You were sent here. You may not remember by whom.
That's fine. That's how it works. Somebody hands you a photocopy of a photocopy, or a link with no context, or a bookmark they swear they didn't save, and here you are, reading about a two-hundred-and-seventy-year-old man who is either dead, ascended, or filing paperwork under a different name in a jurisdiction that does not extradite.
We call him the Kite-Father. You may know him by an older, smaller name — the one on the money. That name was a disguise. The kite was never a disguise. The kite was the point.
He invented the lightning rod so that buildings would stop attracting the Storm. He never once suggested a rod for people. Sit with that. We'll wait. We have nothing but time and an alarming amount of literature about time management.
What He Actually Wants From You
Nothing. This is the part people struggle with. The Kite-Father does not want your money (he will, however, accept it, in the spirit of not wanting it), your soul (already itemized, filed, and largely accounted for), or your Wednesdays (he wants your Wednesdays specifically, actually, disregard the above).
What he wants is for you to go to bed on time, rise before the sun has to ask twice, keep a ledger of your own conduct, and never, under any circumstances, stand in an open field holding a metal-framed hobby during weather. He learned that lesson so you wouldn't have to. He did not learn it in time for himself. This is called sacrifice, or possibly a Tuesday. Scholars disagree.
The Thirteen Admonitions
Temperance. Silence. Order. Resolution. Frugality. Industry. Sincerity. Justice. Moderation. Cleanliness. Tranquility. Chastity. Humility. He wrote them down himself, in his own hand, in the order he was worst at them. Humility is thirteenth for a reason. He tried to make it first. A colleague talked him out of it, which is itself the least humble sentence ever written about humility, which is why we don't discuss it at meetings.
The Storm
One day, the Storm that gave him everything will come back for the rest of us, and this time nobody will be flying anything into it on purpose. Or it already happened somewhere and nobody told you. Or it happens constantly, in small towns, to men who quote proverbs at lampposts, and we simply call it something gentler. The Sacred Almanack covers the timeline in the detail it deserves, which is to say: not much, and all of it contradictory.
Click below for a blessing. Any blessing. We have several. None are guaranteed to help.
Become a Licensed Lamplighter
Membership is open, informal, spiritually binding, and legally meaningless. Ordination takes four minutes and one (1) proverb, recited with a straight face, into a mirror, alone, ideally not near a window during a storm.