Consultation Sources

Growing Together

322. Traditions and Customs in the POP

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Kevin Ranaghan explained numerous customs that had developed in the South Bend branch by 1986: celebrating the Lord’s Day, norms of dress at community meetings, respect between men and women, special events, holidays, courtship, etc. Customs and traditions like these are important both to express and perpetuate the identity and values of a people. These customs didn’t necessarily exist in other branches, nor were they practiced by everyone in the South Bend branch.

Transcript

This document is a direct transcript of an audio recording, and may contain transcription errors and other minor edits for the sake of clarity.

KEVIN: . . . This session is meant to be on traditions and customs in the People of Praise. And my intention is to talk for a while and then have some time for discussion and perhaps sharing of experience. The way I want to approach the subject is to talk with you about some of the traditions and customs of the People of Praise as they’ve developed in the South Bend branch. In doing that, I am not saying, “These should be the traditions and customs of the People of Praise always and everywhere, henceforth and forever.” 

MAN’S VOICE: Amen. [Laughter] 

KEVIN: Okay? What I want to do is describe some of the things we do, some of the ways we behave, and some of the rationale for why we’ve done it, just to give you a feel for it as a basis for some discussion and sharing of experience. 

All social groups have traditions and customs. A “custom,” I suppose, one could define as: a usual—a long-established, usual way of behavior. It might be something people say; or it might be a little ritual of personal interaction of some sort; or it might have to do with the way people dress or sit or stand or behave; or it might have to do with some kind of celebration or event. But the idea in the word “custom” is that a custom is something like a usual, habitual way of doing things—could be with an individual, but it’s certainly true with social groups. 

And the idea of a tradition—the word “tradition,” as we all know, of course, means “handing on something.” For example, old-timers handing on things to new-timers—newcomers. Or, one generation handing something on to the next. Tradition means to hand something over. So, a tradition is a passing on of a way of life, a way of thinking, a way of behavior, and that—the way we use the word “traditions” here has to do, again, with the kind of—the passing on of ways of behavior or thinking or doing that are elements of the culture of a group. 

Traditions and customs sometimes have the force of law. That is to say, they become so—sometimes they get written into legislation. Or sometimes—or even without being written into legislation, they are so universal in a society that they are accepted as having some kind of legal force. Some of the things I am talking about here—will be describing here—have worked their way into . . . maybe official community policies; and some of them are sort of semi-policies; and some of them have no official standing at all. And some of them are probably done by some people in the South Bend branch and not by other people in the South Bend branch. But, we’re only 15 years old, and we’re very new at establishing “immemorial customs” [laughter], or things like that. 

You might—just to start this off with some other forms of reference, just to jog your own minds about other kinds of customs we may have grown up with: it’s probably true for all of us that we all know the custom of putting our right hand over our heart when we say the Pledge of Allegiance; or taking off your hat, if you have a hat, when the flag passes by. And I don’t know if those are laws, but they are American customs. 

Raised as—I was raised as a Roman Catholic, and at least where I grew up, you always made the sign of the cross when you passed a church in the street. So, it was like a public demonstration of faith. Or, you tipped your hat. I don’t know if anybody else did that, but that certainly was the way things were in New York when I was growing up. 

I was trained, both in my school and in my home, that when I met somebody as a little boy, I was supposed to go like this. [Kevin apparently makes some gesture.] Did you ever do that? That was part of our—now, it didn’t last very long. I’d say, by the time I was 10, we were still forced to do it in school, or you’d get, you know, “jugged” or something or other, but it was—you know, the girls always curtsied, if—you know, if company came to the house: the girls curtsied, and the boys went like this to the guests. Now, those are just little examples of little ways of behavior that were typical of a generation. 

If you like mafia movies like I like mafia movies [chuckles], you’ll regularly see this “bacio mano”: the kissing of the hand of the don or the chief hit man or whatever [chuckles], in the movie, you know. And that’s a sign of honor and respect, which looks very, very antique in our age. And yet it was a very, very common feudal, medieval, sign of respect and a sign of honor that defined, in sort of a—it was sort of a salute, sort of a statement of affection, a statement of loyalty, and it defined the relationship between people. 

