This piece needs no introduction:

Out From Walden

By Rev. Dr. Patrick T. O’Neill

2005 Sermon of the Living Tradition
Delivered at The Service of the Living Tradition
At The General Assembly of the UUA
Ft. Worth, Texas June 24, 2005

Dedication:
Listed among the roll of ministers remembered this evening in the year of their death is the name of my first Unitarian Universalist minister, the Rev. David Osborn, whose wife and partner for his many years of ministry, Janet, also died this year. Some thirty-three years ago, it was at their dinner table in Oradell, NJ, that I first shared my secret longing to become a minister. I dedicate this sermon in love and everlasting gratitude to David and Janet’s memory.

The Sermon:
When I found myself enrolled in theological school in Chicago a year after that fateful, confessional dinner at the Osborns’ home, our great UU professor James Luther Adams reminded us in his church history class that the word “tradition” in church history can be translated with two very different meanings in Latin. The first root word of tradition is “traditum,” a heavy-sounding word, which means “the unchanging inherited weight and authority of history.”

But a second, much lighter translation of tradition is the Latin word, “traditio,” meaning “a sense of the living customs of a community; the ongoing creative dance of ever-evolving meaning and practice.”

As illustration of the difference between Traditum and Traditio, JLA offered us the larger-than-life example of Tevya, the devout dairyman of Anatevka, in Fiddler on the Roof. When first we meet Tevya, he explains to us that Tradition – the heavy obligation of Traditum – determines virtually every aspect of his family’s life and his life as a man, as a husband, and absolutely as a Papa.

But as the story unfolds, we watch how this good man’s tradition-bound heart is repeatedly and ultimately challenged and overruled by his love for his three daughters, and we listen in on his anxious conversations with God as his independent-minded daughters, one by one, teach him the primacy of love over custom, teach him to choose L’Chaim, Life, the dance of traditio, as the highest ultimate reckoning with his heritage. As he explains to God his daughter Tzeitel’s decision to marry for love rather than by arrangement: “They gave each other a pledge- unthinkable. But look at my daughter’s face-how she loves him….and look at my daughters eyes, so hopeful.”

Tradition!

(Read on … )