Traditions

By Walter Kish

We are now into the official season of Lent marking the countdown to Easter which this year falls on April 12 if you are going by the modern Gregorian calendar or a week later on April 19 if you observe the traditional Julian calendar.  Of course, if you are like most people I know, Easter and the Lenten season are usually viewed as part of the set of traditions our parents observed, but few of our generation have bothered to continue.  Our children and grandchildren will undoubtedly be even less inclined to preserve the cultural and religious legacy of our ancestors.

It is a shame.  We live in a modern society where traditions have lost their value.  We have become removed from the historical processes that brought us to where we are and who we are today.  As a first generation Ukrainian born in Canada, I was still brought up within an environment that produced a certain amount of respect and allegiance to the fact that I was Ukrainian.  That self-identification tied me psychologically to my ancestors in Ukraine and all of the folklore, culture, traditions and values that they had evolved over the course of a millennium.  I never questioned the fact that I was Ukrainian.  It was not an abstract concept, but part of my every day life.

For my children however, as I am sure is true for most second and third generation born in Canada Ukrainians, the same cannot be said.  They are for all intents and purposes Canadians who happen to carry Ukrainian genes as a coincidence of birth rather than as a defining factor in their lives.  To be sure, there are still some that are active in Ukrainian dancing groups, or that belong to Plast, or go to the “Ridna Shkola” Saturday morning Ukrainian schools, but they constitute no more than a few percentage points of the total population of Canadians of Ukrainian descent. 

According to census data, there are somewhere in the vicinity of 1.2 million Canadians of Ukrainian descent.  Although there no official statistics on this, I think if you were to add up all the Ukrainians that belong to some formal Ukrainian organization of any kind, excluding churches, you would be hard pressed to come up with more than perhaps fifteen to twenty thousand.  The Ukrainian churches, though there are still a significant number of them, have been in significant decline for the past several decades, as the original generation of immigrants and their first generation descendents have died off.  According to official statistics, membership in the Ukrainian Catholic Church in Canada declined from so 228,000 in 1971 to approximately 126,000 in 2001. 

Taking everything into account, I think I would be safe in saying that probably 90% of Ukrainian Canadians have functionally assimilated into the broader Canadian society and culture and typically have no more than a token connection to their ethnic roots.  I say this without passing judgment since living in a free, democratic and progressive society such as we have in Canada, one of the most fundamental rights we have is the right to determine the course and nature of our personal lives.  Further, choosing to be a good Canadian as opposed to a good Ukrainian, is not in any way a lesser moral and ethical choice.  In fact, most of our ancestors endured centuries of persecution and oppression to earn the right to make that very choice.

What does sadden me though is the increasing disconnect that today’s generations have with history and their roots in general.  The Twentieth Century in my mind engendered an unbalanced and unhealthy preoccupation with the here and now, with living for the moment, with instant gratification and a focus on the individual and personal entitlement. As a result, communities of all types, be they geographic or cultural, have suffered immensely.

Accompanying this trend, and perhaps a causal factor of it, has been a callous disregard for the lessons and values of the past.  The elders in our society are no longer consulted or listened to.  Traditions are looked upon as quaint irrelevant nostalgia rather than as a vehicle for preserving values and life lessons from generation to generation. We seldom bother to look beneath the surface for the roots and true meaning that gave rise to those traditions.  We have become so “smart” that we no longer bother to find out what wisdom has been gleaned by our predecessors throughout all those centuries of trial by fire.  In that, we are undoubtedly the poorer.

I suffer no delusion that somehow there is a magic way to revive the Ukrainian spirit in that 90% of the Ukrainian community in Canada that has moved on.  However, we should strive as much as we can to make traditions and history meaningful to that remaining 10% so that it doesn’t fade away to zero in the generations ahead.