SAVE THE DATE!
February 28 – March 2, 2025
Hurricane Milton swept through Florida in mid-October and forced us to have to move our Convent and Investiture to another date. After much deliberation by Temple Church’s Executive Committee, the date of the Spring 2025 C&I has been set and subsequently approved by our Grand leadership. It is now pinned on the GPUSA calendar. It will be held on the weekend of February 28 through March 2. The really great news is that hardly anything has changed! All of the places we had scheduled for the 12 October C&I are the same – Our hotel block, St. Stephen’s Retreat Center in Titusville as well as the formal Banquet at the John F. Kennedy Space Center! In the next week, we will release all the details, including links to register.
SPECIAL NOTE: If you have paid for the October event, those costs you have already paid minus processing charges such as credit card fees, will be applied!
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Time Displacement Orphan
As a sci-fi fan from long before my birth (LOL), I thoroughly engage with every time-traveling story I have ever encountered – from H.G. Wells classic, The Time Machine, to the many movies dedicated to this fantasy. Yet, no matter how exciting and engaging the plot is, the narrative flow of these stories always spectacularly fails the logic test in the end. Regardless of how carefully the tale is crafted, there is at least one (usually many) showstopping time travel paradox to be settled, no matter how well hidden by the author.
We each live lives ordered and mastered by time and time’s seemingly capricious nuances. Said songwriter George Michael, “Take me back in time, maybe I can forget, turn a different corner and we never would have met.” Just turning that insignificant corner seeded a new relationship and intertwined two lives that created a family sealed by love.
This family made others in their line and, in nearly a millennium, hundreds of lives were created resulting in countless millions of interactions with these people and all those whom they met over historic time. This single event created a chain reaction that helped to shape history’s flow and story, just by the seeming single coincidence of turning one single corner.
So what if you wake up one morning and discover that you are solemnly pledged to an identity and a deeply devout Christian family generated over 9 centuries in the past that you have never met, from cultures so radically different from yours that they may as well be alien? Still, you are, nonetheless, even today shouldering many of these progenerators’ same responsibilities from antiquity and strongly channeling their holy intent.
This is not at all a time travel paradox, but it is, in fact, a true dilemma of time displacement. We have awakened in our totally different world and accepted the distinctive essence of our long-dead forefathers. We are truly time-displacement orphans.
This isn’t about a trip through time – but it is, in fact, a mind trip of epic proportions!
Some members get around this as a non-issue, merely wearing the mantle of the Templar Order as a costume or a social rank-enabling device. But many solemnly pledged to God their word and were serious when they took their Oath to the Templar code. Therefore, living as a 21st-century Templar is, in fact, our perfect reality – exactly as it was our ancient forefathers’. In our time, it is just managed differently while fully preserving the identical seminal intent.
Yet, it is these men and women of true and deep honor who are sometimes beset by the reality of being time-displacement orphans of the 21st century. But, in this 21st century reality, that is not necessarily a dilemma!
The Christ of all Creation Whom we serve in this time-displacement venture has a unique characteristic that we draw upon. As time’s Creator, He is “outside” of time and not constrained by His creation. The Word declares, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today, and forever.” (Hebrews 13:8)
Thus, like the One Who commanded, christened, and ordered our mission has not changed, day-by-day our enemy never ceases to seek to destroy the Kingdom of God and “seize it by intrigue.” (Daniel 11:21) Jesus declared, “(The enemy) was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. Whenever he tells a lie, he speaks from his own nature, because he is a liar and the father of lies.” (John 8:44)
Thus, because of the enemy’s never-ceasing mission to destroy the Kingdom of God and God’s People, the plight of Christians in the Holy Land today is far worse than it has ever been – even during the time of the Templars of antiquity. We now stand in the ever-narrowing gap between their presence in the land of the Holy One and extinction.
Blinking back the anachronistic fog of current reality and the unrelenting echoes of another time, we stand – as we always have – with Templar resolve, with relentless courage, and ageless purpose. By the flawless sovereignty of our never-changing God, we trust that every corner turned in our lives has been ordained by the One Who made the timestream that frames His sovereign plans, and there is therefore no coincidence or meeting by chance.
In God’s perfect universe, we Templars still walk out on the battlefield, as we have for more than 900 years, prepared for the epochal struggle. Out here all things are seen with much greater clarity. There is never a paradox, never the illusion of displaced orphans, nor any uncertainty toward the eternal battle to which we have been assigned.
Here, on this field of honor, precisely like our forefathers in whose steps we trod, there is only the Cross of the martyr to which we aspire in a place and a time that truly has no beginning, ordered and framed by the One Who is, and has always been, the same yesterday, and today, and forever.