Why Tradition?

Why work from within a particular tradition? This is a question that many ask today.  Why does one have to root their spiritual life in community?

Richard Rohr, a writer I am particularly fond of, points out that the goal of religion shouldn't be to take claim as the only access to the whole truth, but rather the teaching of religion should be who a particular religion offers access to universal truths (he uses how religion teaches universal wisdom).  I think this is right on.  

If this is correct, and no one faith tradition offers unique access to God and Truth, then why pick one?

In the end i think this is a question that must be answered by the individual that is asking it, but i offer a few way points for exploring the question.  

When we are in the village, on the right handed path, it is clear that the community as a whole reaches towards God, rituals are shared, spiritual questions are asked in the midst of conversations and dialogues.    Having a faith tradition grounding all this is key.  It is important to point out that each community makes its adjustments to the larger cannon of the faith (and by cannon i am speaking of the entirety of the faith system), but it needs boundaries and guidance from the history of the tradition, from the wisdom of its forefathers and foremothers.  There is no reason to recreate the wheel with every new generation.

I can speak for the christian tradition, it took about 200 years for Christianity to emerge as its own tradition, still grounded very much in the much older jewish traditions and also borrowing heavily from greek philosophical thought.  In a way Christianity wasn't a new tradition, it was just a kind of Hegelian Dialectic created from Greek thought and Jewish thought.  There is in many ways no new religions, each is based on something older. The Christian Old Testament (or the Tanakh) borrows heavily from older traditions, and in some places borrows books nearly word for word (see Old Testament Parallels).    Traditions continue to evolve and emerge, but they are always linked (at least the ones that stand the test of time) to older traditions.  As they adapt to the community that surrounds them, they speak to the needs and desires and wants and fears of that particular community.    It is important to acknowledge that faith traditions can easily get off track and lose sight of their purpose and hurt more than help.  Commitment to tradition, while being able to listen also to the community that surrounds that tradition, can help with this, if we learn to remove our ego, we listen better, and are less likely to allow the tradition to become distorted to greed and power.

For those of the left handed path, those out on the journey, it is harder to rationalize a need for a tradition, but grounded oneself in a tradition will get you farther along.  The major religions all have mystic traditions that serve those on the journey well.  If you have a tradition that you grew up with, you can use the grounding in tradition from an early age as a catapult to spiritual maturity, if you did not grow up with a tradition, find one that speaks well to the environments you know best.

Religion so often because a reason not to engage in spiritual discovery, and often times it can be a huge hurdle to discovery, particularly when it has been distorted by power structures.  Religion and tradition are key to greater success, they keep one grounded and rooted in tradition.  At some point in the journey you will be able to move past your tradition, but in doing so you will become more rooted in what you already know in your heart.  If you have no tradition to move past, you create for yourself a difficult mountain to surmount, one that you may never be able to summit.

Again, the answer for why a religious tradition is so important is really only understood later on, and by the person that is doing the asking, no answer i (or anyone really) can give will be entirely sufficient.

Positive feedback loop

We may be familiar with a negative feedback loop, like feedback from putting a microphone too close to it's PA's speakers.  Of course guitarists have learned to use this sort of feedback to their advantage.  There are positive feedback loops too, present in many of the crucial life cycles in nature, like the carbon cycle or the nitrogen cycle, it works properly, it is self sustaining.

There is a positive feedback loop in spirituality.  The role of a village spiritual center (ie church, mosque, temple) is spiritual care.  There are two major types of spiritual care (maybe more), that of the individual and that of the community as a whole (the community can be broken into sub groups like families and meta groups like nations, but they are essentially the same sort of thing).  By engaging in individual spiritual care, the individual goes into the community to provide care to the community.  When the community is cared for, more individuals seek personal self care.

In our modern Christian church, community care is often defined as Mission or evangelizing, and personal self care is sometimes termed salvation.    We are sometimes led to believe that evangelizing is strictly going out to spread the word of God, to talk about Jesus, to turn people into believers, to get them to gain salvation.   Salvation is often described as going to heaven.  

