Tradition and Ownership

Tradition and Ownership

By the Panhandling Philosopher, Dan McDonald

 

            Hooker’s formula for remembering and moving forward in the truth was a three legged stool of authority set in Scripture, tradition, and reason. Tradition was that heritage of faithfulness in which the truths of Scripture had been held by the people of God in the many times and places which God’s people have inhabited. We learn important values by realizing they have been valuable to generation upon generation of people. Holy or Sanctified reason was a way of thinking through issues which percolated up from the soil of fertile thoughts trained by the teaching of Scriptures and the absorbing of those timeless values reinforced by the ancient traditions expressed over many generations. Hooker understood Anselm of Canterbury’s appreciation that when we become believers it is not because we have learned everything and can therefore choose the faith, but rather it is because we have tasted something and now enter the faith and live among the people of God that from henceforth we might learn about what we have come to believe. We do not understand so as to believe as much we believe so that we might come to understand. We are those who know in part while being fully known, and so we seek from that point of initiation to learn, and to progress towards  understanding.

            During the past few weeks I returned home for Christmas. Home is a flexible concept, and I use it as such. I returned home, meaning to be with the family and its offspring that was of the family of which I grew up. I returned home and drove through the town where I once went to grocery stores with my mom, or to the barber shop, hardware store, or Snyder’s Tap when I went with my father. I returned home to drive by the house where I grew up on a small farm. I do have a home where I now live in Tulsa, but sometimes I leave that home to return home.

            I grew up on a farm, but I grew up during an odd season in my father’s farming career. Modern farming is constantly winnowing the number of farmers. Modern farming has from generation to generation required fewer farmers to do what many farmers were once needed to accomplish. My father came to realize that he was being winnowed out of the farm business. He never much sought to invest farming into me. In a few years the amount of farming done on our farm changed. We quit raising hogs. We quit raising chickens. We sold the dairy cattle. Eventually he gave up farming some pieces of land in the neighborhood. He was a good welder. He had welded during the war in the shipyards. He could weld using mirrors. He never taught me welding. Late in life I asked him why he never taught me welding. He simply said, “You already had bad eyes you didn’t need to weld.”  I grew up not learning a lot about the farm, not being encouraged much, and maybe on my part not having the hunger or thirst. But still where I grew up and how had an impact on me for my entire life. There is an old saying that a boy can leave the farm but the farm never leaves the boy. I think that is true of history, tradition, and heritage. We can never live in the past, but neither can we fully keep the past from living on in us. I left the farm that I learned so little of, but it never left me.

            I know there are people that rebel who hate the entire idea of tradition. But tradition is everywhere. It is stored up in a word like “conservative” where people hope to conserve the values they believe made us great, or if not great, at least contributed aspects of meaning to guide us in our lives. Tradition is the material we pass along in education, learned from one generation and taught because of its value to another generation. Tradition is contained in science as Newton stood upon the shoulders of giants, and as Einstein paid homage to what he had learned from Newton and James Clerk Maxwell. Tradition is also learning from the past to understand a vision for the future. To progress within a tradition is as much a part of being traditional as to conserve the lessons learned from tradition. We learned to value freedom and liberty and began to imagine a day when there would be no slaves. We learned the advantages of literacy and began to envision a day when all participants in society would have an opportunity to be educated. We began to lengthen lives for those with the ability to be treated with medicinal breakthroughs and began imagining a society where all its members would have access to affordable health care. Tradition allows both the conserving of the valued lessons of the past and a vision for the possibilities of the future.

            Cultures grow when they believe in a past within tradition to be conserved and the promise of a future to which they may progress. In 2016 our American culture seemed to have separated the concepts of progressing and conserving even as we separated politics along the fracture lines of the urban left and the rural right. Personally, a couple of days after Christmas I went home to drive by the house where I grew up and to take a drive around the city where we had shopped and as often as any identified ourselves as being from the city of Streator, Illinois.

