We have a few short news items for the members this March:

Initiations
If you didn’t know already, we are now authorized to do Pronaos initiations. This is an essential ritual for members, and you must apply for it after attending three Pronaos meetings.  A Pronaos initiation teaches you how to ritually behave in a Pronaos, what the rules are, and what a lot of the symbolism means.   The Pronaos initiation is quite different from a degree initiation, which can only be done at a Lodge. This ritual solidifies your relationship to the local group and helps strengthen your bond with the egregore, or spiritual and energic collective, of our group.

In the Rosicrucian New Year, you will learn more about our vision to rebuild the local group (which used to be a Lodge) and elevate it from a Pronaos to a Chapter. Remember that in AMORC there are levels of local affiliated bodies: a discussion group, a Pronaos, a Chapter, and a Lodge. As the groups get larger the rituals, ceremonies and authorities invested in them (and their capacity to help members) grow and become more beautiful and meaningful.

The first step in moving to the next level for the Pronaos is for more members to attend convocation and undergo initiation.  We need 30 regularly attending members, and at the moment we have 14.  We have over 130 members who live all over Oregon and another 30 or so who live in Southern Washington, conveniently close to the Portland meeting place, so this is a very possible vision.

If you have attended three convocations, and request the initiation by email, we will initiate you within 30 days. Please consider it.

Volunteers Needed to help plan Karen Wark’s Alchemy Workshop
We’re excited to announce that Grand Lodge Soror Karen Wark, Ph.D. will be leading an alchemy workshop for us in Portland this November. This will be a wonderful exploration of the history, philosophy, and techniques of the tradition. You can hear Karen talking about Alchemy on this AMORC podcast.

We need to start organizing this workshop now and need three or four volunteers. Some of this work can be done remotely, so you don’t have to live in the upper Willamette Valley to help. We hope you can take advantage of this excellent opportunity to serve the Order and send us an email if you are willing and eager, using the “contact us” link in the next paragraph.

Postcards
We are no longer sending out meeting reminder postcards in the mail. Last year we began to offer the Pronaos initiations, which means that the scheduling of convocations changes at short notice. The schedules we printed up became inaccurate by the time the postcards arrived in your mailboxes. We have also found by our survey that the postcards are labor intensive, costly and an inefficient outreach tool.  If you wish to receive additional notifications and reminders, contact us. You can also sign up for our text alerts by clicking the link and giving us your mobile phone number. Follow this blog and our Facebook page for the most up to date news.

New Email Format
We are now sending out our emails to all members in Oregon and Washington once a month. The emails will tease news and content that is posted at length on this blog. We will no longer be sending out a mid-month email to remind members about convocation on the fourth Sunday of each month.

Email us at oregon@amorc.rosicrucian.org