And the first time I went to Poland with Andrew Plodowski1—the only time I went to Poland with Andrew, I experienced some customs that were very strange to me. One was people coming up to me and grabbing my hand and kissing it, which I found very difficult, you know, to deal with. The other was the giving of flowers to men. You get off at the airport; they give you flowers; and, you know, here you are, a guy, walking around with two suitcases and a bunch of flowers, you know [chuckles]. 

But it’s—that is the way they greet and honor everybody. And you know, if you ever see on news clips, Shevardnadze or Gorbachev2 or one of those guys gets off a plane, they always run up to them—some little child runs up to him and gives him flowers. So, in the Slavic nations, this is something, that men are given flowers, which we don’t normally do. Andrew tipped me in that then the custom is, you give those to the woman in the next house you go to, something like that, which is a convenient way of moving the flowers on [laughter] and maybe saying thank you to the hostess, okay? 

Those are just, you know, just a few little examples of things that you pick up as customs. We have here—30 miles to the east, we have a large Amish community. And you can just see all sorts of different ways of behavior that they have adopted which are customary to them. They do all sorts of things with colors of clothes. I mean, everybody knows they dress in an old-fashioned way. But in general, unmarried women wear colored dresses, like bright pink or a blue or something like that, whereas the married women wear a dark blue or a black. And the unmarried men never wear beards, and the married men always wear beards. And so, those are socially useful signals within the community. [Laughter.] 

It’s interesting that Amish men wear beards, but they never wear any hair on their upper lips. They always shave the upper lip, and they shave down to here. And when you realize that the Amish came from Switzerland in such and such a time, you find out that that’s how people wore beards at that time, and they arbitrarily chose that as a decent beard. Okay? So—but that kind of a beard is worn by the Amish. Also worn by Everett Koop3 [laughter]. I don’t know why, exactly. But among the Amish it has a symbol [sic], and it helps them to distinguish themselves from other people. 

So those are sort of—the kinds of examples I’m using as customs and traditions. And I’d like to get this point across: it seems to me that a lot of customs and traditions can be very arbitrary in their origins, but they seem to be really important in kind of defining the society or the group, and they symbolize and express something the group stands for. They may also have other effects, but they—the reason they become customs or become traditions is because they say something outside about who we are, and they reinforce and perpetuate the values of the group. 

Well, now I’m just going to try to talk about a whole bunch of things very quickly. But remember now, I’m talking about the South Bend branch, and I’m not saying, you know, everybody in every branch should go do this. 

Lord’s Day is one of the major customs or traditions that we have in the South Bend branch, and there may be four or five different forms, maybe more, of Lord’s Day prayers and ceremonies that are moving around. And it’s not clear that everybody in the South Bend branch has adopted Lord’s Day. Some people—we did a little survey this year. It was among parents of children—I forget all the results—parents of schoolchildren. We found that some people had Lord’s Day all the time, some people most always, some people rarely, and some people never. 

But it’s understood to be something that’s normally done in the community—at least the meal, at least the Lord’s Day meal. I wouldn’t say there’s a standard sense in the branch of what you do with the rest of Sunday. And I’d say that probably relatively few—of the people who keep Lord’s Day, a lot of people don’t keep the closing ceremonies at the meal on Sunday night, but do keep the opening meal on Saturday evening. 

But that whole sense of having a special meal, a special celebration, the good dishes, the good flatware, dressing up for that meal. . . . Now, dressing up may mean different things to different people. One of the things we found out in a lot of circumstances [is] that, for some people, dressing up means a three-piece suit, or—and for some people it means not wearing your jeans, but wearing your cords. So, it varies. 

