INTRO
Knowing the physics of flight -- how lift, drag, and thrust work to get a body off the ground -- is not the same as watching the ground drop below you as the clouds surround you.
Knowing what musical modes are and being able to tell someone John Coltrane used these in innovative ways to push free jazz forward is not the same as putting an intuition in your soul into notes in the air for anyone with ears to hear.
Knowing the Queens Gambit or what a force out is in baseball is not the same as besting a worthy opponent in Chess or feeling your legs take you somewhere your conscious mind may not even know you need to go so you can feel the ball hit your glove and throw where you should to get an out for your team.
And knowing that Jesus said do not worry, and love your enemies, is not the same as feeling the lightness of trust take root in your gut or feeling bitterness lose its grip on your chest.
Some things, you have to practice to understand.
So in this series, we hope to help you practice your faith so you can know salvation.
This time we explore how practicing a Tradition, might do so much more than keep you in touch with the past. It might just launch you into a new future.
STORY
This episode is about Tradition and Progress. And to to talk about that I'm going to tell you more of the story of your smartphone. A fuller story, that doesn't begin with Steve Jobs walking into a room full of engineers and telling them I want my personal computer and all my music in my pocket. I'm going to tell you the story as it begins with Plato and Aristotle.
And my version starts with Plato and Aristotle. With the emphasis on that tiny word "and," because the way this part of the story has been told for centuries now tends to frame it as Plato or Aristotle. You listen to many people introduce these two pillars of thought and culture and the teacher facilitating the introduction will probably make you feel like you have to choose a side: Team Plato, or Team Aristotle.
But while there are significant differences between these two, before we start picking sides, it might serve us well to note where these differences came from.
And these differences were possible only because, before Aristotle became Aristotle, he was Plato's student.
From the ages of 18 to 37, Aristotle was part of Plato's Academy in the city of Athens. And during this time, Aristotle was not just Plato's student, he was Plato's best student, drinking in what Plato did so well.
And what Plato did so well was engage in a disciplined kind of conversation, where he and his partners would try to discover what they could say about things like Justice and Friendship and Love by painstakingly evaluating each and every word of each sentence and testing the relationships between each word and sentence to the other words and sentences. And Plato's most famous theory that came out of this was called the theory of the Forms, where Plato tried to discover and teach about the rational and eternal and unchanging shape of every true idea or thing.
So, for nearly 20 years -- That goes well beyond just taking a few courses from the same teacher, or watching all the videos on their Youtube channel -- Aristotle listened to Plato do what he characteristically did.
Engage in dialectical conversation
... And reason about the Forms
Over and over, Aristotle was there for it as Plato went through his dialogues with other thinkers, evaluating and testing different thoughts expressed in sentences and words, looking for rational insight, and talking about the abstract Forms.
Then shifting a word or replacing an idea and then reexamining the words and connections all over again.
Then from these particular ideas and arguments looking for abstract eternal truths.
Eternal forms and changing particular terms and definitions. Unchanging truths and ever-changing sentences and words. Back and forth, again and again, for decades.
And eventually Aristotle hit on a key innovation.
Aristotle thought:
If you switch out one of those words in the sentence, perhaps there is a way to keep you from having to start all over again and picking apart and testing each idea and reevaluating it's relationships to all the other words in the sentences. Aristotle started to realize that you can evaluate the validity of an argument according to a rational structure that could be separated from the particular words involved.
To take one of his most famous examples, consider the following argument:
All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
Socrates is mortal.
Apart from the particular words involved, this argument exemplifies a rational structure Aristotle names a "Syllogism." And you can change out now, any of the particular nouns and categories in any of these sentences... Change "men" to "roses" and "mortal" to "flowers":
All roses are flowers.
I am holding a rose.
Therefore I am holding a flower.
And if the structure holds, the argument does too. And you can trust this without having to go through pages and pages of back and forth arguments testing the new connections, which tended to be Plato's method.
These examples are not meant to prove to you anything you don't already know. Pretty sure you could already figure out if you're holding a rose, you're holding a flower and that Socrates died. These are intentionally simple examples so you don't get distracted by the particular arguments.
Because the key points here are that 1) Aristotle combined Plato's work on universal forms and particular arguments in a new way. And this integration is what distinguished Aristotle from his teacher.
