When tradition deserves a break

Upsetting a convention caused uproar, so is it right to break with tradition?

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

A robed and seated man, in a speaker's chair talks and gesticulates.

The House of Common's Speaker.

Parliament TV.

“Nearly a quarter of a century has passed since a speaker of the Commons stood down from its high chair with dignity and to applause.” Thus wrote Andrew Rawnsley in the Guardian this Sunday. Last week the House of Commons erupted. An unedifying lava-spew of recrimination and anger flowed through the corridors of power as the Speaker of the House, The Right Honourable Sir Lindsay Hoyle, broke parliamentary convention to the seeming benefit of the Labour Party. Memories of his predecessors’ playing fast-and-loose with Parliamentary procedure pushed buttons. The SNP’s Gaelic fury founded a flurry of calls for the Speaker to step-down, and it was not until he gave a near-tearful apology that some calm seemed to be restored. Opponents cried foul - ‘how dare he upend the conventions of the House!?’ - while supporters jumped to his aid - ‘he was just trying to protect MPs from further harassment over the Israel-Gaza debate!’ - and everyone was unhappy…

The technicalities of this convention (that multiple amendments are not called upon for voting during an Opposition Day Debate) are less interesting to me than the fact that the convention exists. ‘Convention’ is another word for ‘tradition’. Traditions are important. Our famously ‘unwritten’ Constitution relies heavily on tradition, especially for the smooth running of Parliament. Rather than having the process of legislating and governing micro-managed with procedural minutiae, the Commons operate on the basis of nurturing and conforming to its traditions. In essence, the House of Commons operates on the basis of respect - by respecting the traditions of the House, Parliamentarians grow to respect each other as fellow followers of tradition. Exterior action builds-up interior disposition. Practice influences sentiment.

At least, that’s my romantic take on it. Traditions give some coherence to a society - from the society of elected MPs right through the society of a nation - and allow it to flourish. Traditions bind people together. Traditions unite. You may come from a different part of the country than your neighbour, have different family values, have a different religion or skin-colour or education-level, etc…but you can be united in the traditions you follow. Whether it’s having a roast on a Sunday, going to a Carol Service in December, singing Three Lions in a World Cup year, the traditions you share despite all other differences give you a common cause with those around you.

This is not to say that traditions can’t have a dark side. Some traditions can alienate guests. Some traditions can stifle creativity and innovation. Some traditions can be maintained purely to bamboozle the uninitiated for the benefit of those in the know. In extremis, some traditions can lead to groupthink, to the othering of those who don’t share them, to jingoism and hatred; St Paul wrote that it was the zeal for the traditions of his fathers than led him to persecute the first Christians. Traditions should never be taken for granted or left unexamined. Traditions are roses - beautiful and sweet-smelling, but always in need of pruning. But let the gardener prune carefully - you want some roses left for the garden.

When the scribes and Pharisees try to trick and trap Jesus with impossible thought experiments, they often quote their traditions. Jesus always wins the debate. He wins in the face of their traditionalism. He wins by being a radical. RADICAL! His radicalism is not marked by the abandonment of the concept of tradition, but by deep respect for it. The Sermon on the Mount is probably the most famous speech about the importance of tradition - “You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times…But I say to you…” - keeping the traditions of God in the face of the self-serving traditions of men. The scribes and the Pharisees are the White Witch to Jesus’ Aslan: ‘“It means,” said Aslan, “that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time.”’

Not every critic last week will have genuinely cared about the traditions of the House of Commons. Many will have mouthed the words but would have happily stood by if the breaking of convention benefited them. Nevertheless, we must take tradition, and it’s breaking, seriously. Traditions nurtures the relationships of MPs. Traditions nurture the relationships of neighbours and fellow citizens. Traditions nurture relationship with God, as the traditional rhythms of religious practice and Church seasons help order prayer and worship. Perhaps we’ll look back on the upturning of this particular Commons tradition and recognise it as the right rejection of an outdated convention…but let's be cautious. Traditions are important. Break them with care.

Interview

Change

Community

Politics

9 October 2023

6 min read

The thin place family-making creates

Fixing a broken adoption system leads to a 'thin place' – one where family-making transcend traumas. Belle Tindall meets Tarn Bright of Home For Good.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

Three young children run away into the distance down across a field of long grass.

Towards a thin place.

Photo by Jordan Whitt on Unsplash.

‘The thin place’ is one of those wonderfully old terms; fifth century old, to be exact. It’s what Celtic Christians labelled the precise places where it felt as though this world and another would meet. Those places were thin because the atmosphere they provided made it appear as though there was very little separation between humanity and the divine. The seen and the unseen, residing in particularly close proximity.

Being Welsh, I have a soft spot for anything remotely ‘celtish’. Being a lover of anything enchanting, I swoon at such a beautiful notion. Being a Christian, I happen to believe that thin places are real.

Here’s the interesting thing though, when the Celts used this phrase, it was pertaining to a geographical area – a Welsh waterfall, an Irish woodland, a Scottish Loch (sorry England, I’m sure your Anglo-Saxons were just as appreciative of you). But when Tarn Bright, the CEO of Home for Good, used this phrase just last week, it was when talking about the UK’s care system.

Quite the unexpected twist, isn’t it?