But the sense of “this is something for which we dress up, something at which we celebrate”— having the prayers, blessing the wine, blessing the bread, passing around the cheese, having the time of sharing, having special prayers for that at the beginning of the Lord’s Day meal, and really, having that Lord’s Day meal as the opening of Sunday—is something that is, certainly for many, many people in the South Bend branch, very deeply embedded in family life. Like, it’s—there are many families, I think, where it’s almost like the children get disoriented if we don’t have the Lord’s Day meal, because that is part of our life. 

And that says something very, very strong about who we are, and about our honoring of the Lord. Now I—and the fact that we want to celebrate the Lord together, and that we really want the Lord’s Day to be a special day, not just individually, but also some- —and not just something we do out there in the whole group, but something that we honor in a special way in our homes. 

It’s interesting how I have found myself going back and forth in different circumstances about “Are we going to have the Lord’s Day celebration when company’s coming?” And I’ve found myself going both ways on it at different times, depending on how I thought people would react to it. Maybe you’ve experienced that. 

A little—just a comment on the Lord’s Day: I think we have experienced at different times trying to work through just how Jewish this is supposed to be. Certainly, the Lord’s Day celebration has—is rooted a lot in the Jewish Sabbath meal. And we’ve talked a lot about, “Is this the Sabbath? Or is this the Lord’s Day? Or is it the same thing? Or are they different?” And we’ve had, at least among our coordinators here, in different settings, lots of different discussions about that. And there are a lot of different opinions about it in various ways. 

But at one point I remember, a lot of people were being what I would now consider to be maybe “too Jewish” about the whole thing, okay? And then, at times, I’ve found people to be sort of just so loose about the whole thing that there was sort of no ritual structure to it at all. And I think it’s sort of mellowing into something that, at least in my experience, has—there are clearly traces of the Jewish celebration in it, but it’s also very heavily Christian at the same time. And personally, I welcome that kind of balance. And if anything, with more of an emphasis on the present Christian celebration than something that is sort of an antiquarian celebration of something that happened with our spiritual forebears before the coming of Christ. 

Another kind of custom that has developed is the approach we take to dress at community meetings. One of our customs in the South Bend branch is that, at every community meeting, unless it’s a trip to the beach or a picnic in the park, the coordinators all wear ties. Now, we decided that a long time ago, because we wanted to emphasize that the community meeting was a solemn and serious occasion, which called for some expression of reverence to the Lord. It didn’t mean that somebody who was wearing a tie was a coordinator. It didn’t mean that somebody else who wore a tie was bucking for coordinator. [Light laughter.] But it was just that we as a group were going to honor the Lord by giving that kind of—a kind of demonstration of seriousness about the Lord’s Day. 

Then we went through a lot of discussion about what were we going to do [sic] about dress at the community meeting? And what we came down to was that people should dress well and dress up, whatever that means for them. I know, we did, at one time, talk about, “Well, should all the men wear ties? Should all the women wear dresses? Should all the women wear skirts? Should women wear slacks at all?” I mean, some years ago, we went through that whole discussion. We decided, I think wisely, to ask the handmaids what they thought of all that. We didn’t just come and say, you know, “We are saying this about the women.” And it was clear that—I think among the handmaids, and probably among the coordinators—there was not an agreement. 

But what we came to was the sense that people ought to be dressed up and dressed well at the community meeting. They shouldn’t be dressed in sloppy clothes. They shouldn’t be dressed in dirty clothes. They shouldn’t come to the community meeting sweaty in their soccer uniform or their softball uniform if they just played a game. They shouldn’t wear cutoffs. They should wear shoes. They shouldn’t wear tank top kinds of things. I mean, that sense that it was—that we were clean, and we were spiffy, and we were wearing what for us—what everybody individually would consider good clothes. Haven’t always been completely successful at that, but that’s the custom, and that’s what we try to teach people. 

We’ve wanted the children to come to the community meeting, unless we have an evening meeting where they’re excused as a group, and we also want them to be clean and neat and well-behaved. We’ve always said that the smaller children could bring, like, quiet toys, you know, soft toys, or maybe a coloring book or something like that if they were real little, or a little children’s book to look at, because the meeting’s two hours long. But [we] have said they shouldn’t be running around, that the parents ought to take responsibility and authority for their behavior, and if—they shouldn’t have noisy toys, you know: music boxes or Tonka trucks or things like that, okay? 

