Our traditions are our opportunity to speak directly to our remote descendants. The inheritance we hand off to our children is not limited to finances and investments, but memories. Memories are the only way to take time with you and traditions are reliable ways to make memories. Quality time is a product of quantity time. The more you spend time together, the more likely it is that some of that time will be counted "a good time." Traditions are intentional efforts at making the best use of the time you set aside. In addition to spending a good deal of time with people, you can make some of that intentional through liturgy and family tradition. This is an inheritance you can provide for your family which allows you not only to influence them, but their children's children.
"A people which takes no pride in the noble achievements of remote ancestors will never achieve anything worthy to be remembered with pride by remote descendants." - T. B. Macaulay
If you do not look back and attempt to see the tapestry of your story in those who have gone before you, you won't give much effort or thought to ensuring your mark will make a difference one way or another in the future. You will produce what you have patterned: indifference to one's ancestors and your life's work will end being to your grandchildren what your grandparents' is now to you: like it never happened.
“Tradition is the democracy of the dead. It means giving a vote to the most obscure of all classes: our ancestors.” - G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Traditions are your attempt to vote in future decisions. The more you establish traditions, the more what mattered to you will matter to your progeny. You can vote in future elections in the form of present influence and intentionality.
"If we have the opportunity to speak to our descendants, and we do, then I want to tell them that the joy of the Lord is our strength" - Douglas Wilson, God Rest Ye Merry
If you want your descendants to be Chestertonian Calvinists, and you should, live like one right now and establish traditions in keeping with laughter and logic, hilarity and high church, silliness and solemnity. God is the most serious thing in the world, which means you are the laughingstock of the universe. Take yourself lightly, take your faith seriously. Fix your eyes on God and let them be the windows through which duchenne smiles see the world.
Nehemiah 8:10
Then he said to them, “Go your way. Eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions to anyone who has nothing ready, for this day is holy to our Lord. And do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”
Eat the fat, drink the sweet, do not be grieved, be joyful, the Lord is our strength. That is an inheritance worth serving at your table and sharing with your children's children's children.
That is a vote worth casting for generations to come.
"People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors." - Edmund Burke
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