Dalai Banana offers a wonderful reflection on tradition.
Genuinely traditional cultures offer some extreme advantages — and disadvantages — over the largely traditionless cultures of the industrialized West. People in traditional cultures may feel rooted in a social fabric that possesses origin, connectedness, and direction. For better or worse, they also contend with conformity as well as the unhealthful risks of some traditions. In the West, “freedom” and “liberty” mean an individual can believe or do whatever one wants — but such unrestrained individuality unravels tradition. Tradition and personal freedom are not opposites — but they do not mix well, either.
I think Dalai overgeneralizes just a bit about “Christianity”:
A core religion of white western society, Christianity, is exclusive. It does not welcome all people. Oh, it welcomes people who are willing to strip away every aspect of themselves, look good, contribute money, and agree to follow a given set of behaviours that have little to do with the Bible, and a lot to do with industrialised economics.
That describes some branches of Christianity — the Focus on the Family branch, for example — but not others.
I have spent time with Christian (Catholic) communes in Latin America, for example, that possessed a strong sense of peasant tradition — a rootedness in daily and annual religious rituals, community values, equitable distribution of wealth, and Biblical parables. These communities endure despite the efforts of reactionary U.S. evangelicals and Latin governments in the 1980s (and since) to suppress these people, convert their children, seize their properties, and replace their neighborhoods and vocations with industrial complexes, mass-produced stadium-style “religion,” and television programming that promotes individualism and commerce, not tradition or community.
I don’t know about Australia or Europe, but there are Christian faith communities in the United States that preserve a similar sense of tradition rooted in community and social justice. The Catholic Workers and Amish are just examples. I have no doubt that traditional communities also exist among Western non-Christians — Native Americans, Pagans, Buddhists and others — as well.
Unfortunately, since these small communities lack the hundreds of millions of dollars that Focus on the Family has to invest in advertising and political blackmail, few people will ever hear about these communities and their traditions, unless they look hard or start their own.
I guess it is unfortunate that what I write about Christianity has been my experience of Christianty. But I do look forward to the church or Christian community that proves to the be the exception to the rule of my experience.
And I believe that such Christians and communities DO exist. I am just yet to find them. I would appreciate your prayers that I do find them. Not a perfect church, but an inclusive one would be a good start.
I think your experience of Christianity has been that of many people, including me to a significant extent.
I blame the silence and relative poverty of inclusive churches; the willingness of culture warriors to falsely claim to represent God, tradition, and Christianity; and the state of modern journalism (my real-world career field).
In the United States, ad- and subscription-driven journalism frequently fails to report the experience of ordinary people. In order to compete for sales, journalists must report on the loud, the oversimplified, the outrageous. And those wishing to be covered by commercial news media must be willing to play by the rules of the market.
Focus on the Family exemplifies the sort of Christian who will commit outrageous immoralities of one sort in order to focus all public anger on an alleged moral concern of a different sort.
But I digress, Dalai. 😀
I identify very much with your search for rootedness and your respect for tradition.
I’ve long thought that spirituality is supposed to be an “inside job” — not the megamillion satellite networks, not the stadium-sized church buildings, or the massive funding projects (funny how much of modern religion is about money, eh?). Tithing, as an example, is better used when given in love from my hand to those who most need it, rather than a “governmental” church to collect the tithe to build up massive buildings while the homeless or hungry huddle in its shadows. Ditto all the other core foundations of religion. If you can dissolve the outter trappings of religion, the core foundation of spirituality would suffice our society just fine.
O’course, it would put a lot of preachers out of work …. or rather, they’d actually have to go get a job. 🙂
Dalai, I’m glad you said you’re not looking for a perfect church, but I hope you mean that seriously.
I must admit to being a little confused as to what you mean by inclusive. From what I understand, Christ himself was inclusive in that he welcomed all, but he also called his followers to a standard which I galk at (the “Sermon on the Mount”). Not everyone who came would have stuck around after a sermon like that. In a sense, I agree with Ray that God’s work is an “inside job”, but to leave it at that would ignore community and fellowship, one of the basic things about being human in my opinion.
When you said, “it welcomes people who are willing to strip away every aspect of themselves, look good, contribute money, and agree to follow a given set of behaviours that have little to do with the Bible, and a lot to do with industrialised economics”, I just couldn’t help but see the bitterness and cynicism in your tone. It also made me sad that this is what the rest of the world sees of churches. If you know enough about the Bible to isolate the important stuff, maybe you should start your own church and see how it fares inside a society of microwave dinners and teenage pop idols.
I’m driven to do more (sometimes it’s hard to find opportunities), but currently I co-run a homework club for a local library near my church. We help the poorer local kids with their studies on week days after school. Yes, my tithe is going towards a larger premises, but it also supports 5 pastors who minister to the church community (this involves counselling and all sorts of other work – preaching’s the minor part of the role, and I’ve never seen them engaged in the kind of political posturing that this site repeatedly condemns), and any giving towards the “homeless or hungry” comes out of my pocket as extra (eg. I support a child in China).
