Tradition and The Past

This week, the fine folks at Anglicans Online offer this reflection on tradition and the past:

We hear arguments that 'In the past we did it this way' or 'It should be done the way it has always been done'. The word 'Tradition' refers to the past.

The Past. But which past is The past? Last week? Last year? Your childhood? My childhood? The early years of my country? The year my favourite hymn was written? We've found that if we dive into a discussion with someone who wants 'to do things as they've always been done', and press for details about what they really mean, that 'always been' refers to that person's childhood, or memories of childhood. The hymns we sang when I was six years old. The flavour of incense that my parish used and the musty smell of the old wooden beams before they rotted out and had to be replaced with laminated composites. The feel of the rough wood on the back of the next pew. And those hymns and that musty smell are important, because they transport that person to a safe past kindly remembered.

We suspect that this is why someone pushing to return to the past in church is rarely interested in winding time backwards past his own childhood. Pushing for 'the old hymns' never means 'the really really old hymns', it means 'the hymns I sang when I was a child'. But since these feelings appear to involve reptilian memory and not conscious thought processes, it's not going to work to discuss or argue. So these disagreements, about what the parish and church and liturgy should be, are going to go on forever and are never going to be resolved. Sometimes these disagreements are fun, though, but they're not worth losing friends or alienating others.

Fortunately at King of Peace we are a mere six and a half years old. We don't yet suffer from that sort of preoccupation with the way we always did it. And yet, we also have a desire and perhaps an obligation to make sure that we are not so busy being up to date that we disconnect ourselves from the past. In fact, what we are trying to do is to forge a connection from The Ancient Traditions of the Christian Church to our contemporary times. It's not for nothing that our 43,000-marble mosaic floor is a design from 1201 or that our liturgy on Sunday uses contemporary translations of centuries old Christian liturgies.

The real goal for our congregation is not to connect us to the church of the 1950s or even the 1800s or the 300s. The goal is to connect ourselves to the Ancient of Days, our living God who is beyond time and to do so through the timeless traditions of the church adapted to our current, local setting.

We may not be an Episcopal Church as your grandparents knew it, but if there were no connection to the faith of our fathers and mothers, then we would have made a wrong turn somewhere. Right?

peace,
Frank+
The Rev. Frank Logue, Pastor