someone once wore a DeMolay pin or memorized a part in a ritual. They also seem to me to be much closer to what the organization was trying to accomplish.
Our chapter may close. Other chapters undoubtedly will too, while hopefully new ones will open. DeMolay will continue to change, just as every organization that survives from one generation to another must change. I will continue writing about it here. I will continue telling the stories of Senior DeMolays, exploring the history and principles of the organization, and writing about why DeMolay deserves the support of adults willing to give young men opportunities to lead, fail, recover, serve, and grow.
After watching young men from our own chapter move into adulthood, I have come to believe that the most important DeMolay story may actually begin after a young man leaves.
A chapter can close and a charter can disappear. The meetings can end and the chapter room can become quiet. But if the lessons became habits, and those habits helped forge character, then something remains long after the organization that taught them is gone.
Perhaps the ultimate product of DeMolay was never the chapter.
Perhaps it was the man who walked out of it.
References
DeMolay International. (n.d.). DeMolay leader's resource guide. DeMolay International. https://demolay.org/wp-content/uploads/resources/leaders_resource_guide.pdf
DeMolay International. (n.d.). Hall of Fame. DeMolay International.
Florida DeMolay. (n.d.). Parents' guide to DeMolay. Florida DeMolay. https://www.fldemolay.org/files/resources/advisors/Parents_Guide_to_DeMolay.pdf
Rowe, J. N. (1971). Five years to freedom: The true story of a Vietnam POW. Little, Brown and Company.
Sijan, J. A. (2004). Lance and the shield: The inspiring story of an unlikely hero. Word Association Publishers.
United States Air Force. (n.d.). Captain Lance P. Sijan. U.S. Air Force.
Washington DeMolay. (n.d.). What does it mean to be a leader? Washington DeMolay.
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