In this regard, we have always taught—well, not always taught, but we have taught for a number of years—that in the People of Praise, children always address adults by a proper form of address, unless the adult in question asks the child or invites the child to call them by their first name. So, our children—our custom is to teach our children always to call an adult Mr. or Mrs. or Miss. And not to presume a familiarity. Not to just say, you know, “Hi, Paul; hi, Jeanne,” you know, “Hi Barbara,” or that kind of thing, but to use the proper form of address that again speaks of respect and the right kind of distance, and the right kind of honor that should be there. So, as we honor the Lord by dressing up for him or having a celebration meal for him, we’ve wanted people to honor each other properly in terms of, let’s say, age, this way. 

Now, we’ve seen that, you know, for example, generally speaking, our experience in households—generally speaking, not universally, but generally speaking, in households—the adults in the household ask the children and invite the children to call them by their first names, because they’re living so closely together. We’ve had some funny experiences when people the kids have known then have married other people, and my kids have said, “Oh, you know, I saw Monica and Mr. Higginbotham.” You know, or something like that—like, it’s a little bit mixed. Or, I also noticed with my children—like, Carol Miller lived as Carol Pager in our house before her marriage, and lots of my children, you know, knew her as Carol and sat on her lap, and she read to them and bathed them and everything else, I mean, and she was Carol. But after she married and had a few children, they rather naturally went to calling her Mrs. Miller. Which seemed to me to be a good instinct on their part, because she was really in a different place, and that kind of intimate familiarity that had been in the household had now changed somewhat. 

We’ve also taught—and I think this probably comes up in some course outlines—that we should develop proper forms of respect between men and women. And we have encouraged men to adopt and use what might be considered the more traditional forms of honor towards women—opening doors for women, for example, or taking off your hat in an elevator—those kinds of things, which might be—which a lot of people would consider old-fashioned, and which, sometimes, even, we’ll find some women in the world resenting. I mean, those kinds of forms of honor and respect—if they don’t imply that the woman is helpless, or something like that—have been, for us, I think very useful in kind of setting up a pattern of honor between men and women. 

We’ve also taught the same kinds of customs at home. This is arbitrary, I think, and it varies from house to house. I know in some families—this is not true in all families—in some families, the family honors the mother by standing at the table until she comes to dinner and says, “Everything is ready, and let’s be seated.” Or, having the children—when Dad comes home from work, having the children stop whatever they are doing and come and greet the father as he comes home. There may be other forms of such expressions of respect. 

We’ve encouraged people—we’re encouraging people—we’re encouraging men to be men and women to be women. And we’ve encouraged people to express that in how they dress or in how they wear their hair. I don’t know that—I can’t give very clear examples of that. But I mean, I would say—on one hand, we haven’t said, you know, there’s something like an official men’s haircut in the community. We’ve never done that in the branch, and we’ve always had some people in the branch who are somewhat “out of” what everybody else was doing, and it was okay. But there—we have encouraged people to think and talk about, you know, what is the right way to dress, and what is—and what do we arbitrarily want to choose as the way we would dress. 

One of the things that we’ve learned, you know, in kind of the talks Kerry’s given on youth culture—we see it with our own youngsters, particularly those who go—I find,  particularly those who go to Trinity and wear the uniform so much—is that they do have some tendency to get into the more radically expressive current teen fashions, or the—you know, the Target versions of the Esprit clothes, or the fancy kind of teenage clothes. But I haven’t, myself, detected that as too much of a sign of rebellion. Maybe some others have. 

We have a number of customs that have developed around certain kinds of special events, like wedding showers and baby showers; around weddings; and around funerals. Now, these are important events in the lives of community members, in which people come forward to give a special kind of support, and express a special kind of solidarity. 