And point 2) this integration helped people recognize and use a rational structure that exists and works independently of the particular words used to express the argument.
Now, to get back to moving this story forward, Aristotle's outlining of this kind of structure, plus the development of a handful of rules to govern its use, was the birth of Logic.
A little after Aristotle did his work, a man named Euclid started to look for ways Aristotle's logical structures could help us explore not just human reasoning, but physical space.
Where Aristotle separated logic from the actual words we use to think and argue, Euclid abstracted shapes into things like triangles and ellipsis and trapezoids, to reason about the nature of the space in which we live and the forms that fill it up. For example: without human intervention, a perfect triangle rarely occurs in nature, if at all. A triangle does not equal a mountain. But thinking about triangles can help us reason about a landscape.
And Euclid's advancement of Aristotle's work was the birth of Geometry.
But, if you were to open Euclid's book, Elements -- it would not look the way you probably expect a Geometry textbook to look. Instead of formulas and equations, it is filled with diagrams representing shapes and space set within large blocks of text containing sentences and propositions exploring the principles and talking through the calculations. To us, Euclid's work might look like an odd mix of math and philosophy.
This is how Geometry was done, all the way up until the 17th century, when a French philosopher named Rene Descartes mastered what Euclid taught, and started to think that there might be a better way write all this stuff out.
Descartes was the one who invented what we now call, after him, "Cartesian Coordinates" - which is the way you learned in Middle school to think about space as a graph with an x axis, y axis, and a z axis.
Descartes also developed a way to present and work out Geometric reasoning with algebraic notation, with x, y, and z standing for variables and A, B, and C for known quantities, etcetera.
This, in the 1600s, almost 2,000 years after Aristotle and Euclid, is when the way we do math shifted from using objects ranging from fingers and toes to diagrams and abacuses, to the kinds of formulas you are accustomed to. Descartes contribution is why, if you walk into a college physics or mathematics class room you expect to see on the whiteboards or projection screens not blocks of text, but equations.
And this way of doing math, and representing and thinking about things like gravitational pull and friction and velocity is what allowed mathematicians to develop calculus, and then to begin to escape spatial reasoning and it's limitations altogether, and this allowed mathematics to make more and more progress in it's own field.
But mathematical reasoning also got more and more abstract.
The gap between the abstract reasoning and notation and most people's every day experience is still why, so many who are not trained in math, look at a screen full of equations and think, "Really? What does that have to do with planets and car crashes and why I don't float up off the floor?"
And as this storyline progresses, this gap grows wider and wider.
The abstraction got so severe, that in the early 1900s, most academics considered pure math, or mathematical logic, to be the most practically useless school of thought. It's hard to imagine now, with all our emphasis on STEM education, but the world of concrete objects and the world of math had seemed to veer so far away from each other that if some bright young freshmen, say in 1908, were to tell their parents they had decided to major in mathematical logic, it would be like a student today telling their parents they'd decided to major in poetry or painting. "That's great, but how are you going to make a living doing that?"
This was the case until the 1930s, when a man named Claude Shannon wrote a paper titled, "A Symbolic Analysis of Switching and Relay Circuits." And what Shannon did in this paper was like what Aristotle did, but in the other direction.
Remember, Aristotle took concrete words and sentences and ideas and arguments and started to intuit the abstract structure running through them. And over time the abstract reasoning of mathematicians and logicians and the actual things of our everyday experiences seemed to get further and further away from each other.
The insight that drove Shannon's paper, finally turned the direction back toward physical things. Shannon's thought, which at this time was unheard of and strange, was that the highly abstract symbols used by logicians and mathematicians could be used to analyze and organize the structure of things like wires and switches.
And once Shannon figured out how to use Logic to arrange and structure circuits, a switch - and I mean something like the toggle switch on your wall - and some wires could do more than just turn a lightbulb on or off. Arranged the way Shannon outlined, switches and wires could mirror human thinking.
Once Shannon made this connection, it allowed people to take centuries of work done by mathematicians and logicians and write this onto more and more complex circuits that could mirror more and more complex logical operations, like arithmetic, then multiplication and division and then calculus.
Then, in the 1940s engineers advanced these circuits into transistors, and then over the next 80 years the industry has figured out how to make transistors smaller and smaller and to cram more and more of these little logical calculating units into less and less space.
