Convention vs. Tradition (Midweek Message)

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

Convention vs. Tradition

May 31, 2017

There are pitfalls aplenty for any person who would cultivate virtue and avoid vice.  Jesus’ critique of the corrupted religious establishment of his day is summed up in the single word “hypocrites.”  Buddhist darhma teaching discusses the corruption of virtues into vices with its idea of “far enemies” and “near enemies.”  Each virtue has its polar opposite, but also an opposite that mimics but falsifies the virtue. Love has as its polar opposite, hatred or ill-will.  Its near enemy, looking like love but at heart distorted is selfish attachment, the so-called “love” that seeks to control and establish dependence.  Compassion’s opposite is cruelty; its near enemy, condescending and demeaning pity. 

Trappist monk Thomas Merton applies this distinction to Christian monastic and worship experience this way:

“We must carefully distinguish between tradition and convention… Convention and tradition may seem on the surface to be much the same thing.  But the superficial resemblance only makes conventionalism all the more harmful.  In actual fact, conventions are the death of real tradition as they are of all real life.  They are parasites which attach themselves to the living organism of tradition and devour all its reality, turning it into a hollow formality.  Tradition is living and active, but convention is passive and dead.  Tradition does not form us automatically:  we have to work to understand it.  Convention is accepted passively, as a matter of routine.  Therefore convention easily becomes an invasion of reality.  It offers us only pretended ways of solving the problems of living—a system of gestures and formalities. Tradition really teaches us to live and shows us how to take full responsibility for our own lives.  Thus tradition is often flatly opposed to what is ordinary, to what is mere routine.  But convention, which is a mere repetition of familiar routines, follows the line of least resistance.”  (No Man is an Island)

In a liturgical church like ours, we daily are faced with the question of how to breathe life and fervency into prayers and forms that we have received through the ages. It is easy to go through the movements only, think ourselves “traditional” and “orthodox,” but this is the near enemy of those very virtues.   It is also a temptation to tire of what we have received, and simply go off in the search for attractive and exciting “new” forms of worship.  This is the polar opposite of tradition.

In our worship as in all things, we must seek the genuine article and learn to identify its cheap destructive imitation or its sworn enemy.  It is important to rid ourselves of delusion and self-congratulatory images of how good, or kind, virtuous, traditional, or innovative  we are.  We likewise should eschew images of how mean, loathsome, wicked, heretical, or trendy we are.   The standard should always be the truth that Jesus calls us to, and where our choices and actions are leading. 

Grace and peace. 

--Fr. Tony+