When the Homily is about Immunology

Home Maintenance Paradosis

(I know it's long, but read it anyway...I'd like to know if it rings true with others)

Sitting down last night for a time of relaxation (having discovered sunday that our little microscopic friend had not fully left my family). The vomit was cleaned up, the dog fed, the sword had been succesfully removed from the stone, the fellowship had had its harrowing experience on weathertop, and the children were now blessed and tucked away in bed.

On comes the TV. "Ask this old House" teaches me how to change out a kitchen sink.

And it occurred to me that there really is a huge number of such programs. And while most bill themselves as "home improvement", many are better described as dealing with "home maintenance." Indeed, the web is full of sites that will tell you how to do just about anything in your home: from changing a lightbulb to installing a doorway in a load-bearing wall.

I do not know the "market numbers", but when I was growing up I do not remember seeing any such programs on TV - of course that doesn't mean there weren't any, because really if there were, would I have paid attention? But, I think it makes sense that there is more of a market out there to teach people how to do home maintenance today because we might be looking at the effects of traditions (paradosis) not being passed on.

My parents divorced when I was 12 years old, after which I saw my Dad – at most - four days out of every thirty. And for the life of me, I cannot recall every working on a home maintenance project with him. No toilet replacements, no washer or knob changes on a sink or shower, no wiring in the attic, no rough-in's of doors...nothing.

And so now, here I am 36 years old and doing some fairly major alterations to my house and seriously lacking two things that could help me: know-how and money to pay someone to do it for me. I could be wrong about all of this, but shouldn’t there be some magical world where someone passes down information to me that they had learned from someone before them, etc etc? That thing we stupidly lament, called “tradition”?

Have we as a society lost the traditions of home maintenance being passed down from father to son? I mean when I first faced a problem with a toilet in the house, should I have been forced to approach the matter with ignorance leading to fear and trembling? For had I been the recepient of Home Maintenance Paradosis I would have run down to the small local hardware store, gotten what I needed (including beer) and fixed the darn thing in time to catch kickoff at 10am. Instead it becomes an all day project that includes my begging for insight from some ignorant sales clerk at the local gigantic chain home improvement susperstore, getting the wrong parts, surfing the web for insights, and then fixing what I did wrong the following weekend.

It’s really not all that fun trying to “figure it out for yourself” which is a mantra that our culture tends to LOVE and PRAISE. You realize the demonic ignorance of the mantra when you are trying to rip out a bathroom floor because a toilet was not repaired properly and the floor rotted out from the slow leak that should have been noticed years ago. No, tradition isn’t all that bad now is it? Think of all the time and money I could save if I had just been taught beforehand…sigh.

I intend, like Saint Paul, to exhort my sons (and daughters) to hold to the traditions that I will have passed on to them. And the benefit in passing on those traditions is that I get free slave labor. It’s a good trade, one that I wished I had participated in as a kid.

Feel free to make this an analogy for “doing church” if you so wish.
:)