A Revolution of Tradition
“Take care. It is easy to break eggs without making omelets.” Thus, the great and wise C. S. Lewis sixty years ago as his Anglican communion was making jarring changes to the liturgy. It’s a principle that goes far beyond forms of worship and prayer, though, to most of what constitutes a good life for beings like us who straddle eternity and time. Especially in a radically unstable time like ours, the stability rooted in what never changes is often the only immediate recourse amidst much that, in the short run, cannot be fixed.
That can be a hard saying to follow, even for Christians. Students of the classics will recall the famous passage in the ancient Roman historian Livy who, writing while Jesus still walked the earth, lamented “these days, in which we can bear neither our diseases nor their remedies.” God ultimately had a bright path prepared for Rome, but it took centuries – and the suffering and death of many believers – before it fully showed itself.
There are moments, to be sure, when radical change is necessary – especially the kind of radical change that the Scriptures call metanoia, a whole-hearted “turning back” to God Himself. But for the most part, it’s better for most of us, at most times, in most places – if we are already on a steady way – to change slowly, with caution, deeply aware of how little we know about ourselves or the world, unseduced by the secular and ecclesial politicians of every age who campaign on “change.”
Ironically, it was Karl Marx who may have first recognized what was coming about in the modern age. As he wrote in the Communist Manifesto: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” Marx thought a sober materialist revolution would lead to human liberation. We know how that turned out.
