Whatever we think our stories mean...

Whatever we think our stories mean

we have all happened into a story

that's been going for a while.

By the accidents we call history,

geography, and birth

I came to read English poetry.

By similar accidents, my ancestors in Sweden,

Germany, Scotland, England

came to be called Christian.

My parents came to marry in a church in Coulee City,

and thirteen years later

I came to be baptized in that building.

And this, it seems, is pretty much exactly

how we experience science

and tradition.

Neither one is done alone,

more like inheritance than individual choice,

a community through time embodying a memory of how things are.

And they both bring us to encounter what we don't expect,

a source of renewable surprise

and culture shock.

That counterintuition makes science and tradition

less subject to the vagaries of generational preoccupation,

personality, or fashion.

Thus, from within tradition,

it's possible to discover something new

even something from other traditions.

Without tradition,

it's hard to remember anything

at all.