Tradition and traditions

One way of thinking of ‘tradition’ is this: a family lives its life as faithfully as it can and somehow that spreads to the next generation of children and grandchildren, often in ways that the older generations never expected.   This is Tradition, as distinct from traditions in the sense of customs and habits.   It’s like that with the Church.

The Church believes that God has never stopped acting in the lives of human beings and in their cultures.   The earliest Christians thought that God had been active in the culture of Greece and Rome and that signs of divine guidance could be found in the writings of people who didn’t know the God of Israel.

Sometimes this was controversial: Tertullian, one of the Fathers of the Church asked ‘What has Athens [pagan culture] to do with Jerusalem [Judeo/Christian culture]?’ But the Catholic tradition has always wanted to bring Athens and Jerusalem together so that our human culture might become a dwelling place of God’s word.   That is why the Church today is turning our attention to how Christianity relates to the culture in which we each live.

It is possible to think of two kinds of stages in human history: ‘times of habitation’ in which people feel at home in the world, with a clear sense of their place in the cosmos.   The other might be called ‘times of homelessness’ when people are uncertain about how their lives relate to a larger purpose.

We seem to be living today in a ‘time of homelessness.’ It’s nothing new of course; the Jewish people wandered homeless and doubting in the desert; early Christians were outsiders in the Roman Empire and Christ contrasted himself with foxes and birds in that he ‘had no place to lay his head.’ The Church too will always have a sense of having ‘no abiding city’ here.

Today, our culture is very uncertain about the reality of God and about its Christian roots; values have changed and we have a culture that seems to be increasingly resistant to religious faith.   God is missing, but not missed.   Many people are tired of Christianity’s message; religious words no longer resonate.

Yet we also see a growing interest in spiritual things.   Go into any bookshop and you will find a large section devoted to ‘Mind, Body, Spirit’ through which, sometimes strangely, people are trying to find a spiritual base for their life.

We are all affected by the culture around us.  Until Vatican II the Catholic Church seemed concerned solely with looking after its own and stressing the separation of other Churches.   Today, faithful to Scripture and Tradition, the Church wants to help a wider range of people make the Gospel present in the culture of our times.




Peter Knott SJ