A living tradition

Yesterday I preached at the University Church in central Cambridge on creativity in liturgy and worship. A number of requests have come in for the script; some of it I cannot reproduce as it would be a spoiler for the next book. But here's a taste.

...Stravinsky said this about tradition:  ‘Real tradition is not the relic of a past that is irretrievably gone. It is a living force that anticipates and informs the present.’

A distinction needs to be made, I believe, between real tradition, as Stravinsky so aptly put it, and traditionalism  - a rigid adherence to a form we believe to be the only right way.

Tradition, at its best, is a distillation of the best of all we have done so far. It’s not unlike the way in which classics become classics. We enjoy and honour the work of great artists and composers while forgetting that their failed experiments along the way have been consigned to the waste paper bin long ago. You may love Bach, or the Beatles, Rembrandt or Hockney, but it’s likely – unless you are an absolute expert on their work – that you only know a percentage of what they actually produced. You may love the hymns of Charles Wesley. But of more than 600 hymns that Wesley wrote, less than seventy of them are in use in our hymn books. Great and lasting work can only be produced in the context of trial and experiment. And our liturgies and patterns of worship have evolved in a similar way. In the early centuries of Christianity, different forms of worship evolved: The Daily Offices were developed in the Monasteries, and eventually became the templates for what we now know as Morning and Evening Prayer. And in the Cathedral tradition, Holy Communion gradually found its form. Changes have occurred regularly over the centuries, but although the language and the music have changed, the theology has shifted in places, and the combination of clergy and lay that take part has changed, the shape of the liturgy still has the same basic building blocks that it had for hundreds of years. So what’s good about tradition is that it has had time to distil, to establish itself. Put simply, it “works” – it expresses our faith succinctly and well. The liturgy is like the “classics” of Christian worship.

 

At the same time, though, there are aspects of our tradition that are not as traditional as you might suppose. As Anglicans, we are famous for our “Choral Tradition” – something so well established we usually never question it as the backbone of our worship. Yet this form of worship is significantly different now than it was a couple of centuries ago. Much of the music we now consider standard is actually very young. And the use of the organ in Church is a surprisingly modern innovation. At one time parish churches had a musicians’ gallery where strings and wind instruments were played, and singers would lead. When the first pipe organs were installed in Churches there was outrage! Letters were written, and petitions made against this modern innovation that was (so it seemed at the time) incapable of conveying the beauty of worship,. Yet gradually it was recognised that the grandeur of the pipe organ offered a new and apt way of sounding the praises of God. .

 

I say this, simply as a reminder that tradition only retains its grace and power if we allow it to remain fluid. If we never change anything about the way we worship, we may think we are being faithful to tradition. But the truth is that to resist change results in the very thing we are trying to preserve changing its meaning under our feet. The Amish communities of North America are one example of this: their refusal to adopt new technologies originally made a pointed statement to their culture. But as time passed, their practice didn’t change, but it’s meaning did. So it is with our worship traditions. No change is not an option: we have to change to stay the same.

There is meaning invested, not only in the liturgies we perform, but in the physical space of our Churches. And particularly in Churches such as this one that are constantly full of visitors, it’s worth asking how we enable people to discover something more than architectural history. To draw visitors into the life and faith of the Church, we need to curate the space in such a way that we invite people into the faith, and not merely the building, Again, to do this, we need to take a few risks and play with our tradition. If we don’t change, the meaning will change in any case. We have to change to stay the same...

Comments

[Hugh A]

Thank you Maggi, I look forward to the book. In the church I attend we are now moving on from just the organ to using a worship band that may, or may not, include the use of the organ. We have, in a strange way, moved back to a modern equivalent of the west gallery tradition.

What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 1:9)

[Songbird]

Thanks so much for this perspective. As I work with a church facing changes, your words are most helpful.

[Mark Bratton]

The late great church historian Jaroslav Pelikan distinguished tradition and traditionalism nicely:

Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism the dead faith of the living.

I can't for the life of me retrieve the reference. I thought it was a footnote at the bottom of the opening chapter of a multi-volume history of the Church, but I have not succeeded in locating it.

Jean-Claude Barreau, quoting Irenaus, referred to tradition as an expression of the Spirit 'in its youthfulness' (juvenescens - in Latin)