Traditionalism and Tradition

"True tradition is allowing true love to be handed on. That is what the word tradition means. It is continually handed on to be received by each successive generation by the Risen Christ through His sacraments."

From The Imaginative Conservative

By David Torkington

True tradition is allowing true love to be handed on. That is what the word tradition means. It is continually handed on to be received by each successive generation by the Risen Christ through His sacraments.

In an earlier chapter I told the story of how a scripture scholar who wrote a book in the 1920s, was condemned for maintaining that not all the psalms were written by King David. He was condemned for telling the truth which nobody today would deny. The best and the most moving of the Psalms are as fresh and alive today as they were hundreds of years before Christ came, and were clearly written by men who were, in the words of St Augustine, intoxicated with the love of God. How had such people come to love God with such enthusiasm and with such fervour long before Christ was born? The answer is quite simple; they had been told regularly and reminded in much detail and in such inventive ways, just how God had loved them in the past, how he was loving them in the present, and how he would love them in the future with a glorious destiny promised by him through the prophets.

Each time they celebrated the great feast days that reminded them of what God had done for them in the past, they did not just remember them in their minds but in every part of their being. Their feasts were for them sacred dramas in which everyone took part so they would never forget the daily and dynamic love of God that was always active in the past, in the present, and as it always would be in the future. The verb to “remember” meant in their language, not just to call to mind, but to make present again today. When they celebrated the Passover for instance, they celebrated the time when God’s avenging Angel passed over their homes to reap vengeance on the Egyptians, as they prepared to escape from the daily humiliation of slavery by eating a hearty meal of lamb, and other nutritious foods to fortify them for the journey ahead through the desert to the promised Land. When this sacred meal was celebrated each year at what we would call Easter, the father of the family would retell the story of their deliverance and the meaning of the sacred God-given food.

When they celebrated the feast of tabernacles or tents, they would remember the time they spent in the desert and the hardships they underwent in the form of a sacred drama in which all took part. For a whole week they would relive this experience by living out of doors in tents and eating the same meagre food their forebears had to eat, remembering and reliving what they endured. They experienced for themselves the cold nights and the craving for food and water, until God finally came to their rescue, as he always would to slake their thirst and relieve their hunger and do whatever was necessary for his people who he loved. All the great feasts were sacred dramas that taught the believers who participated in them how God would continue to show his love for his chosen people for whom he had prepared a great destiny, not just in this world but in the next world too.

Every day at every meal time the prayer said at table by the father would remind everyone once again that the food they were eating was the fruit of the land of “milk and honey” that God had given them. And then God would be thanked for the love that he always lavished upon them. And when they went to the synagogue three times a day, they would return God’s love in kind by solemnly promising to love him with all their hearts and minds and souls and with all their strength. The Talmud details the religious teaching and practices of the Jewish people, and the external acts of worship that were the backbone to a daily life totally given over to manifesting their love of God. Myriad short prayers, and acclamations were taken from the psalms, the canticles and the prayers on which they were brought up, to precede and follow almost every action they performed in their daily life to sanctify their day and offer it to God.

The first Christians were predominantly Jewish, so these practices would have been practised by them, and taught to new Christian converts. However, they would no longer be taught to concentrate on God’s love as it was demonstrated in their distant past, but on how it was demonstrated for them in the recent past, in God’s love made flesh and blood in Jesus Christ, in his death and Resurrection. Gradually they began to celebrate their own sacred dramas and to participate in a new form of prayer, the meditation that would lead them on and into their new Risen Lord. The old Jewish spirituality that taught them how to consecrate their lives to God would not be discontinued but transformed. They could now be drawn ever closer to their God, because the “light inaccessible” became accessible, because of the love that Jesus poured out on the first Pentecost day and every day. This love would draw all who would receive it into his mystical body and into his mystical contemplation of the father, to the degree in which their own love was sufficiently purified to be united with his. They would not only come to know and experience God’s love through the Risen Lord through meditation, but they would consecrate their daily lives to him as their spiritual ancestors the Jews did, by daily prayer and acts of love that would saturate their daily lives. These acts would simplify into what came to be called the “prayer of the heart” by the Desert Fathers.

When, as happens in any marriage first enthusiasm begins to wane, it is not the end of love, but the beginning of a new form of love. When a person is purified from the selfishness that pollutes all love, it enables love to grow, until that love becomes stronger and more totally absorbing than ever before. The same eventually began to happen to the new people of God once the first enthusiasm that had been set afire in “meditation” petered out as it always does for the reasons that I have already detailed. If unwilling, however, to rekindle their faith, punctiliously performing all the words and actions, all the rites and ceremonies in the vain belief that this was sufficient to please the God who had said, “These people only worship me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me” (Isaiah 29:13), it gradually becomes reduced to holding on to, and tenaciously observing what were originally the expressions of their faith, or what they think were the ancient practices of their faith. That is what has come to be called “traditionalism” giving rise to the slogan, “Traditionalism is the dead voice of the living, but Tradition is the living voice of the dead”. The truth of the matter is true tradition never essentially changes because it is the work of the Holy Spirit speaking and acting through those whose lives are always open, always sensitive and docile to receive Christ in deep personal prayer, at any time, in any place and in any century.

