If tradition's not a holy thing, it's a thing right next to the holy.
So it bears saying, you do not with ease or without thought
surrender tradition that makes its claim upon you by serving as
resource for personal habit and social custom involving myth
and ritual, belief and ethic, conventional and institutional life,
in short, the heart of your being, your bearing, in community.
So there's no intent of sedition when you raise some diverse
point of view, when change seems necessary, when the state
of the status quo of tradition makes for conflict between what
seems in line with the thing right next to the holy and what's
right and just for human being, for being authentically human.
How dare godly influence be at odds with authenticity?
If orthodoxy's what's right, and that's at odds with authenticity,
then what's right must be wrong. No matter how near the holy
a thing may happen to be, authentic human being incarnates
the holy. Authenticity trumps tradition on that ground alone.
Yet there's more. As past, tradition comes from some human
presence that lived and breathed and enjoyed its being at some
past present, some present time that's now past. That present
involved and transcended all present time prior to itself.
Likewise and for the sake of wisdom, The Current Present acts
in the very same order to embrace what went before and to go
beyond it, surpassing it in knowledge certainly and one would
trust in wisdom. That trust is already and always in process.
The anchor that tradition gives you is meant to provide settlement
for a time, to keep from drifting and to let you for a while rest in
the lap of your lord. But your lord walks on water and navigates
oceans of grace, and you cannot justly do that, anchored.
To set sail for higher ground you need not discard anchor, you
need only raise it up. That's how traditions continue to live and
breathe and enjoy their being in future, after all. Just so, a holy
canon, like a human mind or heart, proves best when open.
(It happens, the same can be said for a bottle of good wine.)