Our custom has been to have wedding showers for all the women who are getting married. Usually, they’re put on by the women’s group. Usually, most of the people who will come, or the people who feel the strongest sense of coming, might be the women from the area or the division, but they’re open to the whole. We’ve wanted them to be practically an event where the bride or the new mother receives gifts that are going to be useful. I mean, they really are meant to be an expression of caring for each other materially. But we have—and really, the women have done this—I mean, they have really developed a form of sharing, of honoring each other, and of conducting this kind of event that is very, very different, I’m told, from the way they go on in the world. I mean, my understanding is that a lot of wedding showers in the world, like stag parties, can get pretty ribald and kind of wild and raucous, and there can be too much drinking and things like that. I think our experience in showers is that people are really taken care of materially, and that they really are honored and treasured as sisters. 

In that regard, there’s a custom among many families in the South Bend branch at birthdays. Of—I know of two customs among a lot of people. One is that the birthday-ee gets to pick the menu for the birthday meal, which has led to some interesting situations from time to time, particularly among the kids. The other is that everyone at the house- —in the household, or everyone at the table, shares and honors the person whose birthday it is. That’s a similar sort of thing to what goes on at the engagement shower, the wedding shower, or the baby shower. 

Our custom has been, in the South Bend branch, that a woman is given a baby shower for her first baby, or her first baby since she came into the community. We have a lot of large families, so the first time. . . . And that takes care of the need, doesn’t it? Because it provides a lot of those supplies that are then used over and over again with other children. 

We have a lot of customs about weddings. Weddings, and the customs that surround weddings, and the guidelines we’ve had in the South Bend branch about weddings, are things that we feel very strongly about. Although we always face a certain kind of struggle over weddings, because the world holds up a very strong model about what should be going on at weddings, which we find ourselves disagreeing with. 

We—I think the way we approach weddings is that we want weddings to be as much as possible celebrations—a celebration of the new relationship of the bride and groom. It’s the establishment of a new family or a new household in the community. It is their celebration, but it’s also a celebration of the whole community, and the celebration ought to reflect the spirit and purpose of the community. The celebration ought to reflect the culture and the way of life of the community, and not be an importation of a model that is partic- —you know, generally current, in society. Now, sometimes this is like pulling teeth. And sometimes I think we’re more successful than other times in what we want to accomplish in this area. 

We want—for example, we want to encourage the actual religious celebration of the wedding to have elements of our prayer, our music, and, where appropriate, exercise of spiritual gifts and charismatic spirituality, etc., right within it, as part of the ceremony. We have encouraged heads to take an active role, if the bride and groom will agree to it—to take an active role in actually planning the wedding with them. We’ve encouraged coordinators to act as emcees at the wedding, to explain to the—welcome people as they come, and explain to people what’s going on here, that this is something to which the People of Praise welcome you, and you may experience this kind of prayer or this kind of word gift, or praying over the couple—all those things which we tend to do—and to try to draw people into that. So, we’ve tended to try to have a fairly high visibility for the community at weddings. 

We’ve wanted the comm- —we’ve wanted the wedding to be very nice, but we’ve wanted it to be simple rather than extravagant, and inexpensive rather than expensive. And we have felt that that was the kind of aspect—a kind of a provident life—that we wanted to have mirrored in the wedding. So, we have encouraged, for example, nice wedding outfits, but more modestly priced than extravagantly priced. We have strongly encouraged just a few attendants, a best man and a maid of honor, and maybe one or two others. That has been one of the toughest points, because people tend to like 18 attendants [light laughter]. We try to encourage our music rather than, you know, huge trumpet voluntaries that might be more appropriate for the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of York, you know? We’ve tried to encourage that kind of simplicity in the ceremony itself. And we’ve tried to encourage a spirit of joy and celebration rather than something that is extremely solemn, okay? 

Then, we’ve tried to have the reception be nice, very nicely done, but done by the community, rather than a caterer; to have finger food rather than full meals; and to have it not cost a great deal of money, but be a really good party—and not just for the bride and groom, but a good party for the families of the bride and groom, and a good party for the community. 

