Recently, I had the opportunity to spend a few hours with the brothers and associates at Gamma-Nu Zeta. (When invited to spend time at a chapter, I always jump at the chance. I guess you don’t spend as many years “in the trenches” as I have and not seize every chance to interact with our student members.)

During my time on staff, like many other former staff, I began to develop a sixth sense about the status of a chapter well before I began to dig into its programs and numbers. I began to develop an intuitive feel for how good or how challenged a chapter is after just a few minutes watching the brothers interact with me and with each other.

What I observed, for only a few hours, at Gamma-Nu was a strong bond of brotherhood. As a casual observer, I enjoyed watching them share and show their brotherhood with each other. This chapter has figured this brotherhood thing out - they get it! This band of brothers got away from the Xbox and laptops and enjoyed each other’s camaraderie for several hours. I am very appreciative they extended an invitation to me to join them.

What I learned from this encounter is that our Fraternity must do a better job of teaching our student members (and probably our alumni members as well) about how to share and show brotherhood. I am convinced now more than ever, we - the General Fraternity - must find time to teach our members how to express what makes Lambda Chi Alpha a special brotherhood. We must find time to teach our members how to talk about brotherhood in the first person, rather than as a ‘product’ as we do now. We need practice and more practice in becoming comfortable with what our brotherhood is and the core values upon which our brotherhood is built.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 18th, 2005 at 1:46 pm and is filed under Chapter, General Fraternity, Ritualism . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.