Someone recently told me her family had no traditions. Further conversation revealed that this was not strictly true for traditional foods still appear on the table at Christmas and annual gifts are offered in the name of a saint.
“That’s a tradition,” I said. “What do you think it’s about?”
“Superstition?” suggested my interlocutor.
“I think it’s because he is loved, and people want to make sure another generation remembers him,” I said.
Adults often associate certain figures and teachings with treats. Jewish children have long been taught the letters of the Hebrew alphabet with honey or cookies, and they are pelted with candy after first reading from the Torah. Jordan almonds (or confetti in Italian) are a reminder that married life will be both bitter (like almond skin) and sweet (like sugar).
A digression: The Sarum Rite wedding vows ( mostly retained by Cranmer for his Book of Common Prayer) are the sanest wedding tradition I know. Modern weddings are so lavish and sentimental they need a good healthy dose of reality to cut through it all, like a knife through cake: “… for better, for WORSE, for richer, for POORER, in SICKNESS, and in health...” Bridal magazines paint marriage as one long luxury shopping spree; it is not.
Going to Mass on Sunday is the most ancient Christian tradition, I added, thinking also of Our Lord’s instructions to “do this in memory of Me.” And I thought also that traditions, as a group, must be about memories. They create memories, and they invoke memories. They also remind of who we are: We are the people who remember …. the Armistice , or the Warsaw Uprising, or the Declaration of Independence . Over two billion of us remember the Nativity, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, most of us by marking their anniversaries on calendars and with special, often culturally determined celebrations. Thus, we are also the people du Réveillon de Noël, or of the Fruitcake, or who keep a fish in the bathtub before killing it.
Of course, what we specifically do is not as important as what (or who) we remember. It should be our remembering that defines us, not activities that may no longer make sense, or make no room for better ones. Traditions should be golden links, as in a necklace, not steel chains attached to shackles.
In our Edinburgh-based TLM community, some of us have made a new tradition of annual Michaelmas and Eastertide Dances. Tradition is defined by repetition, and here we are planning the fourth Michaelmas ceilidh. But what is it that we are remembering?
The end of summer, the beginning of winter, stories about harvests, the pre-Reformation time, our Scottish and Irish roots (or our new lives in Scotland), St. Michael himself, the old European ways of communal celebration–live music, singing, and dancing— maybe the history of Edinburgh’s assemblies, most definitely ourselves: Edinburgh Catholics who love the Traditional Latin Mass and our friends.
Some of us also remember previous dances and, as at all traditional dances at Scotland, we will sing Auld Lang Syne, and bring to mind friends who are part of our community but could not come to the dance–often because they have gone abroad. (I think particularly of one now in Malaysia and another who married and went to California.)
Thus, traditions link us to people and places to whom we have said good-bye, too. And of course we hope these farewells are only temporary. Dante described the saints dancing in Il Paradiso: round dances and caroles, which often alternate men and women. What a lovely thought! So even if we miss friends and family at our dances here on earth, perhaps we will dance with them again in heaven.