For example, in 2016 your iPhone had about 3.3 billion transistors in it. In 2021, 5 years later, if you have an iPhone 12, your phone has about 11.8 billion transistors in it.
And that's why your phone seems so scary smart. Not just because it has so many little electronic logic units in it, but because, in another important sense, it has Claude Shannon and Descartes and Euclid and Aristotle and Plato in it.
So this talk isn't really about Aristotle or logic or your smartphone. This is about Tradition and progress.
The way the story is told, we are often made to feel like it is tradition or progress, and we must choose a side. But Aristotle would not have advanced his logic if he hadn't first deeply internalized the reasoning of his teacher, Plato.
And Euclid would not have been Euclid without taking in Aristotle. And Descartes would not have made his advances if he hadn't immersed himself in the work of Euclid that came before. And iPhones would not be in your pocket it Shannon hadn't deeply engaged the tradition of logic and math that he inherited.
So, in the conversation that follows, Julius and I begin to explore how to overcome the either/or between tradition and progress, to set us up to be able to use tradition in a way that can help us face some the greatest questions and issues pressing on people of faith in our day.
DISCUSSION
Julius: Welcome back to “All Things.” [Laughs] That was like a radio announcer tone. Or uh. Morning talk show. This is Julius and Wil… your favorite hosts? No, we're not…
Wilson: [Laughs] Yeah, it's staying in.
Julius: Get that out of the way. Anyway, but so just listening to the story—it's a story about the relationship, right, between tradition and progress—and it seems to inherently outline these two, um…pitfalls, I guess. So one of them, I see, with traditionalism, is that a rote and static traditionalism that isn't open to conversation or change or being repositioned, um…
Wilson: Development, even?
Julius: …development, yeah, greatly inhibits the possibility of, um, progress– of progress that that can lead to truly good things. But on the flip side of that, um, in conversation with that is that there is no moving forward or innovation without deeply valuing or internalizing the tradition.
So I'd love to hear more about um… about what you have to say about those two issues, right? Between tradition and progress, which I think that our culture can so easily pit against each other, and that there's really a move to reject tradition. Like, just the other day I was on Instagram and there was a, there's a photo that was reposted and the caption, the, the text was something like: “Tradition: peer pressure from dead people.”
Which is funny, but… not, not every— it's not quite everything. I think there's just like… I think we've internalized that, “Oh, tradition has done such bad things,” that all tradition should be rejected and um. Yeah I’d love to hear some more move, moving away from that a little bit…
Wilson: Yeah, it seems like you've got some good stuff to say on it too, so I'll, I'll open it up and then, and then we'll bring that in. Because I mean, there was definitely two movements, even to your question there. So there’s just the issue of a rote traditionalism, which will be pretty easy to talk about.
W-we'll do that pretty quickly. And then where you started to take that was, why does this matter and why would we, why would people see it this way? Which are, I mean, that's what this is about, so let's go. The, for… now, I said, this shouldn't be that hard to see, right?
A rote traditionalism doesn't move, doesn’t go anywhere. And, and life moves… right? I mean, just like any, any organism, any, any human being, any animal—if it doesn't move through the world, it's, it's going to die. If it just sits there, it's going to run out of energy and it's going to return to dust.
Similarly, with tradition, if it moves into a traditional “-ism”—now, that's one thing just to make sure, as far as like hearing and comprehending, there's, we're using those as two different terms. There's a healthy tradition, but there's a different, like, a kind of a cancerous form or a a distortion of tradition would be traditional “-ism”. And that's that— “Just sit still,” and that would be the equivalent of, “Well, just plop yourself on a comfy couch. Don't eat anything. Don't drink anything and see what happens.” No life, no processing, no, no taking something good from the environment and incorporating it into yourself and using, turning that to energy to go somewhere. You know, dead tradition.
So to get concrete with it, look: if Plato had only ever parroted—or I’m sorry, if Aristotle had only ever parroted his teacher Plato, Aristotle would not have become Aristotle… and logic as a school of philosophy would not have begun to develop in the West if Aristotle hadn't taken what he learned and done something with it.
If Euclid hadn't taken what he learned from Aristotle and incorporated that into “Well, what do we, how do we think about space? And, and shape?” Right? “And how does that map onto the world? And how could that provide a helpful map?”
