Hear and Understand God’s Tradition…
Audite et intelligite traditiones quas Deus dedi vobis.
“Hear and understand the traditions which I, God, have given you.”
I’m currently reading Thomas Merton: Spiritual Master by Lawrence S. Cunningham and it is from this that I am quoting…
There are traditions which God has given us. They are so to speak a memory we are born with and into which we are born: a store of meanings, of symbols, of signs. What is born in us is the connatural ability to understand these great buried signs as soon as they are manifested to us. What is given us in society is a more or less authentic manifestation of the signs. If society loses its “memory,” if it forgets its language of traditional symbol, then the individuals who make it up become neurotic, because their own memories are corrupted by uninterpreted, unused meanings. Then traditions themselves become mere dead conventions - worse than that, obsessions - collective neuroses. To replace one set of conventions with another, however new, does nothing to revive a truly living sense of meaning and of life. This is our present condition.
This resonates strongly within me. In my own experience, growing up as a Baptist (Southern of some flavor), I often felt drawn to certain things… liturgical tradition drew me, though I knew not what to call it. The austere nature of our faith and its tradition (or rather traditional lack of the same) left me feeling as though something were missing. As a young child, striving to fill that unspoken void, I would contrive my own ‘traditions’ or forms of reverence. Having a lace trimmed hanky to lay my Bible is one good example, and yet this felt contrived even to my infant sensibilities and I soon gave it up in shame for having taken up such ‘pretensions’.
Later, when I saw my first crucifix, I remember being struck by it - feeling a hushed awe and reverence within that was inexplicable… Later still in a similar setting, kneelers were intuitive in response as I felt immediately the desire to drop to my knees and pray. I worked hard (funny that since we were repeatedly taught that works were of little import) to be a workman approved before the Lord and stifled those childhood fancies, all the while feeling as though something important were missing… that such a holy God, such a magnificent Lord and Master deserved more than what was given… and that burning desire to give such to the Lord whom I loved was banked.
Even when I began to attend Church with my Catholic husband, the fear and misunderstanding taught me in my youth kept me from really seeing that what I witnessed there was the very fulfillment of what my young soul had yearned for. When I finally was reconciled to the Church by God’s mercy and command, the protective walls bricked up over time to protect myself from that which I was forbidden to give as a protestant began to come down. As I have lived a full year now as a Catholic with the blessings of the Sacraments, the joys of Eucharistic Adoration, the Liturgy and the Liturgical Calendar with all it entails, I have found at last that which my soul within naturally knew and longed to give as right to the Lord. Truly, God has written His law upon our hearts… we ignore and deny this innate understanding to our peril.
We as a protestant society have lost our memory. Our forefathers denied it; their descendents fought it, suppressing it more and more until it is so very lost that we of the common era in this protestant culture no longer recognize it within ourselves and rail against it embraced by others with vile blasphemies. We have reduced those beloved traditions given us by God to dead conventions so long that they have become collective neuroses. We have replaced God’s traditions, God’s ways with our own. New conventions, new traditions that reject all but that which seems comfortable, godly, and right in our own eyes. In the process not only do we deify ourselves, but we forfeit life and all its meaning. We no longer show respect to any, much less the equal respect to all that we claim. We proclaim proudly that we bow our knee to NO man, and in the process, refuse to bow our knee to God. We have lost all sense of honor, of respect, and have no true understanding or experience of humility. What else is dying to self but considering others better than we do ourselves?
Esteeming others, being willing to be humbled, being willing to abase ourselves, to be SERVANT to ALL men… this is the calling of the followers of Christ. If we are so unaware of the traditions of God that we no longer recognize true Worship, then we call things worship in error in order to have it at all. Such ignorance leads to not only great pride, but great sin. Let us not be so ignorant due to hard hearts and pride that we call speech, lectures, song-a-longs, and any humbling position of body worship. Let us not be so prideful in our ignorance that we can no longer bend our knee in respect to another lest it be construed as worship where none exists. Let us again learn what we once knew and rejoiced to do, obey the traditions of our God and walk humbly before Him always.
Audite et intelligite traditiones quas Deus dedi vobis.
“Hear and understand the traditions which I, God, have given you.”
Let us hear, understand, and obey the traditions which He, our God, has given to us. Blessed be God forever!