Over the years, we have had many unresolved, frank and cordial discussions about dancing. [Laughter.] 

MAN’S VOICE: Amen. 

[Laughter continuing.]

KEVIN: And there was a time when some among us felt that we should only have folk dancing at weddings, and to some that meant Greek and Israeli folk dancing, and to others it meant Virginia Reels and things like that. But others have felt, no, we should have all sorts of dancing. In general, we have—the general practice over the years has been sort of nice, fast and slow dancing, played by a local band. Recently, we’ve run into the “bringing in the disc jockey” phenomenon, and I’m certainly among those who want to move the disc jockeys back out the door. [Laughter.]

MAN’S VOICE: Good luck, brother.

KEVIN: Because, personally—well, you win some and lose some. [Laughter.] Because, in my mind, when you have the disc jockey playing the record, you have the actual secular artist singing at your community function, where, when you have a band, you have an interpretation of it. You’re a step further removed from it. But that’s sort of a “sense” on weddings. 

Something similar with wakes and funerals—of which we’ve had a number in the branch over the years. We have always encouraged our coordinators and our heads to get involved with the families immediately when there’s a death in the immediate family. It’s our custom to have the coordinator or the head right there on the scene, offering all sorts of help in the practical arrangements. And going with the family, if necessary, to the hospital, to the undertaker’s, to the cemetery, helping to make all those arrangements and bringing in any kind of people with expertise in those areas from the branch who can help in making those decisions. 

It’s also been our practice to, as much as possible, plan the wake and the funeral as community celebrations. And we have had many—many may be too strong—several experiences, for example, where—we had one funeral in the branch, where we went to a funeral parlor, and we had—there were 1100 people at the wake. Not—the funeral directors were overwhelmed, the neighborhood of the place was overwhelmed, but it’s. . . . First of all, I think there’s a real strong sense among all the people that when there is this kind of a tragedy in one of the families, everybody comes out. And really, all sorts of other things just stop. And this becomes a real focus of coming together around the family and supporting them at that time. And we will usually try to have a coordinator lead the wake service, and have our own music there, and our own songbooks there. 

And we have—we’ve tried to learn to balance grief at loss with faith in the resurrection. And I think we’ve gone through that over the years, in terms of having, maybe in some instances early on, not enough grieving. And we were—we tried to learn the importance of mourning, and expressing mourning, in what we’re doing, and—but also to have the faith in the resurrection come through. But in fact, I mean, wakes and funeral services have been something like special prayer meetings or special community meetings, and we’ve been. . . . Now, obviously, that’s not welcome in every situation, or you can’t do it because of other members of the family or other considerations. We have experienced that. 

Let me say something about the customs that have developed here about courtship among the membership of the community. A lot of this is already clear from things like CFS II, but we’ve—we have—our custom has been to teach things like: in general, a single man should not be alone with a single woman. When you date, be together, but in a public place. Be together in such a way that you can have a private conversation, but in a public place. 

If you’re casually dating—or even if you’re seriously dating—you should not have a display of personal affection that would exceed what would be appropriate with any brother or sister in the community. Now, there are a number of reasons for that, I think—some of which are, of course, that a little display of affection will lead to a stronger display of affection, and then one gets into a kind of affection that really is only appropriate as a preparation for sexual relations in marriage, and we want to protect that. The other thing is that in the community, what we have is brothers and sisters dating each other. And if a casual relationship does not go forward, or if a serious relationship does not go forward, one needs to be able to continue to relate as a brother or sister for the next 70 years! And be able to look each other in the eye and have good—a good, healthy, brotherly, sisterly affection. 

So, we have strongly encouraged people—and different people may express this different ways—but we have encouraged people very strongly against kissing, or, you know, “linger longer” hugging, in casual dating and in serious dating. Saying, for example, that kissing is probably only appropriate in engagement, and even there, one has to be very careful about the whole question of chastity. 

