ORDO FRATRVM
B.V. MARIAE DE MONTE CARMELO CAPITVLVM GENERALE CARMELITARVM MMXIX
12 September 2019
1. Tradition
Then the LORD said [to Elijah]: “Go out and stand on
the mountain before the face of the LORD. Behold the LORD is about to pass.”
And there was a great and powerful wind, rending the mountains and shattering
the rocks before the face of the LORD. But the LORD was not in the wind. After
the wind, there was an earthquake. But the LORD was not in the earthquake.
After the earthquake, there was fire. But the LORD was not in the fire. And
after the fire, the sound of a faint whisper. (1 K 19:11-12)
One of the great paradoxes of the spiritual life is
that the God whom we seek is present to the world of space and time precisely
by being absent from it. God’s presence is through a perceptible absence. God
is not in the world as a discernible object, but as a presence as close to
nothing as we can conceive. As Elijah’s vision at Horeb indicates, the presence
of God seems to be no more than the sound of a faint whisper. It is silence.
Real yet subtle beyond our imagining. Even while we can affirm God’s agency in
the world we are baffled by the fact that God is not-a-thing, not a thing
alongside other things, but a reality that is utterly other. Whatever we say
about God is necessarily trite and without foundation, yet it is this
experience of the density of God’s absence which kindles the desire that is the
driving force of every spiritual journey.
The marketing of such “an unknown God”, as Saint
Paul quickly discovered, is not easy. The alternatives are atheism or some form
of idolatry. The lurking temptation to make contact with other more accessible
deities is ever-present, and gods of our own creation are usually more amenable
to our ways of thinking and acting. But manufactured religion (ethelothreskia
– Col 2:23) has no transcendent component; it can be only a variant of
social conditioning. Because the divine nature is directly unknowable – even if
God’s existence is postulated – it would seem that human beings are limited to
an effectively godless existence.
Then came the surprise. God spoke. God’s
self-revelation. In various ways God addressed patriarchs and prophets, and as
the centuries passed we received the gift of authoritative instruction in the
things of God (torah). Furthermore, we were admonished by saints and
sages to find the vestiges of God even in the opacity of the created world.
Then, in the fullness of time, God sent the Son, born of a woman. In him the
fullness of the Godhead resided, so that by his becoming human we might become
divine.
Christ, as the site of God’s definitive
self-revelation, is the portal by which we are able to make contact with the
spiritual world and, thereby, with the God who dwells in inaccessible light.
This ongoing revelation is living and active; it is not inert. It is the means
by which God’s agency in the world continues to be accomplished. It is the
means by which eternal life – which comes from contact with the divine – is
transmitted. Christ as the source of eternal life transmits it to us through
human mediation: the proclamation of the Good News, the sacraments, the life-giving
communion which is the Church.
And there you have a description of tradition – one
that goes beyond sociology and cultural anthropology and views it in terms of
theology and metaphysics. It is the transmission of life. Eternal life.
1. Tradition
“[Elisha] picked up the cloak which had fallen from
Elijah and returned to stand on the bank of the Jordan. There he struck the
water with Elijah’s cloak, saying ‘Where is the LORD, the God of Elijah?’’’ (2
K 2:13-14)
Tradition is often misunderstood as a stodgy
reality, referring to the conservation of the past and, thereby, resistance to
the present and an indifference to the future. The form of the word contradicts
this reading. The suffix –itio in traditio indicates that it is a
process. It is closer to a verb than a noun. Properly traditio refers to
the act of handing on something to another, rather than the thing that is being
transmitted. Tradition is alive as long as it is being passed on from one
generation to the next. Far from being static, it is an ever-flowing
Heraclitean river.1
But there is a catch. The verb tradere means
not only “to hand on” but also “to betray”. Ironically, what is handed on is
inevitably changed. The act of reception modifies what is received. This is the
presupposition of the “telephone game” (téléphone arabe), sometimes
called “Chinese whispers” (Chinesiches Flüstern). It is impossible to
receive a message and to pass it on without adding to it something of oneself.
So far from being a museum-keeper’s climate-controlled sterility, tradition
promotes preservation by replicating itself in a variety of forms, each version
drawing sustenance from its own unique and particular environment.
There are, therefore, two false notions of
tradition. One is to identify it with a fixed and unchanging deposit – of
beliefs, values or practices – which serves as a permanent criterion of
orthodoxy. The other is to view it within the nineteenth-century mentality of
continuing.
progress; every onward step is an improvement which
makes the past redundant. The reality comes somewhere within this polarity.
