The coronation ceremony of Charles III was, apart from the elaborate choreography and constitutional symbolism, the very image of a tradition that stubbornly persists in this age of barbarism, moral nihilism and cultural relativism. Yesterday reaffirmed a simple fact that many leading thinkers in the digital age decry as reactionary, pernicious and retrograde: nations depend on this unique cohesive force of tradition to exist. Patriotic attachment cannot be imagined in the absence of solidarity, which is built through historically consolidated gestures. The community that is born in this way is not a demagogic or xenophobic construction, but the very expression of the desire to live together.

Tradition enters our lives in its humblest guise. She does not always appear before us in the splendor and emotionality of state ceremonies. Often it hides in modest poses of human continuity. The route we follow in our lives is written in its frame. Rebellion and Fronde cannot change the dates of this history to which we belong. Never ostracized, never inert, never frozen in impersonal coldness, tradition is the framework within which our existence is framed. Passing and remembering are made possible by tradition’s ability to give meaning to death, pain, and separation.

Tradition takes refuge in the simple corners that Edmund Burke once mentioned in his prophetic pages. Tradition arises on islands and continents that free people create from the matter of their imagination. Signs of tradition are found wherever a sense of belonging and fellowship develops organically. Faith, sport, friendship, art, hobbies in free time represent the energy that gives tradition the ability to redefine itself.

And even in the moments when totalitarian massification tried to crush it, something from tradition continued to pulsate in this tender and fragile shrine of the family. The stories handed down from one generation to the next are part of that Berkinian partnership between the living and the dead: voices from beyond the grave guide us, and the love we bear for our dear shadows is a sacrifice on this altar of human continuity Continue reading article on Contributors.ro