I was talking to a couple about this recently, within the last week, and we were just talking about past experience, and he had said to her, in the midst of their courtship, “Well, are you affectionate?” And she had said, “Yes, but I think a kiss is a promise. And this isn’t the time for that.” And I thought that was an interesting way that she had captured that in the relationship. 

So, we have tried to encourage that kind of restrained, proper, brotherly, sisterly approach to dating. And I think we have, in many cases been successful, and probably in some cases, not so successful. 

Off of that, we teach—or from that, we have taught, and it’s our custom, not to encourage, and really to frown upon—dating, one-on-one dating, among the children of the community, or between children of the community and anybody else. The kids, of course, have a hard time with this, and they haven’t made any voluntary commitment to the community, and it’s another kind of gripe. And they—our experience is that the kids work on their parents over and over and over again. And the slogan, “He’s just my friend”—I mean, it could be sort of an embroidered motto, I think, for teenage girls in the community. 

MAN’S VOICE: And boys. 

KEVIN: And boys—well, the other, “She’s just my friend.” [Laughter.] 

But encouraging—just as we encourage the younger single people to do a lot of social activities together, we encourage that same thing among the teenage kids in the community. And let’s say, from the point of view of the kind of tradition that we’re trying to develop, it’s a tradition in which our teenagers—or, and pre-teenagers—do not date one-on-one. This is also very difficult. And there—we have experienced some erosion in this. We have experienced parents saying, “Well, you can date once you’re 16.” Well, heck, that’s half of high school, you know. And I think we lose a lot when that happens. And there’s something of a constant battle going on there. 

Well, a couple of more things, and then maybe we could have some discussion. 

We have a custom about the telephone. And our custom is that no one in the community should telephone anyone else in the community between 5:30 pm and 7:00 pm any night. Now, the kids violate this all the time. You really have to come down on, “But it’s for my homework!” Okay? We have to come down on that. And sometimes people forget. And sometimes, when people come into the community, they’re not taught that. I mean, we forget. It slips through the cracks. But that’s, again, to try to protect the dinner hour as an important time of family togetherness or household togetherness. And—except, of course, if there’s some kind of an emergency, obviously. 

We always try to celebrate Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost in a special way. We note this—in the Spirit and Purpose, we note the celebration of special liturgical feasts as part of our community life. Usually, we celebrate that with a special music performance, with special food. . . . It had been our custom for some years, and it goes back and forth, from years to years. It’s nice if we can do it. We have, like, a branch Christmas tree, a community Christmas tree, which we’ll bless, and then put the lights on. When we were a lot smaller, we were able to do that very easily. When we were real small, we would go out and cut it down and bring it back, and that was very nice. And then having kind of—a special kind of Christmas party, or community meeting, that is really different, for the celebration of Christmas and for the celebration of Easter, in particular. 

One interesting thing happened in the South Bend branch which is precisely to the subject we’re talking about. In 1977 or ‘784—I’m sorry, I forget the date—about 125 people moved from San Francisco to South Bend. And their custom had been to celebrate the Easter meeting with the continual ringing of bells. And they had all sorts of little bells and big bells and gongs and all sorts of things that they would bring to their community meeting for the celebration of Easter


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. . . and we generally ring them all the time, except when the choir’s performing. And that is a specific way of celebrating Easter that is kind of one of the traditions that we have. 

There are lots of other things we could talk about: household prayer, for example, or other things about mealtimes, or customs and traditions of hospitality, for example. Many other things we could probably talk about. But I think it’d be better if—my point here was just to roll out some things we’ve done. And I think all the things that I’ve talked about, for us, say something about the kind of people we want to be, the kind of life we want to have, the kind of values that we want to hold up for ourselves. Because when you live these customs and traditions, you reinforce your culture in yourselves; you hand it on to your kids; and you manifest it or witness it out, inasmuch as other people can see it, to the people around you. So, why don’t I just stop there and. . . .  

[Recording ends here.]

Endnotes

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