If, if Aristotle, I mean, if Euclid hadn't learned what Aristotle was, was doing and then applied it in a new way, furthered it, took it somewhere it hadn't been before, then we wouldn't have moved in that…we wouldn't have geometry. And then on and on. You know.
If Euclid hadn't done that, Descartes couldn't have done what Decartes did. If Descartes hadn't done what he did, logisticians couldn't have done what they did and Shannon couldn't have done what he did. And now your iPhone is a worthless hunk of, I don't know… batteries or whatever.
Julius: Right.
Wilson: Or w-I mean, we don't even get to that point. There is no iPhone in your pocket…
Julius: You can't even fathom what it is. It’s not a possibility.
Wilson: Exactly. A calculator isn't even a little electronic thing, a calculator is still a human—it’s a job title. Which is actually historically what it was before this. A calculator is a person that sits down and does the calculations. Right? So rote traditionalism, like this is, this is where it goes.
Wilson: But now that being said, I think culturally, there are a lot of folks that are just ready to hear that. But now Julius, maybe open that up— like, why does this, why does this matter? And why does it seem like such a tempting option for so, so many people?
Julius: Yeah, I th-I think that's an important distinction that you made there between tradition and traditional “-ism,” where we love the…where traditional “-ism” is, kind of, making an idol and misplacing too much love and just being too precious about the tradition in such a way that you close yourself off to being repositioned or to critique, really, that, um…
And I, I understand where the resistance to tradition comes from… and when people say that, I think that they're pushing back against certain traditions. I don't think that they would push back against all of it. Like I. I could probably name that when, when people circulate something like “Ah tradition… tradition is just peer pressure from dead people,” that what they're calling out is stuff like, um, I don't know… I-I do know. That, I mean, they're calling out things like, okay, the tradition of white supremacy, or nationalism, or like, um, exclusion in the church, or um… a number of things that have done violence to many marginalized groups of people, because “That's just the way that we've done things,” quote unquote, in this country, in this organization. Um.
And to that, I think it's, it's important for the listener— I hope that you hear us in saying that we believe that any tradition, whether that has to do with religious tradition or tradition in the arts, or like in any significant field or meaningful, um, area of life that a tradition… for a tradition to be healthy and good, it must be open to conversation and critique and being reshaped.
And that the question must…like, we also, as much as we love the Christian tradition, we are people who seek to constantly be asking and like be willing to, like, receive new answers and insight as to, “Okay, is this… can this change to be more loving? Is this something that is violent and needs to be done away with?” Like, we do want to ask those questions.
Wilson: But, shifting back and talking about traditional “-ism,” uh you see that even in the tradition of Jesus. Like, Jesus calls people out for that in the gospels, uh.
One example is actually part of the inspiration for my son's oldest name. So, my oldest son is named Corbin— I started thinking about that as a name in high school when I was reading the Gospel of Mark and I encountered this Aramaic word, Corbin, that, you know, the term there as Jesus is using it, was part of a tradition at the time that had a good intent and a good beginning, that you would take something and you would label it Corbin, designate it Corbin, which means a gift devoted to God.
Julius: Hmm.
Wilson: And so this was a healthy way of, you know, incorporating things into worship and honoring God with things of genuine value. But the tradition got twisted and spun to where, you know, he, he uses this to some of the people of his day who are all about the kind of dead traditional “-ism”— well… they were about the tradition, but now Jesus is saying, but in a way that this is a dead traditional-ism, it's stagnant because you have a fine way of twisting, you know, using your human traditions to, uh, to twist the desires of God…
Because what they were doing is, like, taking money that could be used to help their aging parent or help a widow and saying, “Well, it's Corbin. I can't give it to you. It's devoted to God.” So using kind of a loophole in a, in a twist there. Um. And when you're looking at traditional “-ism,” I think it can cut several different ways in contemporary contexts to contemporary folks.
There are many that are just… and, and, you know. It very well could be that you intuit something that just seems off the rails or seems out of whack, or that, you know, that seems to be called progress but you're not so sure it is progress. The temptation there is to just dig your heels in and get stuck into a traditional “-ism” to fight it.
But I just want to say, like, we get the temptation, but it's a temptation. And that's, that's digging in and it's not the positive way forward. Um. And so. But then on… there are other folks, right, that because of the way tradition has been misused—and I'm convinced so much of this, so much of this comes down to just broken trust, which gets into a whole lot of other issues— but, but ways where the power and the authority of tradition has been misused… which I think that's where we're going in a little bit in this conversation about like, “What are the real goals? What are the real purpose of these?” So we'll get to that.
