The Weary March |
| Posted by Mark (mark) on Jun 24 2008 at 2:14 PM |
It was hot. Stifling even. Waves of tremulous heat combed the horizon; every nook and cranny baked in languid submission. Even the shade of the sparse grove—where a young boy and his father walked—trembled with perspiring oak and leaf. The shadows once dark and cool, seemed grey, listless and permeated with searing air. Yet the boy and his father wore heavy black linen from head to foot. Black hat, pants and coats. Only their cotton shirts and dull grey suspenders pierced the monotony. They mopped their burnt brows hastily and almost continually.
Simon and his father Eli stood and watched them from a distance. They had seen the wave-like undulation of black hats forge through that grove every Sunday for as long as they could remember. Whether baked in summer’s greatest furnace, or bitten by winter’s cruelest blast, there they were, always wearing black, plodding along the same well-worn path.
“Dad?” croaked Simon rather wearily, almost hypnotized by the heat, “Why don’t they wear shorts on a day like today?”
“It’s traditional for them,” replied Eli concisely, avoiding any great exertion of energy.
“Is that why they don’t walk along the river on the way to church too?” Simon knitted his moist brow, “Cause that would be much cooler with those big trees shading it, and not much out of their way.”
“I’m not certain, but I imagine it’s just habit,” Eli paused and took an uncomfortable draught of the stuffy air, “I suppose when one lets tradition rule him, it spills over into many things.”
“Do we have any traditions?”
“Everybody has traditions, and new traditions are forged quite regularly,” Eli smiled with lazy scarlet lips as he thought of his own history.
“Is that a bad thing or a good thing?” queried Simon rather innocently.
Eli slowly turned his head and looked at his boy, as though he were gingerly wading into some unknown ocean, or conversation perhaps. “Neither son,” he replied softly. “I’ve seen the worst of tradition and the best of it, and the problem is never so much the tradition, as the man.”
A quizzical look abruptly ran through Simon’s now sun-stained crimson face. A pulse of curiosity had certainly run through him. “What do you mean?”
“Son, tradition cannot be a source of life, there is only one source. Until a man learns that, tradition will always go bad; until a man understands a vine and branches, and what the vine is and isn’t, he will always make tradition into something it can never be, and he will always demand from it, and look for in it, what it cannot give him.” Then a gleam of unadulterated excitement brought Eli’s weary eyes to life, “Until a man understands intimacy,” he paused to invest the term with great impetus, “tradition will be death, and will rule him—in one way or another; either willingly or unwittingly, but it will.”
Questions were fomenting within young Simon and soon boiled to the surface. “How can they be a good thing then—I mean for these two over there?” he pointed with tired fingers toward the father and son who were now a good deal past them, and still continually mopping their foreheads with thick black sleeves.
“There are traditions in many areas of life, and all of them need to be examined to see if they are useful, and what the heart lurking beneath them is. But in religious terms as we now talk, I would tell you that tradition is the wrestling of past generations with God—it is part of the path they walked. As such, there is much we can learn from it, but that doesn’t necessarily make it our path. They can’t become formulas for us to follow, as though God were manipulated in such silly ways, by such shallow hearts. It is great folly to reduce intimacy to this—and it is a great temptation to do so. But then, we have misunderstood the vine if we do this. Jesus did not leave us a set of formulas or propositions; he made a way to intimacy, and set up home in willing hearts; but will those hearts make a home in him? That is a very sobering question for each of us who claim faith.”
The sun beat down on the black clad backs of the two strangers, turning the deep black to a crimson brown in the sparkling eyes of Simon. “And what of them,” he cried pointing at their swaying figures in the distance, “What of their tradition?”
“I barely know my own heart, and have trouble discerning its motives, let alone two strangers whom I’ve never met,” replied Eli wistfully, the heat almost elongating his enunciations, “But I can tell you Simon, that when men do not know,” his voice rose with forceful emphasis, imbuing his last word with great depth, then he lingered silently for a moment and let the emphasis drape his son, before continuing softly, his words still deep with feeling, “When they don’t know intimacy they often use traditions to nullify that intimacy with the vine. Tradition in the hands of many men, has become the primary way we have a form of godliness but deny its power. Too often we form something in the image of the kingdom—a counterfeit” his voice cracked with solemn overtones, “—then sell it to other people who haven’t sorted out intimacy for themselves yet.”
Simon was fearfully thoughtful now. Images of his older brother who’d left home danced in his head. His mother often called him a prodigal. “Is that why Evan is a prodigal?”
“Well,” Eli looked to the horizon to catch a fleeting glimpse of those feathery crimson brown backs disappearing into the tremulous distance, “Sometimes when people discover their tradition is not the fount of life they were led to believe, they quickly grow tired of its tyranny over them and decide to rebel rather than be crushed.
“Don’t forget though, there is value in how our ancestors walked with God. Those who understood intimacy, produced much out of that forge. Only remember that those who do not understand intimacy, will almost always take what they’ve been given and re-shape it into rout formula, rather than discovering the heart. That is the kind of tradition that can be thrown out, for it will burn in the end anyway.”
“But isn’t mom always saying we shouldn’t throw out something just ‘cause it’s old?” There was a mild streak of protest in his words.
“Tradition should not be thrown aside willy-nilly, but it’s not the end of the world when impetuous youth do so, for they almost always need to, in order to walk their own path, and that path often brings them back to a place of examining those same traditions they so furiously denounced, but with new perspective and intimacy; it’s as though the traditions can be of no use (but a bondage) to them, until they have found the source of life for themselves. Until that point, the tradition will always seek to take the place of life’s fount, which it cannot fulfill. Afterward, they can examine it and learn from it, without growing reliant on it, or following it as their formulaic path.
“Son,” he said softly, his thoughtful words settling heavily into the languid air, “Strict and blind adherence to the traditions of men is death. You cannot walk with God presently in this fashion, you are only chasing degraded shadows of someone else’s intimacy with the vine.”
“And what of those men who cross our path each week? What happens to them?” Simon’s compassion brought a joyful grin to Eli.
“That is between them and the vine, but I suppose they need to ask themselves whether they truly have relationship with him, or if their relationship is instead with their tradition.”