But you need to spend approximately three minutes in Tarn’s presence to agree with her. In fact, whenever I find myself chatting to anyone from Home for Good, an organisation that is intent on ‘finding a home for every child that needs one’, I find myself in a very thin place indeed.

As a way of explaining myself (and Tarn), allow me to briefly turn my attention to just one of the things that make Christianity ever so slightly odd: the Christian God is a family. I know, I know - it’s intricate, it’s complicated, it’s paradoxical, but it’s absolutely core to the way Christians perceive… well…. everything.

Father, Son, Holy Spirit – the Holy Trinity. All distinct, all one, all God. If I were NT Wright or Jane Williams, perhaps I would feel confident enough to explain this thoroughly. But I’m not, so I won’t. Instead, I’m hoping that you’ll take my word for it, follow my (or rather, Tarn’s) line of argument, and seek out the details later.

Deal? Deal.

So, here we all are acknowledging that Christianity has a family as God, that there has been relationship from the very beginning of time. And so, it follows that Christianity also hinges on a family-making-God, one who ‘sets the lonely in families’, to borrow a phrase. Hence, the thin place. Tarn’s profound thinking is that when we, as humans, put families together, there’s very little separation between us and the God who has always been determined to do the very same thing. If those families are formed biologically – wonderful. If a family is put together through a combination of circumstance and choice – that is just as legitimate and just as thin.

I struggle to think of a more beautiful thought.

Blasting through such trauma, is the immense joy of Home for Good finding and supporting a young couple who adopted all five children.

While I could expend thousands of words waxing-lyrical about such things, I’d be remiss to not tell you anything of Home for Good aside from its somewhat sacred (in my over-emotional opinion) nature. Let’s take it from the beginning.

Home for Good was thought up nearly ten years ago, at a garden party hosted in a vicarage; one flowing with Pimms and finger sandwiches. While the setting may be charmingly quaint, the content of the meeting was of the utmost seriousness. Desperate shortage of foster carers and adoptive parents in the UK was making headline news, and several Christian leaders, many of whom were foster carers or adoptive parents themselves, committed to work together to raise the profile of fostering and adoption within the UK Church.

And so, Home for Good was born.

You see, a child will enter the UK care system every fifteen minutes, there are more children in the care system right now than ever before. Each and every one of those children has intrinsic worth and value, all of them have experienced loss and trauma, many have suffered abuse or neglect. The reality is that there just aren’t enough carers to ensure that these children have somewhere stable to call home. It’s one of those vast and painful realities we find hard to digest. And yet, Home for Good not only acknowledges the tragedy, it tackles it head-on.

Active in all four UK nations, Home for Good is working to find a home for every single child: through fostering, adopting and supported lodgings.

You may be asking yourself where on earth they’re finding these homes.

Well, they’re finding them in the fifty thousand churches across the UK. Not ‘churches’ as in the grand (or perhaps not so grand) building next to your favourite coffee shop, but ‘Church’ as in the tens of millions of people who flow in and out of those buildings. We’re talking the people, not the places. Home for Good practically equip, support and train those who want to invite children into their families, while also mobilising churches to be welcoming and understanding places for these families to be. Because, if we are thinking of family as in ‘nuclear family’; that all important two adults to two-point-five children ratio, we are thinking too rigidly. And, contrary to popular belief, we are not thinking along very Christian lines either.

It struck me, while speaking with Tarn, that the work that Home for Good do is also thin in another way: the space between profound pain and immense joy is, and perhaps always will be, very thin indeed. For example, Tarn told me a story of five siblings who were in very real risk of losing each other. There seemed to be very little hope of finding a stable home for all five of them, as there simply aren’t enough carers who are able to take on siblings. And once separated, even if only intended to be a temporary measure, the chances of those siblings living together again are practically non-existent. It’s hard to fathom looking straight into such huge pain on such little faces. That’s the type of pain that, if we’re honest, we’d like to pretend doesn’t exist. But it does. And it’s in closer proximity than we allow ourselves to realise. But then, blasting through such trauma, is the immense joy of Home for Good finding and supporting a young couple who adopted all five children. This isn’t a story of rescue, Tarn will stand for no such thing, rather it is a story of family-making. The type that Tarn, with her own beloved adopted sons, knows well.

Unconditional love, deep belonging and unwavering devotion had been ‘professionalised out of the system’.

As well as working on a local level, Home for Good have built up an immense influence on a national level. Since Tarn’s been the CEO, she has worked with (all seven) Children’s Ministers in Westminster. As she subsequently observes, the system is not of conscious design. Rather, it consists of a conglomeration of reactive policy ‘add-ons’. Although there are people devotedly working within the system who are intent on doing the best for children, it is deeply and undeniably stretched. What’s more, inputting into the ‘once in a lifetime’ independent review, Tarn and her team were able to explain how unconditional love, deep belonging and unwavering devotion had been ‘professionalised out of the system’. Somewhere along the line, we have stopped asking ‘what the child’s heart needs’. And yet, Tarn notes that how we treat our children now will directly affect how our world works in a generation’s time.

If this is not a justice issue of the most profound kind, it’s hard to imagine what is.

And so, there we have it. Home for Good, the thinnest place imaginable. The place where every child is fought for. The place where family is re-imagined. The place where I abandon every ounce of professionalism, as I put all my energy into holding back embarrassing tears. The place that is, thankfully, quite used to such reactions.