From Marjorie Hewitt Suchoki's book God's Presence: Theological Reflections on Prayer:
Tradition is like the crest of a wave always pushing beyond itself. Faithfulness to a tradition is not gained through treading water in repetition of some aspect of the past, but through swimming with the crest into fresh interpretations of God's gracious presence with us. The tradition is a living, fluid thing. Thus to use the texts and the tradition as a formative matrix for our knowledge of God is not to find an ironclad rule that determines what we can think. Rather, it is to find commonalities that not only shape how we think about the God we experience, but that also invite the questions born of faith. We know God through God's presence to us, and we interpret this presence through categories given to us through our communities of faith. But the personalization of these categories may in fact be part of their transformation in the ongoing process of a living tradition. Thus there is necessarily a certain openness in what we dare to call our knowledge of God. It is fluid--perhaps like God's own self. (p. 11)
2 comments:
I've come to understand tradition not as form but as content. We seem to get hung up on the form and completely lose the content or purpose behind the tradition. I sometimes wonder if communion would mean more if we used something like tomatoes picked by migrant workers and Indian flatbread--folks who know what sacrifice is all about.
I sometimes wonder if communion would mean more if we used something like tomatoes picked by migrant workers and Indian flatbread--folks who know what sacrifice is all about.
I like that idea. Admittedly, for me, the whole communion tradition as it is practiced seems rather stale. I realize that my perception of this probably doesn't match that of most Christians (although perhaps not Quakers, who don't do communion.) But I think that what you suggest would imbue it with meaning and also connect the faith with the social justice tradition.
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