Tradition!

In her Halloween post, Maria the Great commented on how Tim sorts candy with the boys after they've gone trick-or-treating, because he remembers doing that as a kid. That got me thinking about traditions and how they get started. . .

Tim's a few years older than me, so he may have a better sense of how this all began, but from what I remember, the great candy sort began as a way for our fathers to inspect our candy. We were young trick-or-treaters during the candy scares of the early 80s, when some people were doing all sorts of weird junk to the candy they gave out on Halloween. Anything that looked suspect was pulled out of the pile without question, along with anything else they didn't want us to have (I think hard candy and suckers were routinely removed until we were old enough for them to trust we wouldn't accidentally choke on them). As we got older and our fathers' inspection was less needful, we'd still dump our candy out all over Uncle Ron's living room, sort it, then swap each other to either gain more of our favorites or get rid of stuff we really didn't like. So, a tradition that began out of practical necessity and gradually morphed into family habit is still going strong 25 years later, as a new generation of Ciccones are learning to sort their candy when they get home from trick-or-treating, because that's what my cousins and I always did when we were kids.

Naturally, I see many parallels here to the life of the church. A noticable parallel around here has to do with communion practices - despite a synod-wide push several years ago to have every congregation in the synod move to weekly communion, there are still many congregations who only celebrate communion four times a year plus high holy days. This, too, began as a practical necessity - in the days of the circuit-riders, a congregation was probably only visited by an authorized presiding pastor 4-6 times a year. But it gradually became "family habit" so even after a congregation had a regularly established and called pastor present every week, they continued their very irregular or infrequent celebration of communion because "that's what we have always done."

Now don't get me wrong here - I think traditions are good. They help us remember and tell and live our stories, and they often give us solid ground to stand on in a topsy-turvy world. And trust me, I can get as grumpy as the best of them when my traditions are messed with.

But, traditions can also be, or become, stifling. When we forget how the tradition started, or why we perpetuate it, when we allow tradition to become an end or a god in itself and refuse to entertain the possibility of any new things we're being called to do. . .then I think maybe tradition is not so good. Or healthy. Or helpful.

At least, that's what my friend Tevye found out (the hard way). . .