False advertising and community service

My dad always told me that charity is doing something and not letting others know about it. I believe there's a verse that said the same thing. I can not remember the verse, so sorry Sunday school teacher.

Anyway, some of our lodges engage in community service activities as a sham. It is almost like a political campaigner I heard of who walked into the soup kitchen, wore gloves an apron, served a couple of guests, took pictures,  and then just left. Imagine if this was a lodge doing this?

I know of a lodge that jumped into a community service event hosted by another organization, wore their masonic shirts, took pictures, and then just left. Then they posted pictures as if they too were partners or part of the initiative that that one organization completely organized. That is a huge fraud by so-called upright men.

So it begs the question: why do we do it in the first place? Why do we have to go through all that means just to appear in some cases like our goal is to serve the community?

Maybe in some part, it is due to the almost dictatorial mandates of our GL's (how ironic though, considering the whole "all lodges/grand lodges are sovereign" talk) to make sure their lodges are performing some sort of community service. This forces a lot of members who ordinarily wouldn't be caught in a volunteer position faking it to make the pass grade.  I've already mentioned how I think community service is a faux goal of our organization due to complete loss of direction of our internal mandate to help each other by self-improvement through masonic education and character development.

But there''s also an unspoken reason that many lodges not only use community service for and often are very hesitant to get the pictures out there to the world: marketing.

The idea is: if we do community service, people will see us and want to be us. If we put it out there, we can even get a larder audience. This is the biggest crock of bull we can tell ourselves seriously. Public awareness, I can understand on the basis that some lodges primarily gain their funds from the community itself (I've already raised my disapproval of that in an earlier post), but now we have these lodges attempting to almost recruit people in by falsely deceiving them that our organization is some kind of community service organization. Then what happens when that man steps in and finds out that it is more of political bickering and grandstanding than it is about community service?

Charity extends beyond the lines of freemasonry and enters into the finer bounds of humanity: do things out of the graciousness of your own heart. Not all of us are volunteers, and there is no mandate within freemasonry to be such. We are to be kind to our neighbors and charitable, but that should be an individual effort more than anything else. We should not be scared to volunteer our time, if we want to, without having any ulterior motive or ego boosting or whatever. I'd expect all our members to be charitable by nature, but they aren't. That's another story that has more to do with the weakness of our selection and intake process than it does about the selfishness of the human race. Or maybe it's really a good mix of both?

Hmm.