But, but when the power… like tradition is powerful, it creates a whole lot of momentum and gives direction to so much of human culture and innovation, thinking, art. So powerful. But when it gets— and it can be twisted though, like Jesus called them out for it—and, and when it gets twisted, hope gets shattered. Trust gets shattered. And when trust is broken, right, there, there can be this other move to the other side. So just like digging into dead traditionalism is, is a void—a pitfall—just totally living out of the broken trust, if it leads you to utterly rejecting tradition, is just another form of the same kind of pitfall.
Julius: Right.
Wilson: And I think what I would say— and I don't know that this would be directed to either one of the, any, anybody in either of those camps— but more the intent is to put it out there is kind of like, here's another example. And if you find this compelling—I would hope you would find this compelling—is just to note that looking back in, in healthy religious tradition, the tradition of art, uh, logic, the intersection of logic and technology, um…
All of, in all of these places the people that genuinely, in hindsight we could say furthered the tradition, even if they made mistakes and there wasn't totally perfect, but they would say we would, we would be able to say they played an important role in genuinely furthering the tradition, we have to know, we have to understand that they knew it well.
They knew the tradition really, really well, and that's how they were able to push it forward. And I think, if we look at like, the examples of powerful folks in politics, or… in religion, pastors. And, you know, Christian celebrities that have fallen, um… that have misused their power to coerce people, to, you know, manipulate… to abuse people, one of the time after time, after time again, you see that those people were out of touch with the genuine tradition. They had lost something, lost something valuable about what it was, and they knew it well enough to speak its language, to get people who are in, who trusted it, to, to get in, but there was something core to what the tradition was, what it was really about, and where it should go that was being manipulated and twisted.
Julius: So, I'd love to explore more of that, um… of this thought of, how is it that joining in and running with the tradition actually helps us to move forward?
Wilson: So, I mean, this is—you already kind of see, the conversations flowing that way… in talking about, you know, not traditional “-ism” or trying to utterly do away with tradition and be totally original and make everything up from scratch spontaneously, you know… has already led to, right. It's yeah. It's internalizing getting what, getting like in the flow, in touch with the, the essence or the real power and potential of it and running with it.
Um, I heard a, a guy that, a scholar of tradition, that he recently— I think 2017? That… somewhere around there, but relatively recently passed named Jaroslav Pelikan. He said that trying to do it on your own is like looking at a huge gap. Trying to work without tradition is like looking at a huge gap and trying to jump it with both feet, like, planted— like, just a standing broad jump.
But, but what good tradition can do is, others have already created momentum… and you, you don't just get a running start, but you're, you get to run with them. So it's not even that— it's not just the momentum you can create—but they create some momentum that you join in.
And then you get a running long jump to, to tackle whatever new problem it is is, is how tradition helps us move forward, you know. And he did a lot of work— we're drawing, I'm drawing from him a good deal in all this because he talked about it, I mean, specifically in the area of religion but then he, he talked about it in music, and in culture, and in art and all sorts of other places too.
So running with the tradition gives us a couple of things that, I think if we just name them, will let us, like, get more tangible and visceral the good that it could offer us. And one of the things that I see tradition doing is it gives us… it, it, it doesn't just hand us the next goal. It makes us the kind of people that can imagine the next goal.
Julius: Yeah.
Wilson: It, it creates the capacity in us to take, "Okay, what do we have around here? What can we do with this?” and if it's a healthy tradition that's not just aimed at power or money, that, you know, if that’s… part of the tradition is, is other sorts of values and virtues that are bigger than just, you know, getting a whole lot of money and living a comfortable life, or being able to control other people…
If the tradition also carries different values, it allows us to become the kind of people that go, “Okay, what do we have? We have this, this and this. And if I really listen, and if I really take in what these people have to teach me, this is what we have, and what could we do with it?” It shapes our imagination. It makes us the kind of people that could like see the next goal.
So to put that concretely and hearkening back to the story that we opened the podcast with, I would say it allowed Steve Jobs, it made Steve Jobs the kind of imaginative person he was. So first, I know that the caricature of Steve Jobs is this rogue, total original, did his own thing… but it doesn't fit the story.
