I Do It Because She Did

Every article on this site opens with the same words and this one does too. This is not medicine. I am not a clinician, nothing on this page is treatment, and nothing I write ever takes the place of a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist. If somebody in that house is unwell, ring somebody qualified today. That comes before anything here about tradition.

Now. Somebody asked you why you do it, and you could not answer.

It has happened twice. Once it was a friend, lightly, not meaning anything by it. Once it was somebody who had married into the family and was trying to learn how things work.

And both times you gave an answer that was not an answer. It is just what we do. My grandmother always did it. I do not know, really.

And both times there was a small feeling afterwards that you did not examine, which was closer to embarrassment than to anything else, and which you filed away immediately because examining it seemed like more trouble than it was worth.

I want to look at that feeling, because I do not think it is embarrassment. I think it is a question that has been waiting patiently for about fifteen years.

The word used about the handed down thing is vain

There is a line in the first letter of Peter that uses a very strong word about inherited practice, and the strength of it is the point.

Forasmuch as ye know that ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, from your vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers. (1 Peter 1:18, King James Version)

Vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers. Conversation there means a way of living, and vain means empty, as in it does not deliver.

And notice what the sentence is actually doing. It is not attacking anybody's fathers. It is saying that people were bought out of a way of living that had been handed down and did not work, at a very great price, on purpose.

You are described as somebody bought out of an inherited emptiness rather than left inside it. First Peter 1:18 names a handed down way of living as the thing people were redeemed from, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person hear that without hearing an insult to their family.

I am careful with this verse because it can be read cruelly and it is not cruel. It does not say the fathers were wicked. It says the practice was empty, which is a different and much kinder claim.

You have never once been asked to keep something that does nothing. The Spirit of God is the one who lets somebody set down an empty practice without setting down the people who gave it, and it is written that the redemption was from the vain conversation rather than from the fathers themselves.

Why you kept it, and what it has actually been doing

Let me be practical, because this is where people get stuck.

You did not keep it out of superstition. That is the first thing to say. Almost nobody does. You kept it because doing it makes her present in the room, for about four seconds, and that is the entire mechanism and it is not a foolish one.

The practice is a way of touching somebody who is gone. And that is worth naming out loud, because once it is named, a person usually finds they can get the same thing somewhere else and with more of her in it.

You are reaching for somebody rather than believing in a practice. First Peter 1:18 addresses the emptiness of the handed down thing rather than the motives of the people keeping it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who shows somebody what they have actually been doing for fifteen years.

And here is the practical half of that. If the mechanism is remembering her, then say her name. Tell the story out loud. Do the thing she actually did that was kindness. All of those put more of her in the room than the practice ever did.

You were given a person and not a procedure, and the person has never once required the procedure to be available. The Spirit of God is the one who gives somebody a better way to reach a woman who is gone, and what is written calls the tradition empty and calls the redemption out of it costly and deliberate.

The plain routing, and the practice is not it

Here is the part of this page that is not comfort, and it is the reason this site exists.

If somebody in that house is in trouble right now, that is 911, and nothing handed down is any part of that answer. If the heavy thing today is in your own mind, 988 answers, and a real person picks up. And if anybody is unwell, ring a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist today, and do it before the practice rather than after it.

You are permitted to break the order of things in that house, and breaking it has never once been disrespect. First Peter 1:18 has people bought out of a handed down way of living at a cost, which is the opposite of being obliged to keep it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a person from habit to a phone.

Say the obvious thing once. Whatever the practice is, it is not medicine, and neither is anything I write. The appointment is the part that changes a week.

You have a call that has never once been replaced by anything a family does. The Spirit of God is the one who is present with somebody doing it differently for the first time, and what is written names the tradition as the thing people were redeemed from rather than kept in.