When the meditation that can become heart-warming, and spiritually uplifting, suddenly comes to an end, it is not because it has failed, but because it has succeeded. It has so succeeded that the heart reaches out and upwards within the mystical body, to be united with God, as all it wants now is to love God and to be united with him. It has to the exclusion of all else a fixation on God, just as after “lift off” the astronauts no longer have any interest in the world they have just left, because they are now intent on the new world to which they are travelling. The pull that draws them Godward is such that the heart, or the will, is so fixed on its destination that it loses its power over all the inner faculties like the memory and the imagination that were used before, making meditation impossible. This ligature, this spiritual binding of our heart to the heart of God, will grow stronger and stronger. Finally when all these inner faculties have been purified then meditation becomes, not only possible as before, but far more vivid, far more graphic, as if what was seen before in black and white is now seen in technicolour.

However, what is experienced at the beginning of the mystic way is called by St John of the Cross “obscure contemplation”. It is contemplation, namely a simple gaze, but the object of its vision is disrupted by endless distractions and temptations rising from the unbridled memory and the imagination. These, as the Cloud of Unknowing insists should be placed under a “Cloud of Forgetfulness” enabling ones heart’s desire, supported by acts of love, to reach God by piercing through the “Cloud of Unknowing”. That is why now and for the far foreseeable future, the prayer of the heart becomes the daily prayer of the spiritual traveller both inside and outside of prayer. However, as these short prayers have to be made in dryness and aridity and surrounded by myriad distractions and temptations without the feelings that could once be experienced in meditation, it was called the “Prayer of Faith” or the “Prayer of Naked Faith”, as it is not clothed with any feeling. This is the most important moment in the spiritual life when, as I have already said, 90% of searchers pack up and run away, not just from the mystic way, but from any serious spiritual way, and some can even lose their faith.

In any branch of human achievement a person, who wants to arrive at perfection inevitably comes to the famous brick wall. The person may be a golfer, a tennis player, an athlete or a musician, they will at some point come to a brick wall that stands between them and the perfection they are seeking. Some years ago I spoke to the concert pianist Vincent Billington about this fateful brick wall and what has to be done to overcome it. The reply he gave me applies to the search for perfection in the spiritual life, as in any other form of secular perfection. “You redouble your practice and keep on going come hell or high water,” he said, “until the breakthrough finally comes for those who persevere.” This is the most important moment of the spiritual life, the moment to persevere in practising the “Prayer of Naked Faith” come what may. Gradually, more likely in very many months, rather than weeks, the Holy Spirit who is guiding you enables you to become aware that Someone is drawing you to himself. Eventually when this Someone begins to make his presence felt, if only very subtly to begin with, the “Prayer of Naked Faith” comes to be called the “Prayer of the Heart”. Although both are short, the former is characterised by cries for help, the second is more usually characterized by cries of thanksgiving, praise and adoration that lapse into the silent gaze upon the One who is the All in all. When an aspirant friar spied on St Francis at prayer to see if he was genuine, he heard him pray throughout the night, continually saying, “My God and my all”. The Latin version of this Prayer, Deus Meus et Omnia, became the motto of the Franciscan Order. If a graph existed to chart the spiritual life on earth, then meditation at the beginning, would be hardly more than 5% of the journey. Contemplation, characterised by practising acts of love that leads to perfect loving would constitute most of the rest of the time, before the union after purification, makes possible the return of meditation, this time in technicolour, and in high definition.

As we have seen when a person is taken up into Contemplation, and precisely because they can no longer meditate as before, they return to the vocal prayer that was at fi rst their staple diet, as did the first Christians. Like them they gradually discover that their spiritual needs induce them to simplify these prayers into shorter prayers, prayers of the heart. That this prayer leads into mystical prayer we know, not just from later mystical writers, but from our earliest ancestors. The only sign by which you can definitively know that someone has come to perfect prayer is not because they experience mystical phenomena, have visions, or revelations, but by their fruits, namely by the love they have for others; not just for their own families or their own fellow Christians, but for their fellow human beings, and even for their enemies. The almost incredible spread of Christianity, and on such a massive sale, can only be explained by the love generated in prayer that enabled them to receive the fruits of contemplation, namely the infused virtues and the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

Many early Christians who were inpatient to receive in full measure this water of life, freely chose to become virgins or remain virginal after their partner’s death. They came to be called the virgines et continentes. Some remained alone in their own homes, others gradually began to come to gather in communities. Before entering into the desert it was to one of these communities that St Antony went with his sister to arrange for her to join their community. The Fathers of the Church used to write little treatises for them called Ad Virgines. One thing above all else that they emphasized was that if they did not so deepen their prayer life, to come to know and experience God’s love, then all the miseries of the loveless would be visited upon them, as no one can live without love. Then far from becoming leaders in their communities they would soon degenerate into being no more than blind leaders of the blind.