Tradition remains itself by constantly changing. It is ever new, yet it loses
nothing of what it was.
Tradition is a process of ongoing re-formation of
whatever is received in accordance the emergent situation. Re-formation is not
an occasional necessity; it is an integral component of the process. The shape
of this re-formation is not determined exclusively by what has previously
existed; it is a response to new challenges. Taking the Good News beyond the
ambit of the lost sheep of the house of Israel inevitably meant that the Gospel
would be modified in the process. There are today thousands of ways to embody
the beliefs and values of the Gospel, differentiated by their geography and by
their individual cultural pathways through the centuries. The self-revelation
of God has produced an almost-infinite variety of resonances is the hearts of
human beings that collectively testify to the unfathomable richness of the
divine entity.
This principle is exemplified in the different
traditions of Gospel living that are associated with the various religious
orders that have sprung up in response to what Vatican II famously termed “the
signs of the times”. We can, if we are so inclined, trace the genealogy of
these traditions, noting how through different concatenations of circumstances
a single stream of tradition is repeatedly re-formed.2 Many of these
re-formations imagine themselves as the recovery of the original and authentic
tradition that had been lost or deformed over the course of time. But, in every
case, it is something new that is emerging. And, of course, traditions are
often deformed in the course of re-formation – that is why the history of so
many of the older religious orders is punctuated by spasms of reform.
The Second Vatican Council summarily described the
task of the renewal of religious life as returning to the sources and responding
to the signs of the times. The key word is, of course, “and”. One or other of
these courses of action is no more than moderately challenging; to pursue both
objectives simultaneously is much more demanding. Within the ranks of those who
follow particular traditions there have always been some who hanker after
returning to the past and others who want to leave it behind and precipitate
themselves into the present. And this requires – to use another much-favoured
ideal of Vatican II – dialogue. Otherwise, the result is polarisation and
sometimes division between what might be termed “conservative” and
“progressive”. In such situations, the wisdom of the well-known saying of Hegel
is often forgotten. "Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts
between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights." Two
rights often make a wrong.
At the heart of this dilemma is the issue of
hermeneutics. Is the tradition being read correctly and dynamically or is it
being seen as something fixed and immovable – on the one hand to be embraced,
on the other to be rejected? The interpretation of a spiritual patrimony is not
governed by the same norms as the juridical reading of legislative texts. There
is a kind of family access that allows those who have long lived according to
the beliefs and values embodied in the tradition, intuitively to contextualise
what is written and to grasp its meaning in their own very different situation.
There is the possibility, as Hans-Georg Gadamer pointed out, of a “fusion of
horizons” (Horizonverschmelzung) which is the prerequisite for arriving
at a common language that permits dialogue.3
To engage
with our spiritual tradition we need the fundamental openness of a listener4 that
permits “uninterrupted listening”,5 and this presupposes that, in approaching
the text, we are “radically undogmatic”.6 I accept that in coming to the
tradition for guidance I will encounter “some things that are against myself”.7
Previous internalisation of the beliefs and values of the tradition is not
meant as a defence against change, but as a point of departure for a new
expression of ancient truths in which the enhanced sensitivity of the committed
reader plays a necessary and creative role.
We
must not lose sight of the theological component in spiritual traditions. The
tradition of a religious order is one expression of ecclesial tradition, one
channel by which the out-pouring of God’s self-revelation flows into us. Our
participation in a tradition – and not merely our reception of it – is a source
of life. It is a means by which the life of Christ flows into us and enables us
to live at a level otherwise impossible. Consider your call. Was not our
experience of vocation a perception of a path leading to more abundant life? It
opened out before us as a means of access to the spiritual world, which we
could accept or decline. It was more than a career-choice. We experienced it as
the call of Christ not greatly dissimilar to the call of Simon the fisherman,
or Matthew the tax-collector, or the rich man who went away sadder.
Our corporate sense of being called by Christ is the
hermeneutical key to understanding our tradition. We approach our patrimony
with the desire to understand what it is to which we are called – today. Not
yesterday. “If today you hear God’s voice…” I suppose that what is operating
here is the grace of communion which energises those who give it admittance,
not only to ensure that the tradition is alive but to aspire to make it lively.
This means that we who participate in a tradition are obliged to allow that
tradition continually to work its magic on us. With one hand we receive from
the past, we make it our own and, with the other hand, we pass it on to the
future. This particular lifeline by which God acts in self-revelation and
self-communication is kept alive by human mediation. That is, by us. By
continuing the tradition we become instruments in God’s work of sanctification.
