Tradition. It's hard to think of a less stale word. A word that can't even be bitten into, tasted, much less savored. It's hard to think of word that is more safe, secure - but like the room of a child who doesn't want to venture forth into the world, or of a prisoner who can't. The word looms like a storm cloud or a falling piano, and we often pity or fear for those who live beneath its shadow. We feel as if it stands at the gates of our minds, monotonously commanding our words, "Abandon all hope, ye who would enter the world." (And often our words turn back, for they, stifled at an early age, had no hope to part with....) The word is brown and sluggish, it is black with death, and whitewashed thereafter.
But how, with a refracted tongue, the word cries out to us from the grave of a dead language! Oh, tradition whose long-lost twin is treason! For we receive both children from the Latin womb, traditus: the X-chromosome, trans- "over" and the Y, dare- "to give." Tradition, that which is handed down, is also that which is handed over. And there is no safety in this "over." It is not the "over" of hierarchy, or of perspective, but the dangerous "over" at the root of treason, transgression, trespass, transcendence. It moves! And as such, it risks, it has to risk, is has to continually be given over. It ever and always risks cessation and atrophy. Even the state of transparency depends on being able, with ever second and every atom, to cede way to the light which passes through. To hold that light, to keep it for the briefest of seconds, is to forfeit its very identity.
And so tradition is a moving noun, it is not merely that which is given over but the state, the motion, of giving over. To stop that movement is to lose the very thing you thought you possessed. It is the stilling of a waterfall in a photograph. What a precarious possession! For in focusing on that possession, in that now beautifully framed print, we have but a memory of, a memorial to, the grandeur we had witnessed (unless our gaze was ever only through the viewfinder - and then never witnessed, a view found but wholly lost!). And that photograph - tradition held - can be nothing but a memorial, for not only is it not the thing itself, but is a witnesses to its death, or at least, to its paralysis at our hands. (Even the best of photographers can only create the semblance, or better, the illusion, of motion.)
And so tradition is never ours, or only ours as we are its, that is, as we both receive it at the hands of others and then turn and give it over into the hands of others. But tradition is not a precious painting (or photograph...) being passed down a line of gloved officials! It is a child we run with, it is an old man who leads us to the most spectacular views, it is a parent who brings us in from the cold, it is a lover who leads us to bed. And in all these, there is a giving of one self to another, a sharing of one self - who one is, what one has - with another. And so in tradition, this is what we receive and what we must give. For part of the beauty and vitality that tradition can be - if we let it - is that not only is it alive itself, and thus gives itself ever over to us, but it also connects us with those around us as they give themselves to us and we give ourselves to other.
Tradition is grabbed with bare dirty hands, bloodied hands, crippled hands...if we let it be (and if the tradition itself has room, a pulse, for this), and if we have faith that this is not to its detriment, but to its growth, its fulfillment, its glorification. And so we hope that in giving it over into these hands and others that they and we may be taken up, glorified with it.
So maybe this is what faithfulness to tradition looks like. Not the gloved procession of a relic. No, we misjudge tradition if we take the thing itself to be that which is precious. What is precious is the communion of lives that tradition enables, no, necessitates. What exactly that communion will look like, however, is frighteningly as much in the hands of the tradition as it is in those who find themselves within that tradition. And so the matter of whose hands we take (and in taking, offer - no, more, entrust! - our lives and selves and the very life and self of "our" tradition) is very much a matter of what we make of not just our tradition, but of ourselves as we hope those selves to be (a hope, of course, shaped by that tradition, shaped in turn, of course, by ourselves).
Tradition need not kill or stifle. In fact, if it does, we have lost not only the tradition, but ourselves. Tradition is a giving over, not a holding over (as a punishment is held over a child in threat), nor a taking over (as an occupying force disrupts and abolishes the prior life of a land), nor a leaving over (as if we didn't want it anymore). It is a giving over, it is gift. And we only give tradition as we give ourselves, and so, the frightening and humbling realization solidifies: Tradition is only as life-giving...or as poisonous...as we who give it are.
And here the Christian, at least, can only hope in the Spirit, for she (should, need to, must) know herself to be the most poisonous of all. And so she hopes in the story of the cross, in which the life of Christ is extinguished by the world (a world she calls her own, her self), and yet a life which is raised by something beyond the world in order to transform the world. And so the Christian prayer for (in) Christian tradition (the life of Christ) is that God may both transform the poisons we find ourselves to be as we keep, no, as we give over, that tradition - that life! - and that God may yet work in the world despite - even through! - the poisons we yet find ourselves to be (and find because of that tradition, that life). It is the prayer that we may be given the grace to betray ourselves, to be guilty of treason of the highest order: that our allegiance (our heart, our life) may be found to lie beyond the boundaries we have ourselves so well and so carefully mapped out.
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