I say this not to show off, but to suggest to you that while churches might look like they don’t do much good, a lot of what people do doesn’t make the media spotlight.
There are ways to go if we want a church that really shines in this world.
I am glad to see that Dalai Banana distinguishes between the Bible and what he is observing because this “civic religion” has very little to do with Biblical Christianity. Note the following passage from Acts 2:
“42They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. 43Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. 44All the believers were together and had everything in common. 45Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. 46Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, 47praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.”
Here we do not have a political system (although some have tried to do so) but a description of the community that ought to be the case for Christians. As an evangelical I note from this passage that true evangelism (“the Lord added to their number”) stems from the outworking of a healthy community of believers.
I recall someone once saying that if you removed Christianity from the world in one day, then you also remove most of the relief and humanitarian work as well. I am not sure where I read it, but I do recall some phenomenal percentage of this planet’s charity is handled by Christian organisations.
So, yes, there is a place for the Church. In fact, I love the Church. But I am also very, very angry at her.
I agree that most churches and indeed most Christians do not participate in the “political posturing” that we see around us, however, the yelling and screaming of the few always seems to outweigh the contemplation and inner spirituality of the many. And this yelling and screaming becomes the ugly face of the Church to the world. And will continue to be until the wider Body stands up and speaks out against these “Family Values Cults”.
And yes, I am a little bitter and cynical. I, unfortunately have allowed myself to be another quality product from the makers of the nuclear family and the evangelical church.
The same church of which was written, “the gates of hell will not prevail against it”.
The same church that can’t get itself together to prevail against “microwave dinners and teenage pop idols”.
But, like you, I do my part. I still actually tithe to the Church that threw me out… Hillsong Church. I haven’t lived in Sydney for 4 years, yet I still tithe there via mail. I, too, support third world children, one in Haiti and one in Ethiopia through Compassion.
So I do still love the Church. I always have. But I will still speak out against what she does to destroy people, in spite of all the good she does.
If we weighed it all up, her virtues would probably outweigh her sins. However, as I have stated, these are MY experiences of the Church. I share only my position based on my experiences here. Your experience of church not spewing forth politics is, unfortunately not my experience of church, where political posturing has been almost universal. And I have been to alot of churches.
Again, to answer another of your questions, I am looking for a church, and yes, she doesn’t have to be perfect. But she does have to welcome me as I am, not coerce change on my part, and be willing to fellowship with me “warts ‘n all”. God may change me and soften my stance over time. But it will be He that does it. Not the Church.
An old analogy of “kissing a lot of toads to find a prince” applies in my search for a church home. However, it is difficult to bring yourself to keep kissing the toads after three decades of abuse (sexual, physical, emotional) by the toads. You soon find that the hypothetical prince is hardly worth any more abuse from the toads.
Bit, I assure you that I will keep kissing those toads anyway, but I will find the Church that fits my needs eventually.
The focus (or at least intent) of my message was appreciation for Dalai’s thoughts on tradition. Instead, I seem to have evoked defensiveness over one element of a larger essay.
Does anyone have thoughts in the general neighborhood of the core topic, as I see it:
How do you (each of you) find rootedness in a spiritual or philosophical tradition, in a society arguably lacking incentives toward community cohesion, contemplation, and tradition? 🙂
My pastor was asked recently what the most difficult part of being a pastor was and his response was the fear of despair when people were attacking him. It wasn’t the attacks themselves but his own reaction that he was most concerned about.
We all long for authentic community and we so often do not find it. But, we need to realize that in that longing we are participating in what Scripture calls the fellowship of Christ’s suffering. So, how do we keep from despair? By inculcating the nearness of God. People cannot be a replacement for this fellowship. In fact,it is utterly unfair to expect it of others. Mike has it right by putting the word contemplation right next to community cohesion. Because they are hand in glove. By having the vertical relationship in hand then the horizontal can be built one relationship at a time.
Sorry Mike A, if I came across as defensive, I think I caught myself on a bad day.
Good question though…
How do you (each of you) find rootedness in a spiritual or philosophical tradition, in a society arguably lacking incentives toward community cohesion, contemplation, and tradition? 🙂
It is quite a dilemma. Some would say that the structure of society (the industrial revolution-bred Protestant work ethic) is not condusive to community cohesion, contemplation and tradition. But like all traditions, there are always ways of adapting. That is another great achievement of humanity… the ability to adapt, not neccessarily to environment change, but to philosophical or religious change. But one of the interesting phenomena of the last 40 years has been the integration of spirituality and lifestyle. The technological, sociological and even psychological changes of this last century have not quashed spirituality (which I propose may be at the core of many views of community, contemplation and tradition), but, rather, the form of spirituality has changed to meet them. Where paticular religious rituals and beliefs don’t fit the relevance of the times, they have declined, and others have come to fill the void.
