Aging Beautifully
It is an imperative of many industries and fields to be “current,” offering the latest features and the newest models. In fields like medicine, being up to date is decidedly important, as innovations and new research often provide life-saving treatments. Yet, in other areas, from Top 40 songs to car commercials, newness is treated as a virtue and selling point that requires no outside explanation. What is newer simply must be better.
There is certainly a wide variety of opinions about how the Church should or should not “adapt” to changing times. Due to its reverence for tradition and ritual, the Church is often cast as “stuffy;” thus, it follows that the push to “update” our methods or soften our stances on thorny current issues is often cast as the best way to reach people in the present. Yet, to take measures such as those I mention is to look for answers outside the Church, when all of the newness and life we seek has always been and always will be available to us through the sacraments.
The sacraments teach us the ultimate lesson about the essential roles of both “old” and “new” in Catholic life. They have been passed down from Christ Himself, yet their graces are available to us anew every day. How could these slices of eternity on earth ever be called “stuffy”?
The Church offers both constant renewal and the richness of tradition, both in their fullness. Thomas Merton writes about the role of tradition in the Church: “The living Tradition of Catholicism is like the breath of a physical body . . . As the physical act of breathing keeps the soul united to a material body whose very matter tends always to corrupt and decay, so Catholic tradition keeps the Church alive under the material and social and human elements which will be encrusted upon it as long as it is in the world.”
In other words, tradition is the instrument for animating the Church in the present, preserving Her power in a constantly changing world whose desire to remain “current” creates a throwaway culture, not a dependable and nourishing model for living. Merton continues: “And yet this tradition must always be a revolution because by its very nature it denies the values and standards to which human passion is so powerfully attached.”
In the introduction to his spiritual autobiography, “Orthodoxy,” G. K. Chesterton previews the story of his conversion by telling a tale of a sailor. A sailor sets out from England to discover a new land; and when he finally reaches the shoreline of his paradise, he is both shocked and consoled. This land is fresh and dreamy, yet it has the comfort of home. As it turns out, he has unknowingly sailed away from, and then back to England. He has ended where he began, seeing his home’s beauty with new eyes, and rejoicing to be in a place that is “the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure.”
If Chesterton is the sailor in this tale, his “England” is the Church. Having gone away from her, Chesterton grew to love her for the way she is always renewing and full of delights to be discovered, and always monolithic and imbued with the security of home.
So let us remember the beauty of belonging to the Church who, in her wisdom, has remained steadfast in her teachings and practices for 2,000 years, yet offers us the sacraments that grant life-giving grace whenever we receive them. Let us love the Church for her liveliness and for her age . . . she does age beautifully, doesn’t she?