Like, no, he didn't, he didn't utterly conform to— and I think in some ways he, he rejected some unhealthy traditions, um, and so didn't utterly conform to—in other ways he deeply ingrained them, but that's when we're not getting into all the nuances and complexities of Jobs’s character, I guess, but, um, so anyway. My point here is he spent a whole lot of time studying.
No, he didn't care about the college degree. He didn't care about the, you know, the, the status that comes with having an undergrad degree from this or that institution. But he audited all kinds of classes. And he paid, he probably paid better attention in those classes than the students that were taking it for credit, because he was there to learn what that stuff really had to offer. He wasn't there to get the grade. He wasn't there to climb the ladder. He wanted to learn.
He deeply ingrained the stuff about design and technology and taking that stuff in, you know. If it hadn't been for Shannon's work, there wouldn't have been circuit boards for him to learn about and think, “Well, what could that do?” If it hadn't been for the tradition of design, right,The Eastern and the Western design that influenced him—if it hadn't been for that artistic, like, tradition, he wouldn't have imagined the elegance, the simplicity, right? The kind of zen-like, um, unity of the thing. Right. But he puts those things together and that allows him to go, what can we do with this?
If it hadn't been for that tradition, Jobs never would have been able to imagine a little device that he could walk in and say, I want this, this and this… and I want it all in my pocket. I want a phone and I want a camera and I want a music player and I want it in my pocket. Right?
He… if it hadn't been for the tradition, he could not have imagined the iPhone and would not have been able to walk into a room and tell his designers and engineers, “Figure out how to do this.” And so, tradition helps us think, like, the next goal. It, it allows us to think of what is the “this” that we're trying to get after.
Julius: Yeah, I, I love what you said there about— and I know I'm paraphrasing you here— but, a knowledge and participation in the tradition is necessary in shaping our imagination… that knowing the story that we're picking up from allows us to have a vision for, for moving forward in the future that builds on that.
And I can't help, but think of Jesus and the disciples and the, the, was it like three years, right. Of following Jesus and like being there for these moments of—of course, I'm thinking about, like, we love talking about the Eucharist, right, the shared meal, and how that is so central to the Christian faith and the kind of people that Christ through the spirit is forming.
The church to be is shaped by this practice of the shared meal and thinking about the disciples, kind of even just knowing the stories that came even before they were walking with Jesus—of Israel, receiving manna in the wilderness, right? That there's feeding and God's provision here.
And even that, like, that story that's ingrained into at least the, like the Jewish followers who would have been Jesus's disciples, they're familiar with these stories and then seeing those recapitulated in. Oh, we're in, we're, we're in this spot and there's like all these strangers around us and suddenly 5,000 people are being fed, and we're sharing this meal, and there's this provision that's come, that comes from God that embodies a sort of abundance that challenges the narrative of scarcity of like, “No, we got to fight for this. Cause there's not enough food,” and then Jesus is like, “No, we're like, we're good. We've got bread and fish and there's more than enough,” right. “For everyone.”
And so that there's this thread that you can trace of like, “Oh man, that's a lot like Israel being like, what are we going to eat?” And then it's like, oh, we've, we've got enough for the day. And also we don't have to fight for it. And also we literally cannot hoard it. And then. Being in the story of like, “Oh my gosh, this Jesus guy, he's doing the same thing. Like he's providing food and also we don't have to fight for it”. And then being shaped by this lineage, the church becomes the kind of people who is like, “Yeah. One of the things that we do is we share a meal,” and that touches so many different, like…it, it keeps on moving it forward in that like, “Oh, we, we did this thing with Jesus, and it taught us not to worry about scarcity, so of course we will share our bread with these people.”
And. Looking at the spread of people in the disciples, right, Jesus called people who were at odds with one another in terms of social, like on the social strata, right?
Wilson: Yeah. Yeah.
Julius: And so they're like, “Oh my gosh, we can share a meal with you.” Yeah, exactly. Like, “Oh, it's okay, and it's good for me to be at the table with this person.” And the more that you do that, you're like, “Why don't we keep doing this?” and challenge, like, these structures, right? So that's, that's another thing like it's, it's that narrative challenges, another tradition and it moves it forward to something better.