The Church has often been accused of not being relevant to it’s time, and that may be the case. But other religious and spiritual movements have risen to meet the challenges of the modern western lifestyle. Eastern traditions of yoga, Falun Gong, mysticism, Buddhism, paganism and some of the more fringe elements of Islam, Christianity and Judaism have sought to see the survival of their traditions by relaxing some customs that have been seen as not relevant to the times. This, in the case of Christianity raises serious concerns in some as being “Gnostic” or bowing “absolutes” to the idol of “Relativism”. Was the ministry of Jesus itself not revolutionary and, in part, a reaction against a brand of Judaism that was seen to be “not working” in it’s time? If Jesus had have arrived during the reign of David or Solomon, would His message have been quite the same? If Jesus had not have arrived until now… it would be interesting what the content of the message would be.
And this is where I come to a clash with conservative Christianity. I believe that his message may not be the same as it was back then. There are incredible principles and messages in his words from the First Century that carry through to today. Unfortunately, the Bible is a very old book, and the context it was written, edited and distributed in at the time is not perfectly clear.
So, back to tradition, community cohesion and contemplation… the path, I believe has always been an individual one. A movement will always exclude someone, if not by decree, then by circumstance. All movements, by their very nature, need to exclude someone. Then are there no absolutes? I am not sure. That is one question I will need to explore further.
And how does one mesh tradition into a modern context? By risking the possibility that what they personally believe may not match what their movement publishes in it’s Statement of Faith. Out of this dilemma are born some incredible people… Buddha, Martin Luther, John Wesley, General Booth, Josepth Smith (an interesting example, but his impact has been big), and even new movements such as the Metropolitan Community Church, Gay Quakers, Tolerance and many other splinter groups and para-church organisations. Where the broader Body is not meeting a need, a new movement sprouts to fill that need. That the Church is a staid and tradition-bound entity betrays it’s history. The Church was very different in AD1 than it was in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the 1600’s and even now. Each fitted it’s time (to a degree), and when it was no longer a relevant force, it was impacted by factions and splinter groups.
The same principle can be applied to the individual. Where the church fails to serve a people group, new traditions are birthed. So, the individual, rather than taking the position of the Israelites at the foot of Mount Sinai, who were too scared to approach God themselves and instead asked Moses to do it for them, can bravely climb the mountain and approach God themselves, from their own perspective.
Strangely enough, when people, even conservative Christians, do this (Jesse Duplantis, Benny Hinn and others in our current age are examples) they rarely come back the same, and their life changes, their routine changes, and they are start something new… a new movement, a new slant on the Christian message that applies to their given situation. Given, they then largely turn this into rules and behavioural codes for the rest of us, but the principle remains the same. When a man of God approaches God on his own, and within his own context, fresh revelation abounds.
And new traditions are born. New revelation to complete upon is given. And new communities soon grow out of those who share that revelation of understanding.
I hope some of that made sense… I am just writing it as I am thinking it (most of it for the first time)… you just gotta love the spontenaity of of writing in this medium…
I’ve actually heard it argued that Christ’s teachings were not that revolutionary. Isaiah called people to the spirit of the Law as well (all that stuff about God desiring justice over offerings). In terms of his moral teachings, Jesus seems more like that often-unwelcome voice inside you that says, “You know that’s not the REASON why that rule was put there!”
(It could be said that it was Christ’s ministry of healings and other things that pointed to His Messiahship, and his death on the cross, which were really revolutionary, along with the coming of the Holy Spirit. Maybe the sudden and radical phenomenon of the Christian church in the 1st century could be attributed to the arrival of this “helper”, as Christ promised.)
From what I’ve seen, the issue of gender and sex, and how the two relate to eachother (marriage, etc.), and whether the former should even exist, has never been given as much attention as now. Some would argue that the “incredible principles and messages in his words from the First Century that carry through to today” include a rather central understanding of gender as part of humanity. The Bible doesn’t shy away from talking about sex, men and women. There’s heaps of stuff on it, even in the earliest parts of Genesis (some of which Christ himself apparently referred to).
So what concerns me is that, in meshing Christ into our modern context, we risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Are we trying to challenge our society (as Christ did) or appease it? It must be said that, to some, this boundary is crossed on the road between love of a person and approval of their choices. The challenge, and it’s a HUGE challenge for me, is how to demonstrate love to people who won’t accept it without the additional approval of their choices. I was one of them!
Sure, we can look into it, but we shouldn’t expect everyone to jump on board with every attempt at “relevance”. It seems to me that for every splinter group and faction that has helped further the kingdom of God in the long run, there have been more which have come close to halting it, and whose loyal followers have been left with nothing but a shattered faith. Some people are a little cautious, and we can hardly condemn them for being so.
i have never heard more of the truth of my mother religon.