Many many years ago, when the world and I were young, I visited Moscow for a week. It was in the last years of Brezhnev, in the last decade before the Great Restructuring. My sister was studying in Moscow for a year as a penniless and insignificant doctoral student, and had suggested that I come over, so that she could show me round. And what a visit it was! She had an enormous range of contacts; students, dissidents, official sculptresses, rich violinists, the list went on and on. My week was a dizzying whirl of visits, rushing from one new experience to the next.
Towards the end of the week, we went to an evening party hosted by Jewish students. I remember a small room, crammed full of twenty or so young people, a loving and cheerful atmosphere. I was chatting to one of the men, and he suddenly said, "You'll be wondering why we bother to be different, here in a society which dislikes difference and makes life so very difficult for us. Let me play you a song which explains why, in a way far better than I can put into words." And he got them to play this song on the record player:
(have a look: it's about 7 minutes long, I'll wait).
A little later in the evening there was a phone-call, claiming to be from the police, saying the neighbours had complained and we should stop the party. Though I had no Russian, I noticed peoples' reactions and their body language. It wasn't a trivial thing to be Jewish in Brezhnev's Russia; it came with a price attached.
I've been thinking about tradition this week; what it is, where one finds it. I work in higher education, particularly in the field of mathematical science, even more particularly in statistics, and it seems to me that we are steeped in tradition of a certain kind, without realizing it. We have our own jokes (they are excruciating). We believe in logic, in systematically thinking things out right down to the far end. We have a hidden hierarchy, almost a dissenting hierarchy, in which you are as good as the theorem you proved yesterday, and may no longer be as good as the theorem you proved the week before last. We think there is a notion of "mathematical taste", which allows us to say what is good work and what is not, but it is very hard to explain what this entails. There is a rumour that the American Mathematical Society can never run a conference in the same city twice because of the behaviour of those who attend; we don't get banned from hotels for trashing hotel rooms or for disgraceful behaviour; we get banned because our idea of a good time is to get together over a table in the corridor, drink bad coffee, and discuss mathematics far into the night - and that sort of behaviour doesn't pay the hotel's bills! But it's a tradition that works, has worked for four thousand years, and now pervades all of modern society (including the processes by which you can read this blog).
And I worship, and now serve as churchwarden, in an Anglican church in which all manner of ecclesiastical traditions are joined together in a single community. In a single Sunday our church services range from early morning 1662 Common Prayer (no music, no singing, but phrases which ring through my heart in wonderful poetry), through an informal 0930 service largely run by ordinary people (who work through their daily theology together each Sunday in a way which makes far more sense of the modern fashion for "independent learning" than any government prescription could ever do), then a full Eucharist with choir, and a sublime choral evensong, and finishes off with an experimental evening service at 7pm. We believe we have to engage with all these different traditions, and learn a mutual respect, and an understanding of how each part is to be considered valuable; not in a functional and utilitarian way, but because each tradition represents something of who we are, and how we relate to God. It isn't easy, but it is what we are called to do.
Not all tradition is good, of course. As an Anglican I know there are dark chapters in the past of my Anglican community, and I can neither ignore them nor easily escape from them. As a mathematical scientist I have to recognize that from time to time the triumphalism of mathematical logic oppresses the human spirit, and that there can be a subtle and corrupting arrogance in the mathematical soul. I have to own my tradition, because it is part of what makes me who I am, but I can still be intelligent about it, and recognize that it need not be an unqualified good.
So. Intelligent tradition, then; recognizing that even when I consciously break away from my past nevertheless I am still influenced by it, still swim in the currents of thinking and behaviour and habitual assumptions, the currents of the sea in which I was born. Intelligent tradition, because that will allow me to reach out to the beyond, that will allow my church to celebrate its diversity without compromise, that will allow me to aspire to function as salt and light in my working community, that will allow me to change when change is what is needed, while losing neither identity nor integrity.
To end this excessively serious post, here is the joke.
Top excuse for not doing homework:
I accidentally divided by zero and my paper burst
into flames.
(Taken from a scientific paper on mathematical jokes - bet you didn't want to know that!)
into flames.
(Taken from a scientific paper on mathematical jokes - bet you didn't want to know that!)
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