The centre of unity for everyone was the Mass that was in those day so alive, so vital and spiritually dynamic, precisely because at that Mass Christ himself would be made present amongst his people. While he was on earth every moment of every day Christ was caught up in doing his Father’s will which was that he should love his Father with all his mind and heart with all his body and soul and with his whole strength, and love others as he himself was loved. When he was dying on the Cross, a lifetime of selfless sacrificial loving was drawn together as one, in the final most testing, most agonising act of selfless sacrificial loving that he had ever made. At the ultimate moment of self-sacrificial loving, when all was given to the last drop of his blood, what the Greek Fathers called his kenosis, his self-emptying was brought to its completion, to be filled with what they also called the pleroma, the fullness of his Father’s love. This is how their Lord and Saviour returned to be made sacramentally present to the early Christians every Sunday, when they came to celebrate their weekly Mass. He was not, however, present as someone who had played a part in their history in their past, but as someone who was playing a part in their history in the present, because the dynamic loving that was uniting him with his Father was simultaneously overflowing onto and into all those present who were open to receive him. As they received him, as the bread of life, he would draw them up and into his life, into his mystical body and into his mystical loving of his father. To the measure that they had learnt to carry their daily cross, as Christ had done before them, then they would enter into his selflessness, his self-emptying, his kenosis. Then they would receive something of the pleroma that he received.

What happened at Mass continued to happen in the believers’ daily domestic acts of selflessness and self-sacrifice, that preceded and followed each Mass as they gradually became more and more at one with their Risen Lord. As promised he became the New Temple in whom the new offering “in spirit and truth” was to be made by his followers, whose physical offerings in the old temple would now be replaced by spiritual offerings in the new temple, which was none other than the mystical body of Christ in whom they now “lived and moved and had their being”. It was because their offerings were now made in, with and through him that they had a power and an effectiveness, and therefore a success, that could not have been counted on before. This meant that the love they received, in, with and through Christ, enabled them to be ever more deeply united with him who was the supreme prophet, the one sent, as they would now be sent in his name, to both embody and teach the truth to others. And the ultimate truth is that God is love and that he wants everyone to receive this, his love, to be like him, to be one with him, not just in this life, but in the next, and to all eternity. All who are baptised into Christ’s royal family are called to be viceroys of Christ the King, and to spread his kingdom that will always be characterised by love that does not reign to “lord it over others” but to serve, be they friend or foe. Christ promised that the true proclamation of God’s kingdom by his viceroys on earth will always be accompanied, not just by white martyrdom, but by red martyrdom too. An unpurifi ed world impregnated with evil recoils like a viper from goodness and truth and is ready to kill and destroy psychologically or even physically, rather than have its true nature laid bare. Even the very presence of goodness for some is enough to incite them to evil for fear it might hold up a mirror to what they cannot bear to see for themselves.

When you see the battered and bleeding body of Christ writhing in agony on the cross you are seeing the physical embodiment of human evil that could not listen to the teaching of pure unadulterated love promised since time immemorial by the prophets. Yes, we are called to become prophets, priests and kings in imitation of Christ, and his love has been sent to ordain each one of us to this end at Baptism. Further to this his Mass is there to continually remind us of his presence and support us in our calling, but something further is required. Prayer and continual prayer, as Christ himself prayed, is necessary so that we may continually be open and available to receive the only help and strength that will enable us to be faithful to the end.

True tradition then is allowing true love to be handed on. That is what the word tradition means. It is continually handed on to be received by each successive generation by the Risen Christ through his sacraments. This handing on is symbolised by the laying on of hands through which the love of Christ continues to be transmitted to his people. The person whose hands touch you when you were baptised, for instance, received power from the Bishop, who laid hands on him at his ordination and that “tradition” can be seamlessly traced back to the first apostles and to the loving touch of Christ. This is true in all the sacraments, but most particularly in the sacrament of marriage, when love is communicated by touch by the ministers of this, the sacrament of love.

But love is not magic and that is why it is only those who in ever-deepening prayer enable that touch of love to suffuse their weak human love with Christ’s divine love that brings him back to life again in us, and through us in his Church. That is how true tradition is established.

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The featured image is “Nuns Praying in a Church,” by Johannes Bosboom (1817-1891). This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.