Human beings love antiquity, fetishize it even. That might seem like a strange thing to say here in the modern world so think for a moment.
How many New Age spirituality practices are supposedly (whether true or not) said to trace their lineage back to an ancient guru or teacher, and their legitimacy is staked on that link? Modern paganism claims to be a renewing of ancient pagan religions, and the most frequent criticism of it is that certain festival names were “made up” in the mid 20th century (how dare they)! Even Christianity, that megalith of splitting and diversity over tradition, went through what is called the “liturgical renewal movement” in the 1970s and the impetus of this movement? The rediscovery of a manuscript from the 400s CE which sparked a rush to “correct” the liturgical drift of 1600 years.
We are suspicious of things that are too new. Especially when it comes to intangible truths like ethics, spiritual movements, cultural traditions, or shared ritual. And some of this is natural. If we’re going to invest our time and energy in something we want to know that it has been tried before, that it has stood the test of time. No one likes being a guinea pig.
But there is no perfect mystical past. Our ancestors were not wiser than we, they did not live closer to the Divine truth just because of when they lived. There is not some perfect human anywhere in the past, we have been fallible and much as we are now since we first became distinctly human roughly 300,000 years ago.
But, some would argue, look at all those wise teachers who lived so long ago, like Buddha, Lao Tzu, or Jesus. But of course they all began where they were, building on what had come before but also saying their own new things which I’m sure others of their time dismissed as “modern.” It is only in long hindsight that we humans discover which teachings or traditions stick. We wouldn’t be practicing mindfulness here in the West if someone hadn’t been Buddha’s first follower back when it was all new.
And plenty of the traditions and wisdom we take for granted everyday started far more simply, perhaps in a specific family or community, and that new thing (thought up by an Aunt, an Elder, a group of children) lodged into cultural memory and endured. This is how all change is made, all timeless wisdom found.
My dears we are someone’s ancestor (even if never have children). We are the start of a tradition we might never guess at.
And there’s another (perhaps bigger) issue with fetishizing, or idolizing the past: we cannot criticize it. When we imagine that those who came before us somehow had a closer relationship to the Divine, a more pure understanding of truth, then we cannot criticize their teachings, writings, or practices. We are stuck.
However, if we realize that at every moment in time human beings have been doing the best they could with what they had, and have been using what they had to make sense of their world, then we are doing the same. And that means we (and the traditions passed down to us) can also change and grow.
I am a Christian priest (Episcopal) but I do a lot of inter-religious conversation and learning. And that work has shown clearly how the history of Christian violence, oppression, and the forced conversion of Jewish people is rooted in our scriptures. Both the Epistles (letters) and Gospels (to varying extents), and the way we read the scriptures we share with Jews. Because of my seminary training I am aware of the context behind the anti-Jewish bias in our scriptures. That intra-religious arguments (from when Jesus’ followers were all Jewish) and stories about those arguments took on a very different tone when those telling them were no longer Jewish. I understand the ways the early church sought to ingratiate themselves with Rome, and how their own trauma as they split from Judaism colored the stories they told and how they told those stories.
Two thousand years later much of that context is invisible to the average Christian, and the antiJewish bias in our liturgy, scriptures, and traditions often is as well. But the harm is not. The result has been 1600 years of suffering for Jews at the hands of Christians. If we fall for the myth that our ancestors had some sort of special pure knowledge of God we might not see any way to critique those sacred stories in a way that could stop ongoing harm being done to Jews. (Or indigenous folk, Black folks, LGBTQIA+ folk, etc.)
However, if we let go of the myth that our spiritual or cultural ancestors had some sort of special perfect knowledge then we open up a world of possibility. We can engage with our sacred stories (scriptures in this case), traditions, rituals, and history as things we can critique and change. Instead of saying “what do you want me to do, it’s our scripture” when antisemitism is pointed out we can do something radical: we can change.
As I embark on a new season in my life, one outside of parish ministry this is a central part of my work. To critique it all, to find out what the tradition into which I was born, and in which I was raised, might look like if it sets the welfare of our neighbors, our nonhuman kin, our very world as our highest and central good.
It will mean naming places where we think our ancestors got it wrong as they made sense of their encounters with the Divine.
It will mean changing our liturgies to honor the voices of all members of our community, women, children, disabled people, queer folk, BIPOC folk. Even, or especially, if that means departing from historic precedent.
It will mean being open to listening, and learning, and most importantly to changing the way we think, we talk, we show up in the world.
But this is good news. Because if our ancestors did have perfect knowledge we would be doomed to never match them or their relationship with the Divine. Because we are not them, we cannot be. We can never go back. We do not even read the same way they read. Our context, the ocean in which we swim, is so different that even if we were handed a perfect record of their liturgy, or their complete theology it wouldn’t belong to us, it wouldn’t fit who we are.
It wouldn’t be authentic for us to try to recreate the practices of another people or another time, even if it were possible. This is true for my ancestral Celtic practices. First because they have simply been lost. What remains was recorded by much later people who were recording stories and legends of another culture as a curiosity, or even out of the hope of preserving them, not the people themselves. And because I am not my ancestors. As a 21st century white woman (descended from mostly Scottish ancestors) living on stolen land half a world away I simply cannot reproduce their culture, myths, or connection to their land.
The good news is, we don’t have to.
There is nothing wrong with new things, or redesigning older things for our context, we have after all done it already, we just move the goal post. The an early church leader (who may or may not have been Paul) tells “slaves to be obedient to their masters” (In letters to the Ephesians and Colossians). But despite that almost all modern Christians would say that slavery is wrong and that clearly the author of those letters was part of a different culture and context.
And this is my invitation, to you and to myself and to all of us together. To carefully examine what we have had passed down to us by our ancestors (in so many ways and parts of life) and decide what still serves the good, and what it is time to let go and remake.