Wilson: And this is how we continue to experience his presence amongst us. And he continues to nourish our very life through his presence. Yeah.
That’s, I really like that analogy and, and how you built on it. Um. Where, what you've got there is... so let's, let's just make it really, really clear the analogy that that was just made. Just like Steve jobs had the tradition of electronic engineering and computing and design, and he brought that together in a new way to create something that had never been before, you can see that similarly with the stories of Jesus and the Eucharist. So, we rightfully say the Eucharist is like central to the tradition. The practice of Eucharist goes all the way back to the earliest days of the church. But even at that point, the earliest days of the church, there you can see it as…
Now, I don't necessarily want to call it an innovation just because that's reading a lot of our contemporary ideas back into people that, you know, that that's just not how they view the world, but it's not totally wrong. And so, you know, the Venn diagram—there's a good deal of overlap.
And so there's, there's something of what we're getting at with innovation, but maybe a word I'm more comfortable with his development an unfolding. So you've got all these stories, just like Jobs had, you know, hey, design and computing and circuit boards and music. And. And digital music, Right.
You've got the story of Jesus doing this and the story of Jesus doing that and this practice that we were doing, but the Eucharist as the church did, even in the days of Acts— Jesus never did it that way with his disciples, but what they are is like, “Okay, what do we have? We have… We know this about Jesus and we know he was like this and he did this and he's still with us. And so, yeah it seems right that we should eat with Gentiles. Yes.”
And, and, “This is where he's present to us and this is how it develops and unfolded. Yeah. And so,this is right.”
This is how tradition grows and allows us to be the kind of people that can imagine the next right step and to, and to move into it. It gives us that momentum, the resources to imagine it and to, to make that jump.
Julius: Yeah.
Wilson: And so a second thing that, that joining in, what it does for us is deeply connected to what we just pointed out. Right? It's it's it. It can, we can distinguish it, you know, as far as terms and thinking about it different levels, but it can't be separated from what we just talked about. But if you really, if you really are understanding, “Okay, what do we have and what is it?What's it about?”, where would that go?
Another thing that grows out of that, kind of like another branch on the tree or fruit of the tree, is it it gives us resources to discern things. And it gives us something good and healthy that we can, that we can use to pick between right and wrong between yet to say yes or no to, but in a way that, that feels organic and true to like what really is and where we want to go.
So and again, that sounds, that's pretty abstract. Let's make it really, really concrete. Anything can be turned towards the goals of wealth and power and like circling back to what we talked about with broken trust and why there's such a distrust of tradition is because so often we, we misuse this part of it, or we miss this part, or we don't allow tradition to give us this.
We don't receive the gift of naming for us. Like the why. Why do we do this? What's the good that comes out of it. Yes. And instead of receiving the internal. Good. Right. So in the case of Well, let's, let's stick first with technology, right? Instead of the, the goods of making life better for people make giving access to things more broadly access to information, access to music and art and culture.
Those would be goods. That would be like, no, but this is true to what design is. This is true to what the knowledge is. This is what, this could be true to what technology could be. Those would, those would be like, Yeah.
Yeah, that, that in my bones, I know that that is valuable and is worth valuing. Right. But then the tradition of technology can be twisted away from those sorts of things and making it about money and status and power. right?
And so now it's about building an empire now, and here's a place where, you know, it could rubber band back and we could see like, well, even apple and jobs have deeply internalized some other traditions as well about wealth and influence and power. And that's where something grates against us. And we say no.
And when it comes to like Eucharist and communion, Well, it's the presence of Christ and how Christ heals and reconciles people, right. And brings us together in him and lifts us up out of the things that keep us broken down and enslave to our own wills or broken down and enslave to unjust structures and powers and forces that we have nothing to do with.
Right. It. It gives us something that says, oh, but I think along with making me the kind of person that can imagine, where should this go? It also shapes us into the kind of people that can just intuit and discern, but this is what it is, and this is the good that I receive and what it should, would, it should be about which takes my mind back to your, the meme that you referenced earlier, right?
Tradition. It's peer pressure from dead people.
Julius: Yeah.
Wilson: So. I think so much of the sensibility,
Julius: Hmm.
Wilson: Right. Shapes how you would view it and the sensibility. That would make us view tradition and the influence of other people. So much of that sensibility that would see it just as like bad peer pressure from dead people Has come from the places where either, you know what you might call the internal goods like that.