            I quickly felt melancholy as I drove towards the old home place, seeing houses that didn’t look like they did when I was sixteen, now that I am sixty-one. I was stunned to see the old house gone that had stood just east of our home place. It once had a historical marker set on the highway nearby its location. The house had been built in the 1840’s. It was a two-story, with a cellar. It didn’t have extraordinary architecture.  It was remembered for the history that took place within the home. Either an undertaker or a carpenter lived in the house. In any way there was always a storage of coffins kept in the place in its younger days. The coffins were sometimes used for burial, and at other times they were used for the hiding of what in those days before the Civil War were called “colored” people. An abolition minded family lived in the home and used the coffins in the cellar to hide runaways fleeing southern slavery and headed to the promise of liberty in Canada. It was a hush hush operation for not every neighbor would approve of breaking the laws requiring slaves to be returned to masters. But this was a house where those seeking freedom by leaving the land of the free, might escape the land altogether to find liberty in Canada which had refused to seek American liberty during the American Revolution or the War of 1812. Now the house and the historical marker of that house used to support runaway slaves to make their way to freedom in Canada were removed from the present landscape even if their memories were perhaps buried in archives somewhere or in the mystery of what a prairie soil might have witnessed. I am not sure it is good for that house and marker to have been removed from the nearly completely white community in which I had grown up. I fear communities such as mine live believing that they are kept a safe distance away from injustice. We can remain unmoved by another’s injustice if we feel we are separated by time and space from the injustice we simply choose to ignore. There used to be a sign of someone who did something about injustice. The sign is removed. The community I fear imagines itself separated from pockets of injustice in places like far away Chicago.

            I then came by my father’s house. Everything had changed. I felt the melancholy of having lost the past. The house had been thoroughly remodeled. It looked more impressive. I bet they even had heat in the upstairs bedrooms where I remember winter nights when we slept under piles of quilts and maybe even in a sleeping bag. I remember taking a thermometer upstairs to see what the room temperature was during a stretch where outside it never made it above zero for a few days. Inside my unheated bedroom the thermometer showed just 20 degrees above zero on the Fahrenheit scale. The property had been changed with old buildings torn down and new ones built. The buildings were built in a well-planned layout rather than the haphazard look that had characterized our property’s building arrangement in my youth.  The property looked attractive.  I felt melancholy all the same. The past I came to see one more time was now nearly gone.

            Then I noticed the trees. They were there. I was in high school when my Dad decided to plant a line of evergreen trees north of the house and more trees to surround the house. The Evergreen trees to the north would add beauty and provide a wind break when the howling winds of winter would drive the cold deep into the old house. The trees around the house would provide shade from the summer sun. It was one of the things he did for the property with pride and joy. He would die before the trees were fully grown to bring his initial vision to fullness. It wasn’t that he died particularly young. It was simply that trees like he planted took more years to fulfill a vision than one often had to live when the trees were planted. He wouldn’t have been surprised to die before the vision was fulfilled. Perhaps there was something inspiring about planting a tree that wouldn’t fulfill its purpose until years after one’s passing. A vision that cannot live past one’s own life seems a pretty inconsequential plan to pursue in one’s grey-headed time of life.

            My father’s birthday was January 4. I think he would have enjoyed the fact that most of the trees he planted remain on the property even when everything else seems thoroughly changed or gone. I think he would have missed the familiar look of the house and older buildings where a family of children once grew up. He would look on the property I am sure with a sense of melancholy. But I think unlike me, he perhaps might have knocked on the door of the house and said to the new owners, “I am glad you kept the trees I planted, and how you have built the buildings and arranged them – I can tell that you have shown your love to the property and to the land. It is your land now, but in case you wanted to know I love what you’ve done with it.”

            I think through all the melancholy I now better understand tradition. Tradition is not a slave owner. Tradition is like a house trying to lead us on a journey away from slavery. Tradition is not the past holding us in chains. Tradition is not a demanding property that does not allow us to reimagine what we have received. Tradition is simply a past speaking to us saying, “I know you have loved something valuable you found on this property where I live, but it is yours now and if you show by your ownership how you have cared for the past living here and have shown you have loved this piece of land in your possession with your vision for this property how can I tradition be anything but joyous over your stewardship.” In the end we are stewards who own our places on earth for a short time and then ownership reverts to the tradition of the generations with its influence upon human life. Tradition is not our seeking to live in the past but our past seeking to live within us. We can fight it but it will still live. The boy can leave the farm, but the farm will never leave the boy. We can view tradition with contempt but one day we will be driving down a road and will see what we have lost and we will realize that we left the past but the past never has left us. We felt tradition didn’t matter but it dwells within us waiting for the moment when we will listen to what is important for us to pause and give place and space in which it will graciously teach us.