I have issues with tradition.
Take, for example, the last political event you watched on CNN or CSPAN…an inauguration, for example, or some other pomp and circumstance thing like that. Have you noticed how steeped in tradition that stuff is? That may be a huge reason I hate politics so much…well, that and the fact that it’s composed of people lying professionally, but I suppose that’s a different topic in and of itself.
Church ceremonies are just as bad…heavily liturgical ceremonies drive me insane, because it’s just repitition Sunday after Sunday. A lot of churches aren’t liturgical, but are trapped in an outdated way of functioning because “my parents did it this way, and now so do I.”
How about weddings (drawing from an argument I had with my fiance in the recent past)? Think about how much stuff goes on during a wedding ceremony that’s just…well, pointless? Or graduations. My fiance graduated with her master’s degree last month. I was enormously proud of her, but the ritual and ceremony of the whole thing left me willing to cut off my left arm to get out of there. What did it all mean????
That’s the crux of the problem, I think. A tradition is worthless as soon as it stops symbolizing something. If we can’t remember why we’re doing something a certain way, then we should stop doing it that way and try something new. We’re crippled as human beings, because we always find ourselves lulled into a comfort zone with tradition, with ritual…empty actions that make us feel as though we’re accomplishing something. This makes church tradition particularly dangerous. How horrible would it be to think that we were connecting with God through empty rituals, only to discover that we never connected with Him at all, that the entire time we thought we were moving we were, in fact, spiritually paralyzed.
I fear we may.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about symbolic elements. I took communion this week, but I knew what I was doing with it, what I was remembering, what it symbolized. That takes it out of the realm of tradition and into the active realm of the present. Baptism is similar, if you know what it’s symbolizing, and what you’re symbolizing by doing it. If you don’t, and you’re relying on it to have some miraculous effect when you don’t even know what it means, then it’s worthless. Save your energy.
We’ve incorporated things into our wedding ceremony (another word I hate…ceremony), but we know what those things mean, what they symbolize, what we’re (in effect) saying when we do them. If not, we would have cut them. We have cut a lot of things, because they were pointless. Pointless, but traditional, because people thrive on tradition. Tradition and ceremony fill us with a false sense of security and accomplishment.
We think we’ve accomplished something meaningful by sitting through a ridiculously long graduation ceremony, when in fact the piece of paper that is mailed to us is the real accomplishment…all we’ve done is waste a Saturday morning.
We think something meaningful has happened when a certain candle or set of words is repeated at a wedding, when in fact we have no idea why just lit the candles or said the phrase. We’ve wasted our time, but feel secure in the fact that it sounds or looks cool.
We think we’ve connected with God by repeating words or singing doxologies or kneeling and rising at certain times, when in fact we have no idea why we’ve just done what we’ve done. We’ve wasted our time. Worse, we’ve wasted His. He would much rather have us just be open and honest and talk to Him, instead of engaging in ceremonial mish-mash.
Our culture is a surface one. As long as it looks good, then we’ll look over the fact that there’s no substance. Hence tradition and ceremony. We want to feel like we’ve accomplished something, even though we haven’t. Then we rely on that feeling of accomplishment and security to fill a void in our lives that remains empty. And we just can’t figure out why. We desperately want to feel secure, and to accomplish something. Instead of actually doing it, though, we settle for looking like we’ve done it. We allow ourselves to be consoled by shifting shades of the past that have no content beyond an aesthetic value. We allow ourselves to be comforted.
Whoever said we should be?