Well, I can tell you what it isn’t – according to Helmut Schmidt (former Bundeskanzler in West Germany) in his wonderful book Ausser Dienst. He says this on page 28 of the German edition:
Tradition ist etwas Wichtiges, aber es ist nicht der Hauptzweck des Lebens. (Tradition is something important, but it isn’t the main purpose of life.)
He is actually talking about the tradition he inherited when he left public office and moved into publishing with the great German newspaper, Die ZEIT. But his comments put very succinctly something that bugs me and has done for a very long time.
I grew up in a Baptist church in Liverpool. (Obviously, I grew up in a house with my family, but you know what I mean.) We prided ourselves on having no regard for tradition or liturgy … like those Anglicans down the road who probably weren’t Christians anyway.
But, of course, we did have traditions – inherited ones we revered and assumed to be sacrosanct. They had to do with particular theologies, particular ways of reading the Bible and understanding history and the church. And we did have liturgies … well, just one, really. Every service was the same-ish in the journey on which it took us and it was not hard to predict who would do what in which order and using which words.
Human beings are by nature traditional. We build today on what and whom have gone before us. We make unconscious assumptions about what we regard as essential, useful and desireable in life and they become part of the ‘backstory’ that gives us our identity now.
So, I don’t have a problem with traditions or how to maintain them when they are worth maintaining. I do have a real problem, however, with the sort of people and churches who claim not to have traditions (or ‘be traditional’) or who pretend not to be ‘liturgical’ when it takes only ten minutes of being in a service to work out what actually is going on, who is in control and what the likely future journey will be.
Just admit it: we are liturgical and traditional beings. No shame in being honest about the human condition.
September 29, 2009 at 8:11 am
Do the traditions we hold dear help us or hinder us in our work? How do they equip us for dealing with and healing the world? Tradition can be comforting and comfortable but I feel it should not make us too complacent. I am also very wary of people asserting authority based on tradition. Tradition can be useful and beautiful but it is not automatically correct in and of itself. I find that replacing the word “tradition” with the word “habit” takes some of the perceived weight out of these arguments.
Do we have the honesty and open-mindedness to recognise that others’ traditions in worship and in life may help them to do their work, even if we don’t easily relate to those traditions?
Do we have the courage to examine our own traditions for what they are and change them if appropriate or adhere to them faithfully even if they are difficult? When is it appropriate to discard or change a tradition? When we feel a tradition is alien or irrelevant, is that a sign that it should be abandoned, a sign that it should be developed into something more useful, or a sign that we need to engage with and maintain some sort of continuity with our past?
(When did I start saying “we” when talking about the church? Oh dear…)
September 29, 2009 at 8:54 am
thank you, these thoughts really resonate with me as another one who grew up in the Baptist church, in Teddington, SW London in my case, but I bet the “liturgy” wasn’t too different from yours! Even as a teenager back then I could see that the arguments that we were “better” because we had no set service were rather spurious as the service may not have been written down but was still the same week by week. I love the acknowledgement here that we are traditional people, tradition and liturgy does not equal dry & dusty – I find myself in a bit of a battle trying to communicate that sometimes.
September 29, 2009 at 9:25 pm
On a bit of a tangent but…
Lunchtime on Radio 4 today was a phone-in discussion about oragnised religion and the folowing occurred to me,
Put two people in a room together, they believe similar things, they discover they have the same spiritual practice so they decide to do it together. What do you get? An organised religion! And (in light of what you have just said) If they do it for a year they have a religious tradition!
September 29, 2009 at 10:46 pm
Gareth, I was asked to take part in that phone-in, but I am at (another) conference and couldn’t do it. But what you say is true and applies beyond the church. Dismantle a political structure (Communism in Eastern Europe, for example) and you are not left with a vacuum, but with another set of institutions/structures based on a different way of being. Tradition is a phenomenon, not a choice; which is to say, you can’t not have a tradition which shapes who and how you are.
October 13, 2009 at 5:44 pm
The concept of purpose has fascinated me for a long time. It seems to be an innate understanding emanating from our deepest core – there are actions we are meant to take, impact we are meant to leave on others, meaning we are destined to comprehend. It seems to me that purpose is a grand cosmic endeavor with many facets. Walking a path of seeking purpose leads to enlightenment on many levels to the elusive ultimate purpose – which perhaps might be as simple as to leave this planet a little better off than when we entered it.
Most organized religions, in my view, tend to obscure purpose with an unfailing demand for conformity. While the liturgical and traditional nature of human beings may be inescapable, there are many who have declined to conform to the dominant thought that access to God requires a middle-man as many organized religions would have us believe. We therefore question traditions and rituals and ask the intelligent question – Is this what I really believe or was I taught to believe it?
Which is where – I think – purpose enters the picture. Those seeking such profound answers are bound to question the traditions upon which their beliefs lay.