NOTES for Psa 102:18

Tradition is of course important for any religion: without it no continuity of generations is possible. But one's attitude toward tradition can differ. It often happens that tradition is reduced to a certain set of texts and rituals that are repeated again and again, becoming the basis of the community's religious life.

These texts and rituals are never meaningless, at least not originally meaningless. But often it turns out that with the passage of time, in the process of endless repetition, the original meaning not only of the ritual but even of the text is forgotten and goes into the past, while another, new meaning comes to replace it, sometimes one little connected with the original.

Practically nothing can be done about this: as any thing wears out through use, so ritual wears out, and as worn material loses its original appearance, so a worn ritual loses its original meaning, which is forgotten and goes into the past. Even if some historian manages to dig down to this original meaning, his discovery can no longer change the situation: the ritual lives its own life, and it is impossible to return it again to its original meaning, just as it is impossible to return newness to material worn by time.

Therefore the author of the psalm proposes another path: each generation must offer God its own praise, find Him anew for itself, and establish with Him its own living and real relationships. Past experience in such a case is needed not in order simply to repeat again and again someone else's words, however expressive, or someone else's thoughts, however deep. It is needed as an example, as a model of those relationships that cannot be repeated but can be established again here and now.

Spiritual life consists of relationships that cannot belong either to the past or to the future: any relationships, whether with God or with another person, are possible only in the present. To orient oneself toward old forms means to imitate what is not there. To make use of them means to understand how relationships with God were built before, and with past experience in mind to do this today. In the way genuine tradition presupposes.