When tradition deserves a break

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

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is assistant priest at Holy Trinity, Sloane Square, London.

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.

Article

Culture

Digital

Fun & play

18 March 2024

4 min read

Fun is dead

When video games turn play into work, we need to play without fear of consequences.

Simon Walters

Simon Walters is Curate at Holy Trinity Huddersfield.

A woman stand in front of a large video screen displaying the Space Invaders title, hold her hands out in front of her.

Photo by Andre Hunter on Unsplash.

Imagine there’s been a sudden change in plans. The evening meeting is cancelled at the last minute, or your friend is sick and can’t come round. There are no looming tasks that need doing, so you set out to have some fun. What do you do?

Karen Heller’s recent article in the Washington Post suggests that we don’t really know how to answer that question. ‘Fun is dead’, proclaims the headline, and her analysis is simultaneously insightful and depressing. Weddings have become stressful extravaganzas, holidays require a constant stream of activity, retirements should have a purpose and a plan. Our fun, our play, requires a reason to exist. Can we have fun without it having some larger purpose? Can we play without needing to post it on social media? Everyone else, it seems, is having much more fun than we are.

Take video games. You might think this ought to be the very definition of a playful activity, one with no particular end or purpose in mind. But even here, it seems we don’t know how to have fun without some type of incentive. Conversations about video games online are frequently so self-serious and toxic that you’d be forgiven for thinking that it was a matter of life and death, not differing preferences about fun. Some of the world’s biggest games – things like Fortnite, Genshin Impact, and EA Sports FC – give rewards to players who turn up to play every day. It sounds generous until the psychological hooks of these methods grip you far past the point of fun. Players talk about not being able to sustain more than one of these types of games, because otherwise they won’t be able to keep up. What starts as play quickly turns into a form of work.

The world of play is a world of grace, where we are free to find pleasure in an activity on its own merits.

I am as much a sucker for this method as the next person. I find myself drawn to games which start out as free and fun, but the fun inevitably seems to turn into a chore that I cannot dislodge. There is an unwritten pressure to turn up to play every day to complete daily tasks and keep up with the competition. I end up feeling guilty for wasting my time playing games, and anxious to keep up with what’s required when I do. No wonder, with all these contradictory pressures on play, I find myself more often than not vegetating in front of Netflix rather than really playing.

This is all a bit of a first world problem and might seem like another depressing indictment of modern society, but perhaps it shouldn’t be that surprising. As humans, we are always looking for some way to justify ourselves, some way of finding proof that what we do matters. Play, by contrast, demands that we step into a different sort of world. The world of play is a world of grace, where we are free to find pleasure in an activity on its own merits, and not for anything we might get from it in the end. Play, in its best sense, is purposeless apart from the joy of playing. "When we try to give our playful activities some wider purpose for why they matter, we are turning them into something else."

The world of the Christian faith is not often seen as a playful one. It seems so very serious, dealing as it does with matters of life and death. But within the serious world of the Church, a space for play emerges. After all, it is first and foremost a world of forgiveness from what we have done wrong in the past, present, and future. This forgiveness takes away the fear of failure. Whether I am greatly successful or not I am loved and forgiven by God. This is God’s gift, which cannot be earnt and cannot be lost.

The result, perhaps surprisingly, is that I am free to play, because I do not need my play to achieve anything for me. As the theologian Simeon Zahl puts it,

In play a person is free to engage with the world creatively, actively, energetically, but without fear of ‘serious’ consequences. The Christian is free to play with things that once seemed deadly serious, to find delight in what were formerly objects of fear, and to take themselves much less seriously.

In the world of video games, this idea is perhaps most clearly seen in the games produced by the Japanese game developer Nintendo. Their games, from Mario to Zelda, epitomize a vision for gaming which is driven by creating joy for whoever is playing, and not unnecessarily burdensome tasks. One of their best games of last year, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, doesn’t offer a prescriptive path for how players should approach its challenges. Instead, the player is given a toolkit and set loose to use it in the world as they see fit. The result is a sense of joyful freedom, a feeling that its world is full of delight and even silliness. It gave me some of the most fun playing games in recent years, without me even coming close to finishing it.

It's this playful attitude that I want to take into the rest of my life. What would it look like for us to see the world as a playground rather than an exam hall? The result wouldn’t just be a lot more fun. I think it would also be deeply Christian.