This is what it's about. This is what it should be for has, has been lost or manipulated or the next, right, step. The next goal, like, no, this really does flow. That's been twisted. And distorted like, and it's not, it's not good progress. It's not that kind of change. It's like a cancerous change, a growth that's going to lead nowhere good leads just to say like, well, why are all these dead people influencing me? The thing is peer pressure is influence and the truth is peer pressure can be good or bad.
Julius: Yeah.
Wilson: You know, and, and the d-for a question, I mean, just saying it's peer pressure from dead. People doesn't necessarily say anything about it's worth it value.
You have to then move on to here's where tradition would help us a healthy, good tradition could help us just determined, but is this a good influence? Cause I mean, I'm a dad and so I feel the weight of that. I'm also a professor. And in both of those places, I feel the weight of my influence. And I mean, I, I hope my kids and my students know, I take that very, very seriously.
I realize the influence that comes with that and how, how much power comes with that and how that could go wrong, you know? But at the same thing, like if I, if I then said like, Ooh, but that power and that influence, like it's scares me. What if we go and I just totally neglect my responsibility there, it would be, if I didn't influence my kids, I would pretty quickly go to jail for neglect and abuse.
Julius: Yeah,
Wilson: Even on the level of like influencing how they eat, because at this point, if there wasn't like pressure from their dad to not just eat donuts, my kids would just eat donuts and that's not going to end well for them. And so when it, when it comes to like the influence of the tradition, we've, we've got to go deeper.
And this is one of the things that a good knowing it, internalizing it and using it this way and seeing how it would develop, like when this starts to integrate, it makes us also the kinds of people that. You know, again, if we can, if we can imagine the next place it should go. And if we can start to value the things that are just part of what it really is and who we are and want to be also helps us look back and evaluate the tradition and say, now, what kind of pressure is this?
And in some places, you know, if it's, you know, if it's some KKK grand wizard, no, I don't want that peer pressure. Let's name that. And this helps us name that and begin to do something to correct it. But if it's the, if it's the peer pressure of Mother Teresa, thanks be to God.
Julius: Yeah, yeah, exactly. There are some dead people who are worth listening to.
MEDITATION
Now, Christian, I want to tell you a story about your name.
From the earliest days of the Tradition, the earliest and simplest proclamation of faith made by the disciples of Jesus was, "Jesus is Lord."
And in those days, whoever was Lord determined the way of life for those under their Lordship.
But instead of sending his followers to war to expand his rule or demanding taxes to build his palaces or ordering circuses for his entertainment, this Lord told his followers to love and trust God with their whole being, and that this would enable them to love and pray for their enemies, and care for the poor and sick.
And from its earliest days, the Faith growing out of the life, death, and resurrection of this Lord was just called "The Way." As in this was The Way our Lord enables us to live.
It wasn't until The Way made it to Antioch, a city in the Eastern Mediterranean, in what is now Turkey, which was known for trading, in spice and gold, and military strategies, and Religious Ideas, that the followers of Jesus were called "Christians."
Adhering to The Way warranted this new name because these followers internalized Jesus' way of trusting God's love and provision in ever-different circumstances and difficulties, and because in new places and ever-changing relationships these disciples took in and applied Jesus' way of loving enemies and serving those who had no way to pay them back and caring for the sick and elderly.
So the new word chosen for these people initiating a new Tradition, was "Christian," because the suffix "ian" means little - just like the suffix "i-t-o," ito in Spanish means little. So just like in Spanish perro is "dog," and perrito is "little dog" or "puppy," "Christian" means "Little Christ."
And the way these Christians trusted and obeyed their Lord made them live in ways that looked foolish to the people in Antioch, so the word was meant as an insult.
They took it as a title of honor.
And they began to summarize the gospel they lived and taught as the story of how God in Christ became as we are, so we might become as he is.
This is the story of your name.
So I invite you, Christian, think of a roadblock, or issue, or source of pain, frustration, or confusion you are facing as a person of faith.
And if one Tradition can progress until Aristotle gets into our iPhones, and if internalizing the beliefs and practices of the Christian Tradition gets the Creator of the Universe into your flesh, how does that shift your understanding of your faith?
And how would it open a way forward for you, if you understood that progress in Christ's world, is progress in Christlikeness?