James Shaw - The Deadly Deception; Freemasonry Exposed by One of Its Top Leaders

Copyright 1988 by Tom C. McKenney

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Huntington House, Inc.

P. O. Box 53788, Lafayette, Louisiana 70505

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 88-081728 ISBN Number 0-910311-52-8

Printed in the United States of America

Freemasonry, sincerely entered into, is a search for light. Any knowledgeable Mason can tell you this. Yet, beneath the surface of this search for light, there is much more. This truth is seldom realized by the Masonic candidate. As a matter of fact, the vast majority of Masonic seekers are never aware that there is anything more available to them in Masonry, beyond what they see and hear in their Blue Lodge experience. Quite naturally, they settle for that.

Yet the very richness of meaning in the word light should tell us that in the light they seek there should be truth answers to deep questions. There should come revelations of the meaning of life, death and eternal things.

Very few Masons realize this and press on through the degrees and offices of Masonry and the writings of the Masonic philosophers in an unending search for enlightenment for intellectual and spiritual fulfillment.

Only a small number make that extra commitment that goes far beyond social and business motivations. They continue to work, study, seek and learn, climbing the mountain of Masonic knowledge, searching for that light in all its fullness.

Jim Shaw was such a man. He was not satisfied with social fulfillment or surface knowledge; he sensed the deeper, true meaning of that promised light and he sought it with all his heart, mind and strength. His ardent quest carried him through all the chairs of leadership in the Blue Lodge and the Scottish Rite, all the way to the House of the Temple in Washington, D. C. to the Thirty-Third and Last Degree and the position of Sovereign Grand Inspector General, Knight Commander of the House of the Temple of Solomon. There, at the top of the Masonic mountain, he broke through the clouds at last and found the full revelation, the true meaning of light and life. This is his story. Come and make that pilgrimage to Truth with him.

Tom C. McKenney
Mahon, Kentucky

My mother married for the second time when I was two years old. I was, of course, too young to understand that my father had deserted us when I was only a few months old. I have never seen him.

As time passed, my stepfather developed a growing dislike for me that I accepted as normal, having no knowledge or experience against which to judge life. He really loved my mother, I think, in his own imperfect way. But his resentment of me created problems for her almost from the start.

My Christian grandmother was a beloved and powerful influence in my life. She loved me. Our mutual love and her obvious dislike of my stepfather contributed to his ever-increasing hatred and rejection of me.

However my origin, my grandmother and our love for one another impacted on my problems at home, these took a giant leap for the worse with the birth of my little half-sister. It was only natural that my stepfather would favor her, which he definitely and obviously did. If there was anything remaining of our father-son relationship, it vanished with her coming.

After my little sister, three boys were born. With the coming of each one, my stepfathers life was increasingly fulfilled with his own babies. Simultaneously, I grew older, losing any little boy advantage with which I may have begun our relationship. I just became, obviously and completely, an unwanted, adolescent ugly duckling, an entirely unwelcome complication in his home.

Unpleasant as all this was for me, I accepted it. I had never known anything else. And I was busy. My stepfather had decreed I must work and support myself. So I did, beginning with my first newspaper route at age five. Soon I was buying all my own clothes, books and school supplies.

During elementary school I had a newspaper route which I delivered early in the morning before going to school and a second job working in the neighborhood drugstore after school. In the evenings I walked, doing my paper route collections, and selling extra papers up and down the streets. I kept up with my school work, worked at my jobs and stayed out of trouble except at home.

Things really didnt seem so bad. I just did what I had to do and thought my life was fairly normalexcept for one thing. The beatings I took from my stepfather didnt seem normal to me. They were frequent, whenever he could find the slightest excuseand they were nothing like the loving chastening a godly father should give his child. They were beatings. But I took them, not seeing any alternative, and made the best of things. I could cling to the belief that my mother and grandmother loved me. This was my life through the age of 12.

I was 13 the day I saw my stepfather hit my mother with his fist. I didn't take time to think. I just reacted in a reflex built way down deep inside my very nature. I jumped him, pulled him away from her, and a wild fight followed. Although he was much larger than I, and I was only a boy, I fought with the fury of a son rescuing his beloved mother, and with the pent-up anger of a lifetime of physical and emotional abuse. I fought him to the floor. He got up and left the house. Although I didnt realize it, this part of my life had come to an end.

The next afternoon, when I came home from working at the drugstore, my mother was waiting for me in the front yard. She was

crying. She stopped me short of the house and said, Jimmie, Joe says you must pack up and leave. He says he cant stand having you around here anymore, and you must go.

She was choking on the words. And as the reality of what I was hearing came into focus in my mind, weeping rose up within me and spilled over. We wept there, standing in the front yard, but this was something we both had to face. She now had four younger children besides me and a life she had to live.

As I shouldered my school books and what little clothing I had, my mother went on to say, Now, Jimmie, I want you to get a room near your work; and since you have been supporting yourself anyway, maybe it wont be too difficult for you. Jimmie, I want you to try to be a man. Try to be like your Uncle Irvin (her brother); he is a good man and a Mason. He goes to church and is good to his family and if you get to know him better maybe you can grow up to be a good man and a Mason like he is.

My mother knew nothing of what Freemasonry is but she knew her brother as a hard-working, church-going, good man.

My stepfather had forbidden that anyone in our family attend church services, saying that all the people in the churches were hypocrites. I believe that the fact that Uncle Irvin was an active member of the Methodist Church was the main reason my mother looked up to him. She wanted me to be like him. The seed that would later germinate, spring up, and grow to full fruit in ardent commitment to Freemasonry, taking me to its high levels of service and leadership, was planted.

Although I didnt realize it then, the course of much of my life already was set. But I wouldnt just become a good Mason like my Uncle Irvin; I would go far beyond him in the Craft, far, far beyond him, for it would become the center of knowledge, wisdom and religious fulfillment in my life.