The word “tradition” gets thrown around a lot, especially
among folks like me who hang out at church. Sometimes people like to talk about “traditional” versus
“contemporary” worship, or “traditional” versus “emergent” or “creative”
worship.
The words can function as helpful shorthand, but they also
create dichotomies. "Traditional”
is a tricky word. Sometimes when
we say “traditional,” what we really mean is “it looks like what I’m used
to.” Every once in a while,
someone will talk about what we do at St. Lydia’s as “non traditional” worship,
and I’ll note that our rituals are rooted in the earliest traditions of
the church. What we’re doing may
not look like Sunday morning in most of the United States, but it’s a practice
that dates back to the second century.
It’s really traditional.
On top of our traditions around worship, there are also
traditions around church culture: how we make decisions, how we organize
ourselves, how we’re structured.
There are vestries and councils and conferences and pastors and rectors
and elders and deacons and all the different ways we’ve come up with to be
church, to function as a body.
This too is part of “The Tradition,” and sometimes it works, and
sometimes it’s weighty.
A new-ish congregant and I were discussing all of this over
a beer in an outdoor café near Grand Central last night, and came up with a bit
of imagery that I found helpful.
I’m invested in St. Lydia’s doing something new while being in a deep and sustaining relationship with the larger church, and I
think these images can help us think about that.
Tradition is not a ball and chain that we’re trying to loose
ourselves of.
It is not a trap that we’re stuck in
or garbage that we’re trying to throw away.
Tradition is not a net that’s pinning us down,
or a weight that’s holding us back.
It’s also not necessarily a foundation that we’ve decided to
build on.
It’s not an object that we’re here to replicate.
We’re not building a factory where tradition will be
produced or fabricated.
It’s not an heirloom we’d like to pass down to a future
generation.
Rather, tradition is an ocean we are floating in.
We are held up by it, and informed by it,
effected by its nature and character,
drawn into its tides and currents.
Our job is to be buoyant,
to allow ourselves to float weightlessly in a vast sea of
heritage.
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