Often we're requested: write a foreword, but I beesech you, be short and simple.
That's like commissioning a murder in a regular spy story: be sure it's gonna be a quick and clean job.
On the other hand, wasn't Athena, the greek goddess of Wisdom and literature, a warrior goddess:? She is a Goddes who might kill, and iconographies portray Her carrying a shield, donning a helm, prying a spear. I'll do my best to be clean and quick but as far as being simple is concerned, alas a problem arises.
You can be as much simple as to get elemental, and you can get as much elemental as to be primitive, but upon treading this threshold there is no longer either a message left worth of being spread or an audience interested in heeding it.
You can't demand of an elaborated or meaningful message to wear not the sophisticated outfit which expresses it, exactly as Athena was a fully clothed Goddess, if not by paying the price of resigning the message itself.
 
Freemasonry is a complex world, which lives breaths and deals with an outer "profane" world that is complex and full of drama, and upon such waters the banal solutions do no good, for they solve no issue.
Where would a modern world be landed, if we would have abided by the criterion of the highest possible simplification? How could have evolved a liberal market in the anglo saxon sense, if the political leaderships would have prescribed the IBM: beware, keep it simple.
When between us and the Almighty only this water is left, the simplest solution is to drown. And when trudging headlong the battlefield, sieged by enemy forces, appears no longer possible, the simplest solution is to give up and die all together.
 

a Georges de la Tour painting: Mary meditates before a skull (1620)

Thereby this is the very first thing a newly initiated Brother should be told: it would be meaningless entering Freemasonry, if you're expecting an environment where the same bias and the same commonplace as the profane world would be enacted and revered here too.
If you are a freemason, you are a freemason exactly insofar as you're done with the "simple" solution: it means you have turned all of them over, forever.
This is what every religion meant when saying: give up vice: give up the simple solutions, for as Gospels preach you need to enter a very narrow path to attain celestial manhood.
Do you remember what you saw written in the vault of the crypt where you where alone, buried before the simplest thing of the world, a skull?
 
When my mother died I asked the priest to read an excerpt from the Book of Qoelet. Once again, it is not really short, but it does is very beautiful. Be patient.

«In the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thine hand: for thou knowest not whether shall prosper, either this or that, or whether they both shall be alike good. (...)
Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them;
While the sun, or the light, or the moon, or the stars, be not darkened, nor the clouds return after the rain:
In the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease because they are few, and those that look out of the windows be darkened,
And the doors shall be shut in the streets, when the sound of the grinding is low, and he shall rise up at the voice of the bird, and all the daughters of music shall be brought low;
Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets:
Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern.
Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it. »
[Ecclesiastes Book, chapter 12]

Thus, beloved new Brother, I want to spur you: develop a new body and a new conscience, even more, much more keenly aware of the sufferings that need to be alleviated, and of the manifold problems that are out there in the world and cry to be solved: for such, and such alone, is the purpose Freemasonry got constituted for: a Host, a Army of concealed, demure men, voted to the good.
Do not live masonry passively! Look, you are just arrived - and you are already out of time!
 
In a fascinating essay our Brother F. wrote two years ago, he stated: "Luckily enough, Freemasonry is not its freemasons".
Dear Brother who just got initiated, do not feel disappointed if by chance you were to find Brothers that do not match the idea of Masonry you entertain: keep your gaze fixed upon Freemasonry, not upon Freemasons: upon what Freemasonry is in Its symbolic Majesty and Imperium, for it is only before it and before your conscience that you're to be held accountable, and it is only towards these that you bound yourself with your Oath; as our Brother C. said to me a few days before I myself got initiated: "Remember that Freemasonry is not a void dream, for it means you - you yourself".
 
You're now just an Entered Apprentice: just the first of -maybe- 33 degrees.
Do not waver. Do not wait for being raised to any miraculous and messianic degree. Such thing deosn't exist.
Whatever masonry is going to be or not to be to you, whatever it can give to you or deny to you, whatever it may mean to you as far as gratifications or delusions are involved, these are all things that do not depend upon what Freemasonry is or is not, would or wouldn't be, but they are all things that would depend in their entirety upon how you, you yourself, will interpret and impersonate Freemasonry. This stage is made of actors, not of scripts.
Freemasonry, that is like a stupendous machine: you sit inside it and you see its wheels, its gleaming chromes, its tout wires; by the switchboard of the commands you can guess its inner, roaring power; and after a moment of consideration you may say: "nice machine, but it doesn't move".
Be learned that this machine is made in such a way, that it will never move if you won't kindle, ignite drive and lead it.
 
Therefore do consider that there exists no thing whatsoever that you, as an Entered Apprentice, could not do and that conversely only as a Master Mason you would be allowed to do: for what you're not ready to undergo and to do as an Entered Apprentice, is the very same thing which you won't as a Master Mason; because it is not the degree which ennobles the man, but it is the man who provides the degree and with life and with meaning and with all the nobility.
So do not hesitate: you're already out of time, and every minute that goes by without your personal intervention, is a minute that carries away another victim.
 
And do not linger idle, mulling whether Freemasonry may deserve or may not deserve the earnest work of your arms.
A german writer, Karl Jaspers, thinking over the nazi fascist catastrophe and the just lost war and the veterans and the enormous weight that the feeling of being guilty saddled the whole of Europe with, wrote: "Our guilt, is of being still alive".
 
Dearest Brother, you have to know that the only solution to this riddle is that we do strive to deserve such honour. Let's deserve of being still alive we ourselves in the first place, in the Presence of all the diresome sacrifices that have been weathered and endured so that we can be still free, and gathered here to-day to signify our joy because the Great Architect of the Universe has donated us a new Brother!
 
It doesn't matter whether the profane world, so enlaced and entwined with grief but also with crass cowardice and gross ignorance, may deserve or may not deserve your efforts.
The truth is that if only one person dithers away amidst indifference and inaction, if only one person is or becomes poorer, we all are poorer immediately, for we're all on the same boat economically, sociologically, humanly, symbolically, and politically.
 
So always remember to work for the commonwealth, envisioning all matters with the widest possible compass, giving up the simple solution, giving up particularism, fears, pettiness.
You are a Freemason!
Think, project and fight only for Eternity, and do not settle down for anything less - although being fully and perfectly aware that it might be pointless, or you may occasionally fail: be sure you get prodded and exalted and not inhibited by this feeling of inutility and precariousness.
 
For you must know that in less than five minutes, we're all dead men.