"Tradition is not an argument."

I found this on Julio's blog. How I feel for him. We're in a world of iconoclasts insistent on breaking down structures or reasoning and communicating, just so that we can somehow be "free" to be ourselves.

The irony is that it is God who wants us to be free to be ourselves. Indeed He has freed us from the slavery to sin in which we are forced to be anything but ourselves. Now that is part of Christian Tradition - the ultimate freedom - to be what God made us to be. To cast away Tradition is to cast away our link with this Truth.

But why does society want to get rid of Tradition which it sees as restrictive? Why is Tradition so oppressive? Perhaps there is a bit of displacement going on here.

It's easy to displace onto others the faults that we ourselves have, or ascribe inadequacies to others when it is our worldview which is skewed.
We flip the bird to the driver who speeds past us honking their horn aggressively, without realising that we are the one who is driving unhelpfully slowly on the motorway.

If Tradition doesn't allow us to do what society thinks is reasonable, then it must be that Tradition is wrong, and it must be bowlderised so that it fits what is correct in the modern sense. Tradition is a threat to the modern way of living, and the modern way of living cares only about now, never about tomorrow, less still about yesterday.

Tradition has carried the Catholic Faith through all Catholic Christians, all of whom encountered in different ways as different people in different countries with different cultures the same God, the same Truth, the same Creed (modulo a filioque) and received the same Baptism. Tradition binds us together and bids us not to be selfish, isolationist or intolerant. Daily, the current of the World dashes our bodies against the Rock of Tradition, and in so doing we are made smooth like polished pebbles.

Society cannot see this because Society sees what it wants to see, and to it Tradition is more honoured in the breach than in the observance. However, let us not concern ourselves with the big picture. By living our lives according to the Faith that our fathers (all the way back to Our Lord Himself) held but living it as part of our lives as who we are, then we work on the smallest scale possible, sowing minute seeds of fidelity and love that will be missed. God will ensure that these are watered and will grow to proportions that people will not be able to ignore. Let us not depise the day of small things but rather do what little we can. Therein lies the hope of one who is Traditional in the world of Iconoclasm.