The Shadows of Tradition

Tradition can be a problem. And we can't really do without it.

MSU - Notre Dame - 1966

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I received the news that the Big Ten conference was going to add USC and UCLA to their membership with some sadness that I couldn’t quite explain.

I remember going to a few college football games with my grandpa and a brother or two when I was a young lad. They were Michigan State University games because my grandpa and dad went there (I ended up there as well). I don’t know if they still sing “MSU Shadows” at MSU games, but my grandpa knew all the words and sang along with the (mostly older) people who sang and seemed moved by the connection to time and place. I remember grandpa’s annoyance at our use of his binoculars to look at the Goodyear Blimp instead of the big game against Notre Dame. The blimp was an intrusion, I think. It wasn’t a family tradition for us to go to Michigan State football games, I remember a couple, but it isn’t as though we went to every or most games. (I went to games as a student, but that was an entirely different experience.) It wasn’t a tradition for us, but it was a tradition. It was a marker of a more ‘traditional’ time - or a time when tradition was so taken for granted that it wasn’t even seen as traditional.  You likely can remember a similar time with different particulars. 

My grandfather died some years ago and was born a few months after the Wright brothers had flown the first aircraft on a beach in Kitty Hawk, NC - so everything about his life seems so draped in tradition that he didn’t probably see it as tradition, he probably just saw it as life. Part of his draped-in-tradition life was his morning paper. We still have a neighbor who walks down his driveway every morning to pick up an actual newspaper. I think he is retired. If they still have actual paper newspapers when I am retired, I might have one delivered every morning … I remember fondly picking up the actual paper and reading it at breakfast. I think it would be nice to do that again. Until recently, we had another neighbor, this one quite elderly, who had a newspaper delivered, but he passed away. There is something about his death that seems more poignant because he had the paper delivered and the new occupants, who seem to be about 19, though I am sure they must be older, never in their lives had a newspaper delivered. I know the world of news on websites is better in so many ways, but I still miss my paper.

Kingsway B|A

Michigan State is still part of the Big Ten conference, it continues in that tradition. But those football games were back when the Big Ten consisted of ten universities located in the Midwest. It now consists (before the addition of USC and UCLA) of fourteen universities spread from Nebraska to New Jersey. For some reason, they still call themselves the Big Ten.  That was also back when the Pac 12 consisted of ten universities located in the Pacific time zone and was called the Pac 10. They have since added a couple of Mountain time schools - at least they changed their name to the Pac 12. They may have to change it back, I suppose - since they are losing USC and UCLA. The Big Eight is now the Big 12, except Oklahoma and Texas are leaving for the Southeastern Conference, so maybe they will have to change as well (except the Big Ten is taken by a conference with 16 schools in it). You don’t have to be a sports fan to notice that a lot of things are changing. Probably, nobody thought any of that would change. It all changed for money and market share of course. I am not against changes that produce more revenue in general - and there was nothing inherently sacred about these traditional conference alignments - but something seems to have been lost. Something I can’t name. But I think it has to do with tradition and memory and time and place. Which seems like an important part of our sense of self.

I don’t think of myself as a defender of tradition. In some ways, I have been an opponent of blind tradition, especially in the church. Tradition has been invoked to cloak injustice or prejudice and it can be used to baptize our own preferences in the water of ritual. Jesus had some thoughts on that. Some of the most ‘religious’ people of his day had forsaken the heart of God, substituting their own practices for long enough that the heart of God could no longer be found. Until their tradition violated the heart of God.

He replied, “Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written:

“‘These people honor me with their lips,

    but their hearts are far from me.

They worship me in vain;

    their teachings are merely human rules.’

You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to human traditions.”

(Mark 7:6-8)

So there can be blind tradition and bad tradition, and we live in a time where the impulse is to rid ourselves of all of it. The impulse is understandable. Some of that tradition needed to go and needs to go. We can valorize it or glorify it, or it can simply blind us by its silent existence to the way things should be, serving as the way we assume things will always be. We should be intentional about our traditions, the traditions we notice at least. But tradition, whether the tradition of your alma mater or your family, can sometimes be the only effective vehicle for bringing people together - or for some other vital purpose. It may be a tradition for a good reason. It may have arisen for good reasons - even if some tradition is sometimes the venue for abuse, abolishing the tradition may not be the answer. Abolishing all tradition isn’t the answer - I’m not sure it is possible.

For a number of reasons, my siblings were scattered across the country for much of my adult life. When my grandpa turned 90, almost 20 years ago, we all gathered to celebrate him, not knowing how many more birthdays there would be to celebrate. (It turned out he had 12 more.) That gathering started our tradition of a family reunion every other year on the family property in Northern Michigan. It isn’t a glamorous time or place. Sometimes the younger members of the family aren’t completely enthusiastic about all the particulars. But they, and us, falling into the tradition of time and place and family, fall in love with our own family again. It is the strangest thing. I think soon I may write about the widely different views these strange and lovely people have - all found in one family, but here we set all of them aside (for the most part). It may not matter why this tradition started. But once started, it begins to serve an important and good purpose. A vital purpose. Probably an irreplaceable one.

A log cabin, a train caboose, and a fire - our family gathering place

G.K. Chesterton famously used a fence to illustrate a healthy attitude toward tradition. We shouldn’t discard the ‘fence’ of tradition in our path until we know why it is there - it may serve some purpose we don’t see. It may have been erected to fulfill a purpose - and done so successfully enough that we forgot the purpose. We may discard it, but we should understand it first - we should understand what we are losing and what is arising in its place. We live in an age where the rejection of tradition is assumed by some to be a virtue. I am with Chesterton on this one - I don’t think that is always true.

We built the fence of our reunion as a vehicle to bring our family together (of course). I didn’t even do much to build this particular fence, I am grateful to others in my family who led the way. We may have bad weather or a disagreement. We may forget how things were before we started it. A nerve may be frayed here or there. But it works. Tradition may not always be good, but this tradition is good. Not all fences should be kept, but I hope we’ll keep this one. 

Links

This is from Comment magazine and is also about the traditions of a family. It has a paywall, but I think you can get a free version.

MSU Shadows (linked above)

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