FREEDOM. . .

Who can forget the scene in the movie Braveheart when William Wallace (Mel Gibson) cries out "They can take our lives but they'll never take our FREEDOM!"  In tormented voice, he ends the movie with the same word, "Freedom!"  It was an iconic moment in 1995 and remains so.  It has been romanticized and revoiced into the 21st century ethos of gender choice, sexual desire, and ever other life defining decision that we want to make or insist upon making for ourselves.  But, alas, freedom is not the real mark of humanity or the most noble expression of our humanity.  There are others.  The quality of mercy is one.  What separates humans from animals is the choice to have mercy, forgiving, forgetting, restoring, and renewing ourselves and our lives together by refusing to take full advantage of freedom.  Self-denial is another.  The most profound freedom does not demand but willingly sacrifices of self for the sake of another -- be that other familiar or stranger.  The cost of love is often that very freedom.

There is another character to our humanity that is self-defining.  That is our refusal to live in the moment.  Yes, you heard me right.  The refusal to live so fully in the moment that we ignore all who came before and live oblivious to those who would follow us.  GK Chesterton said it "Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.."   Jaroslav Pelikan put it this way:  "Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living."  Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., had this to say:  "Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response."  And then W. Somerset Maugham, "Tradition is a guide and not a jailer."

Your definition of yourself is hardly the bedrock of our humanity but our ability to remember, to recall, to honor that memory, to learn from it, and to pass it on.  That is humanity -- except where we have lost so much of our humanity that we no longer know who we are at all.  Dorothy Day accurately diagnoses the ills of modernity:  "Tradition! We scarcely know the word anymore. We are afraid to be either proud of our ancestors or ashamed of them. We scorn nobility in name and in fact. We cling to a bourgeois mediocrity which would make it appear we are all Americans, made in the image and likeness of George Washington."  None of us can go back but that does not mean we cannot look back into what was in order to better know today and prepare for the future.  The call to tradition is not to be custodians of ashes and cold coals but to tend to the very flame and fire that will warm our present and enlighten our future.

 

What we draw from our past is not the useless information that so dominates our present.  No, what we draw from the past is an appreciation for that information and framework in which to interpret and apply the facts and figures that can be reduced to mere numbers so that they speak in words.  In the same way, Christianity is nothing apart from the past but it is not a simple record of what was.  Its tense always speaks of that which has not only continuing significance but power to mark what is to come.  We confess the faith that is not a testimony of what was but of what is and what is to come because of what was.  If God is the One who was, who is, and who is to come, only the tradition of this God can possibly hope to open a door by which we can enter the future and carry with us the living legacy of those who went before us.  So we add our voices to those who went before, confessing the creed in ancient words that have present and future impact and praying with the saints to the God who is not encumbered by the crass division of past, present, and future.  

 

We are at our best as people when we live within that living tradition passed on to us to be passed down through us.  The voices that scream "Freedom!" are shrill and unpleasant because they would abandon the wisdom of our fathers for the foolish whims of the present or the untested plans of tomorrow.  Indeed, the only anchor in our human is tradition -- the living tradition of Christ and those who live in Him and therefore with Him forevermore.  The Gospel of Christianity is not the gift to define yourself without knowledge or credit to those who went before you and without regard for those who will come after, but to be defined by the ever-living Gospel of Christ and Him crucified.  In this Christianity there is no such thing as instant catechesis or quick holiness or spontaneous prayer.  For some this is a bad thing but for the wise this is the most comforting thing of all.  

God said it this way:  "Therefore, brethren, stand fast and hold the traditions which you were taught, whether by word or our epistle. Now may our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, and our God and Father, who has loved us and given us everlasting consolation and good hope by grace, comfort your hearts and establish you in every good word and work." (2Th 2:15-17)  "Those who leave the tradition of truth do not escape into something which we call Freedom. They only escape into something else, which we call Fashion." as Chesterton put it.