Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is no other. – Isaiah 45:22
The new school year has begun! Do you have traditions to mark the start of another year of school? When I was growing up, the big day was mid-August. My mother would take my brother and me to the mall to do our back-to-school shopping. I don’t think the back to school shopping trip is a particularly big deal anymore. At the least, my children have never had any interest in it. I think that is probably a good thing. Still, for me it was always such a big day. It was a day full of decisions on how I wanted to define myself for the coming year. First up would be a binder to keep all of my things in. In earlier years that would mean a Trapper Keeper and finding the right design to be distinctive enough yet still cool. Later it would be a plain 3” binder with a clear pocket in the front for pictures. After that would be a pair of shoes for the year, and the big choice of Nike or Adidas (or perhaps even some British Knights as a change of pace). Add some jeans, a couple of shirts, and, of course, in a good year if I had managed to save some money over the summer I could get myself a new Swatch watch. These things all seemed extremely important at the time as ways that I could define not so much who I was, but who I hoped to be in the coming year. The shopping trip was a bigger deal than the actual starting of school.
Routines and traditions serve a valuable role in helping us keep a sense of time and of marking the steps of life. It is worth having some. At the same time, we can overvalue such things and give them greater importance than they deserve. We can also fall into the trap of using these rituals as a core way to define ourselves. I tend to understand “sentimentality” as loving something more than God loves it. Rituals, traditions, Trapper Keepers, and new shoes are all worthwhile in helping us get into productive routines, joyfully recognize the rhythms of the year, and express ourselves stylistically. Too often, however, we fall into overvaluing them. We end up using them to define ourselves and to force excitement to cover over a deeper boredom and lack of a sense of meaning in our lives. When we do that, we are turning to those external things for meaning in life. Tradition is meaningful when it continues to speak and give a sense of timing. Back to school shopping no longer has that sense of a big event. These days sharing “first day of school” pictures is a more common way of marking the time. These sorts of traditions can change as needed. The specific tradition is less important than what it points us towards.
Through Isaiah, God reminds us that being immersed in God is what gives us meaning, direction, and depth to our lives. The traditions that we hold to function best when we recognize how they point us back to God. Certainly back to school traditions are not deeply religious, but insofar as they provide meaning there is a religious element to them. My attempts to redefine myself each year through my purchases always fell a bit short, because they were my own attempts, rather than recognizing who God made me to be. At a larger level, even our religious traditions lose their meaning if we do them for the sake of doing them rather than recognizing how they point us back to God. Sometimes traditions even
need to adapt to help us keep a sense of the same meaning. In the end what is important is that God shows up in our lives in ways we can recognize by marking the turning times.