Jesus often talked about the Kingdom of Heaven as being here on earth, we hear it in the Lord's prayer,  "thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven".   Salvation is recognizing that and caring for earth here, salvation comes in service to others, and its not necessarily about going to heaven, but in making heaven here.  If we work to make our communities healthier, with better schools, better hospitals, better public safety, we are doing the work of God, we are in fact saving souls, saving them not only from poverty and the cycles that exist there, but we are saving the rich from the cycles of greed and corruption that can easily occur.  The more people are comfortable in their communities, the more likely they are to have better personal spiritual health, it is a positive feedback loop.  We get "saved" and help others, and others get "saved" and they help others and your return is a community that furthers your personal spiritual health.   We may become "saved" by having someone help us, we may become "saved" through the act of helping others, we may become "saved" through putting in the work, or the necessary suffering that often needs to occur.

This is not a perfect explanation, but it gets at a central theme.

We have allowed our definitions of salvation and heaven to become things that are so unearthly that we can't relate to them any more -- except through disconnected models that close off the rest of the world. So many ask why our churches are shrinking, its because so many can see the detachment from anything real.  

If one is on the right handed path, get out into your community and serve!   If one is on the left handed path, get out and serve where ever you are.  Its so easy for a community to become disconnected, but through the basic act of helping someone, you may offer that needed "salvation".   It is not about what you say, it doesn't matter what you say, it matters what you do.    Christ wasn't calling us to be "Christians".  Christ was calling us to Love.

This is at its center a Christian understanding, using Christian words and theology, but it resonates at some level through all religions.  There is a central message that Religions form around, they each make  up there words for it, their terms their definitions, their rituals, but the central message is still there, somewhere, but it is so easy to lose track, to lose the central message, what it is God is telling us.   If you are not christian, fill in the terms that make sense to you, if you are atheist, you can't deny that at some level this still makes sense, love the community and individuals benefit, love individuals and the community can benefit.  

Lets get over the religious rhetoric about salvation and heaven, lets just get out there and do what we know is in our hearts, to spread love, whether that love is food or books or medicine or a listening ear or whatever it is, we have to spread Love, it is what we are called to do.

Surrender

The goal of religion is in many ways to get us to get over ourselves and get over are own ego and put our trust in something bigger than ourselves. It's been said that in the west our egos are too big, too tough, too hard to break though, like the rich man who turned away from Christ. The wealth we accumulate only pads our ego, making it harder to break.

For those on the right handed path, living in community, being humble with others, leads to diminishing ego, caring about others in the village leads to God in many ways.

For those of us on the left handed path our egos are broken in travel, during lonely nights during hard times, yet also when things work out when we never expected them to. Look back at your own journey so far, can't it be miraculous sometimes, doesn't it speak to something larger, whether it was the kindness of strangers or luck in stumbling across something immensely beautiful?

I think of the man who picked me up hitch hiking in the middle of no where Ireland and brought me all the way to Galway, at least at hour's drive. Or a jazz club in the basement of a bar in Paris that I stumbled across while following folks from the hostel I was staying in, where Parisians sang jazz standards at an open mic, or the sunset over the bayous of Louisiana, a place I never expected to live. In our journeys, if we don't let them lead us someplace we weren't expecting, someplace we never planning, often in absolute contrast to our best plans, then we never get to truly experience, we never get to be led, we spend our lives in our heads, and not out in the world. We have to overcome ourselves almost before we can do anything.

holding on

we can't hold on to tightly to the path we are on.  If we hold on too tightly to the right handed path, for those in the village, we close off to those that come from the outside and might have something useful to say.  At the same time, those on the left handed path are challenged in the same way.  If those on the left handed path hold on too tightly to the journey, and are unwilling to live within villages from time to time, to share our stories, then we fail to make the journey valuable, it becomes a selfish endeavor, in the same way villages wall themselves off.

We must constantly strive to share and to welcome others, particularly those we are not used to.

This does not mean we should try and convert the other, or to hold no respect for the other's view, even when we don't agree, we must move to something deeper, a place where sharing can occur, where both feel closer to wholeness as a result of the encounter, pride and self preservation must be set aside.

Only when we can allow ourselves to be removed can we truly begin to share and welcome.