Tradition
When I was a child, it seemed as though everything and everybody was older than I was. To my young brain, it seemed as if everything had existed for hundreds of years before I came along—the church, the school, the roads, the bridges. To me, all teachers, priests and adults were ancient and I was the only newcomer. And it seemed as if all things were done just because it had always been done that way.
To me, traditions were something that I kept up because… well, just because. Often times, I was not given a reason why certain things were done they way they were done. They just were. But as I grew up, I noticed that not all things stayed the same. My family kept up certain practices and let go of others. Sometimes we changed things around. This did not sit well with my inflexible and stubborn younger self. I kept waiting for lightning to strike and for the earth to swallow me up, but nothing happened. And eventually, I realized that the beautiful thing about traditions is that it wasn’t about buildings and roads and other lifeless objects. It was, in fact, about people. And the reason traditions change or stay the same is that people make it so.
This became quite clear to me when I started working seven years ago. It had been my first job and I felt it was my duty to remain silent as I absorbed the school’s 50-year tradition, backed by the four hundred and fifty years of Jesuit tradition in education. What did a twenty-one year old know of anything? I wasn’t even an alumna. But as I stayed on, I realized that I had become part of the tradition. That its tradition wasn’t some dead thing we were all expected to venerate. It was alive and vibrant and open to what its current community of teachers and students and parents and priests had to offer. I had a voice and someone was listening. It became no longer just a place that I worked at but a culture that I was trying to promote. It wasn’t just about new buildings or bigger grounds (although it certainly has been a blessing); it was about carrying on a tradition of service and excellence.
Keeping traditions is not about handing down an unalterable formula from one generation to the next. It isn’t about keeping practices as pristine as possible until they become obsolete. Rather, it’s about taking something beautiful, adding on to it and perhaps even taking from it things that no longer work or no longer become significant. It’s about allowing things to grow and change insofar as they lead one closer to the original ideal. It’s about staying rooted to the past and at the same time welcoming the future to address the needs of the present. It’s a celebration of what we once were and a challenge of what more we could be.
Tradition isn’t about stagnation. It’s about transformation. It’s not just remembering history. It’s making history.
This coming weekend, on August 22-24,
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