The communion of saints is imaged in the New
Testament as the Body of Christ – a body in which the different members are
functionally distinct. This means that there is no ground for comparison
between the relative value of one against another. “The eye cannot say to the
hand, ‘I do not need you’.” Within the universal call to holiness there are
distinct vocations, each contributing to the divine master-plan. And we have to
admit that no matter how much we labour over our vision statements and mission
statements, we do not really know with much clarity exactly what is our ongoing
role in the universal scheme of things. As a result, we often misjudge what is
happening around us as we pass through necessary but unwelcome periods of
transition. Nothing remains the same for long. Religious orders typically pass
through alternating seasons of expansion and contraction. What we often fail to
understand is that the driving forces of growth are often the lessons learned
during diminishment.
In particular, we tend to be overly negative in
assessing the potential inherent in the present situation. This is a convenient
excuse for luxuriating in our lack of prospects and sinking into
purposelessness, tending the fire sufficiently to keep ourselves warm, but
lacking any missionary zeal to allow it to flourish. Many of us feel inclined
to exclaim with Cicero, O tempora! O mores! We look around at problems
and divisions within the Church, at the disheartedness of so many religious
because of reduced numbers and diminishing vitality. We find rising in our
hearts what may be termed the mantra of despair. “If only.” If only the pool of
potential recruits were larger. If only we had more candidates. If only more of
those that enter persevere. If only our leadership were more dynamic… To which
God may well reply, “There are still seven thousand who have not bowed their
knee to Baal.”
Too often we are held back from the good we can do
by what Jean Baudrillard has termed “eclectic nostalgia”.8 We are tyrannised by
our selective memories of what it used to be like, as though the exuberance
many orders experienced during the 1950s, or in the nineteenth century, were
normative. We are sent to interact with our own time and culture, whatever that
may be now, and whatever it may be in the process of becoming. This is why
tradition is alive; it draws its energy from the real world, which it views as
an exciting complex of brand new challenges. The athleticism with which
tradition has responded to change in previous centuries is a source of
confidence that it is well able to serve God and advance God’s Kingdom in any
situation that ambient society throws up.
Nobody would take seriously a tennis player who
insisted on playing only those shots to which he had given prior approval. The
point of the game is that a player does not know what sort of ball his opponent
will send down next. He has to be ready not only to defend against his
opponent’s shot, but creatively to turn it back on him in a way that is not
expected. In kindergarten tennis it may be different, but the professional is
expected to be able to deal with anything the other player throws at him.
Maybe it is time for us to pay less attention to the
“prophets of doom” and their statistics and projections and begin to see what
are the particular possibilities that this time of change brings. We should be
in no doubt that we are confronting not merely an epoch of change, but a change
of epoch. As Pope Francis has said.9 We are living through a paradigm shift.10 This
may very well require of us new learning and new skills, but it is not the end
of the world. And it need not be the end of the tradition to which we belong.
Unless we have some sort of a death wish that robs us of hope and saps our
energy to resist extinction. Perhaps we should take to heart the famous poem of
Dylan Thomas: “Do not go gentle into that good night. / Rage, rage against the
dying of the light.”
A tradition is not usually extinguished by external
forces alone; if it fades it is because those who bear it become disheartened,
lose their nerve, and put down their burden.
SOURCES
1 On this see M.
Casey, “Tradition, Interpretation, Reform: The Western Monastic Experience,” American
Benedictine Review 69:4 (2018), pp. 400-428.
2 In “From Desert to
Cloister” in Monks Road: Gethsemani into the Twenty-First Century (Trappist:
Gethsemani Abbey, 2015), pp. 9-87, I tried to demonstrate how different facets
of monastic spirituality were successively brought into play by the distinctive
social conditions of the eras to which it was addressed.
3 Hans-Georg
Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Sheed and Ward, 1965), p. 273;
“Understanding … is always the fusion of these horizons which we imagine to
exist by themselves.”
4 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p.324.
5 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 421
6 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 319.
7 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 325.
8 “Postmodernity is
said to be a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable
simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality, in which the traditionally valued
qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are
evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals.” Sourced from
www.azquotes.com/author/1049-Jean_Baudrillard.
9 “We are not so much living in an epoch of
change, but a change of epoch.” L’Osservatore Romano, 4 July 2014, p.
10.
10 Thomas S. Kuhn,
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 4th Edition 2012). p. 175. See Hans Küng and David Tracy [ed.], Paradigm
Change in Theology: A Symposium for the Future (New York: Crossroad, 1989).
Hans Küng, Can We Save the Catholic Church? (London: William Collins,
2013)
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