One (Traditionalist) Road to Recovery

Tim Chesterton bears moving testimony to the ministry of Bishop Ron Ferris, formerly of the North Canadian Yukon diocese, then Algoma. In retirement he has left the Anglican Church of Canada for one of the Canadian Traditionalist networks. I can’t / won’t comment about his choice, not knowing its immediate context; This post is not about his retirement ministry, but what preceded it. Bishop Ron was an early adopter of the internet to stay in touch and guide clergy, and used to post brief weekly notes and ideas, which I came across a few years ago, and thought were solid gold.
I hope they stay somewhere on the web, even though the author has retired...

One of these concerns conflicted Christian communities. Like an immune system attacking its healthy body, Church groups can become oppressed by a soul-sickness that reveals itself in paranoia, bullying, silly (usually ad hominem) touchiness and sick bunny sarcasm. Here is Bishop Ron’s list of characteristic symptoms and treatments...

1. High and habitual anxiety and reactivity which overshadows perspective, opportunity, and differentiated thought.

Remedy: Meet enough security needs to allow calm dialogue and thought. Stabilize the patient.

2. Carefully tended list of grievances is held and recited to negotiate future concessions.

Remedy: Acknowledge and air wounds. Apply reality therapy to exaggerations.

3. Enduring personal animosities override all decisions, all deliberations, all impartiality.

Remedy: Slowly renew, dilute, and broaden the leadership base.

4. Blaming and cyclical, unhealthy relationship patterns will be present and gain strength from anger, revenge, stigmatization, "them and us" thinking, and distancing "ain't it awful".

Remedy: Re-state the problems without personal blame. Envision a new future. Don't be vague.

5. Conflict is magnified through indirect communications such as one person speaking for anonymous others.

Remedy: Create a fair forum for direct communication where people speak for themselves, directly to the whole group, and where the open decisions matter.

6. Hostage taking occurs "unless . . . l'm leaving".

Remedy: "We love you, appreciate what you've done, and don't want you to leave, however . . . "

7. Relationship obsessions abound with unhealthy clinging or distancing. This may lead to endless analysis, therapy, inward scrutiny, and desperate solutions.

Remedy: Focus on the great outward common tasks and purposes.

8. An exhausted few tenuously cling to the wheel as the ship tosses and lunges largely out of control.

Remedy: Leaders must priorize, set boundaries, differentiate tasks, and proceed with faith in God and their own integrity. Reduce the tasks to match the resources and create the space for some enjoyment.

9. Insecurity reactions around books, buildings, the old days, and the past hero will be sentimentalized. People will cling to each other in unhealthy ways: gossip circles, power groups, guard-dog teams, and "ain't it awful" observation teams.

Remedy: Help the community find its security in their primary convictions; God, Christ, the word, the mission, and the love.

10. Often there is a sense of morass and abyss. Poverty thinking will overcome abundance thinking. "We're hurting. We're stuck. We're getting to like our insecurities. We're poor and that insures nothing good can happen. Even if we could change the cost might be too high."

Remedy: A new climate, new patterns of relating, abundance thinking, hope kindled

Retreat Notes 2: Tradition and “Traditionalism”

Tradition is lived reality — in the New Testament “I received of the Lord what I passed on to you;” I received it as I received it, and you received it as the person you were, lived it fallibly, but authentically enough to pass it on. Thus tradition renews itself in each generation, out of circumstances, by Grace and the Holy Spirit.

Therefore Tradition is always touched by human hands, never pure and unsullied, always subject to seasons and sin. Pure objective points exist, but they are beyond me. If, driven by fear and insecurity, I extract some element from my life in Christ and try to erect it into an objective norm to bypass the messy process, I am basically making an idol. The tradition I pass on wouldn’t need pickling if it were actually alive.

That is why we need faith; and that is why splinter movements, even Lefèvrist ones with traditionalist good intentions and bright beginnings, always end up petering out inconsequentially, unless they find a way to reintegrate. Separated from the vine they wither and die.
Good religious communities are laboratories within which we can see the dynamics of tradition properly working. The life to which Benedict calls Christians renews itself generation by generation, as it is lived. Here is Dom Antoine Levasseur writing about Saint Wandrille:

His biography is far more than an informative record about a character from the dark ages. It must live in us. That is difficult for our modern minds to grasp, given our habit of considering ancient writings as mere records, or souvenirs of a past age. This is that, but it seeds itself afresh in each successive present, in order to engage us and train us for the future, to live the life for real.

Lived tradition challenges tendencies, understandable in times of fast change, to romanticize, confabulate, fantasize or panic. It is those tendencies which invite us to fix on some Big Thing, hang desperately onto it, then make it the Grand Shibboleth.
Here’s a recipe for “traditionalism.” Half digest some of key ingredients from a living tradition in a rather modernist way, pickle them up, then pack them up in the old kitbag as weapons. You half digest because the days are evil and you are in a hurry. If you really digested the tradition you would be aware of its subtleties, vulnerability and ultimate mystery.

The Religion may be laid on with a trowel, but there is little faith involved. There used to be a thing in England called the “society for the maintenance of the faith”; a rather extraordinary object for a society, the more you think about it. Or at least so it seems in a place where the week’s ferial collect contained a daily reminder it is God alone de cuius munere venit, ut tibi a fidelibus tuis digne et laudabiliter serviatur (“of whose resource alone it comes, that your faithful may do you appropriate and praiseworthy service”). This monastery wears its religion sincerely, but lightly and realistically. After 1359 years of the process Dom Antoine describes, there’s nothing left to prove. Amen!