There’s almost nothing worse than finding yourself being abducted by a UFO packed full of aliens on the way to the golf course. You lose your tee time, it throws your day’s schedule completely out the window and makes you late for everything thereafter. You never know when they will finish their experiments and toss your amnesic body out in the middle of a New Mexico desert. It is a thing, you know.
But there is something even worse than a UFO abduction. And that is a Templar Priory being abducted by anything unrelated to our prime mission! In comparison, the alien abduction is only a minor inconvenience.
Therefore, fellow Templar, just what is our prime mission that we must protect at all costs?
We have adopted two of the original Templar missions:
- Protecting Christians at Risk, particularly in the Holy Land and the Middle East, and
- Keeping the Road to Jerusalem open to all people as our own.
These two objectives are at the top of the list of why we exist. Added to those are these four points of our strategy on the Templar Spiritual Battlefield:
- Seeking God in our lives and promoting love and respect for our community.
- Increasing understanding between religions, helping pilgrims visit holy places, and maintaining a Christian presence in the Holy Land.
- Supporting the poor, sick, and unjustly accused; standing against oppression; and protecting freedom of speech.
- Encouraging the noble ideals of Chivalry; and maintaining the monuments, archives, and history of the Knights Templar.
Each Priory of the Autonomous Grand Priory of the United States of America features these mission objectives not only on the front page of their website but also in the banner of our daily Plan of the Day! I submit these to you, Knights and Dames of The Temple Church, as a clear reminder of who we are and why we exist.
For nearly a millennium, we are and have always been a “Chivalrous Order” – seeking God in our lives and promoting love and respect for our community. Just as we are scrupulously guarding as Christians against being sidetracked by the designs of the enemy, we likewise are scrupulously guarding against being sidetracked as Templars, knowing that our enemy wants us to be busy doing anything but what we are actually called to do by these clear mission objectives and strategies!
And, finally, we must also be aware that when the alien craft drops down from the sky on its sketchy mission, that as true 21st-century Templars, our response must be both noble and chivalrous – and not accepting rides with strangers, not matter how cool their spaceship may be!