It is impossible to choose or join a tradition and ever participate in it in the same way as you do the tradition you find yourself a part of. Your second language can never become your first language. There is no undoing the grammars of consciousness you inherit from childhood. Your inherited tradition will never leave you, even if you leave it. […]
In separating myself from my tradition I became aware of it, and the moment of separation is indelible. To know and be aware of one’s tradition is to be at least one degree removed from it—to have a knowledge apart from it rather than knowledge as a part of it. It is in fact to be in possession of two modes of knowledge with different objects: tradition as such and the truth that the tradition hands down. Knowledge apart from tradition can be experienced as either liberation or loss, or both at once, but the knowledge cannot be expunged. Knowledge apart from tradition is a knowledge that comes at the price of pure inhabitation. It breaks the enchantment, makes visible the invisible.
Once visible, aspects of traditions and the forms of knowledge they represent can be distinguished, categorized, and classified—religious, ethnic, intellectual, familial. But the various knowledges of tradition are abstractions. They all share the common elements of remembering, reconstituting, repetition, identity, belonging, preservation, handing on. In the shape of a human life the lines between them cannot be easily drawn. Even if theoretically distinguishable, they are near inextricable in experience. It might be the work of a life to sort them out.
It is my suspicion that this untangling was not always so difficult—nor particularly necessary. Prior to the advent of what we too easily call modernity, one could examine a tradition and inhabit it in a way that is now impossible. Or, at least, what our ancient forebears did with native intelligence we achieve only with great effort. Our distance from ourselves is a historical novelty. In the modern world, to examine a tradition is to assume a sort of objectivity, a mastery over it that precludes inhabitation. In the pursuit of absolute knowledge, some things that should not have been separated were separated, and thereafter it became necessary, in a sense, to choose. Once knowledge as a part of its object has been separated from knowledge apart from it, it is impossible to reintegrate them, even if you want to. […]
I have spent the better part of my adult life trying without success to extricate myself from my tradition, arranging and rearranging my mental furniture, trundling it from one space to the next in the many-roomed mansion of the Christian faith. But I am mired and immobilized by a tradition of blood and piety deeper than intellect or assent, one I know and sense and react to below the threshold of consciousness. I can only try to catch up to it in my waking mind. And so it betrays my attempts to leave. […]
As a child riding with my parents out to my grandparents’ farm, I noticed that the trees which manage to grow in open land, away from other trees or from a water source, often stoop permanently northward, shaped by the relentless summer wind. The branches and leaves on the northern side, away from the hot blasts of air, grow lush and full and green. The southern side languishes, pale and sparse. These trees have a kind of desolate beauty, setting themselves up in defiance of the very forces that give them their character and their form. I could never really decide whether I liked them.