After the terrorist attack on Berlin last month, I posted the famous 1963 utterance of President John F. Kennedy, “Ich bin ein Berliner,” on my Facebook page. With these words, JFK concluded his speech expressing solidarity with the citizens of the walled-in city of Berlin. They are words well worth remembering as we continue to pray for the victims of this heinous crime. Every time I visit Berlin, I go to that Christkindlmarket to pray at the extraordinary memorial Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church nearby. That church, bombed in 1943, rebuilt and reopened in 1963, stands as a sign of hope to all Berliners. There in the church, the risen Christ, robed as a priest, presides over the congregation from his cross, suspended against a background of a wall of strikingly deep blue stained glass. Now that church bears yet another remembrance. As a theologian, I always find it helpful to draw on the insights of the past because those who came before me also puzzled over the questions we face today. In a word, I believe in the resourcefulness of traditions, and I hope to highlight some of these traditions for you in this column as we take up ethical quandaries that will arise as the new year unfolds. In graduate school, I learned to distinguish between the various ways traditions function for a people. We were taught the distinction between tradition as the living faith of the dead or as the dead faith of the living. We learned that the living faith of those who have gone before us carries us forward. The very word “tradition” comes from the Latin word “tradere” meaning to deliver. The tradition delivers us from the present and bears us into the future. The words of Kennedy and the interior of Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church bear us forward, in part because the president and the architect properly read the signs of their times. They heard the heartbeats of the people they meant to accompany. Tradition is only living if it emanates from those who are able to perceive what needs to be recognized. When that tradition is living, it can then deliver. We Catholics invoke traditions to help us move forward, to follow in the footsteps of the one who calls and leads us. Our traditions help us to respond to him. In Pier Paolo Pasolini’s great work “The Gospel According to St. Matthew,” Jesus is depicted as a silhouette heading to Jerusalem at a ferocious pace. He moves so quickly that we can catch only glimpses of him as he teaches the multitudes, heals the sick and instructs his disciples. We become like those disciples who trip over themselves as they try to see him, hear him and follow him. Pasolini’s film urges us to get on with it, to stop our idleness and to see the one who is passing by this very minute! Pasolini captures the tradition’s insight that true disciples must keep moving ahead in response to the summons of Christ, for not to move forward on the road of discipleship is to move backward. As Thomas Aquinas taught centuries ago, “In via Dei stare retrocedere est.” “On the way of God, to stand is to recede.” When I think of this dynamic journey, another disciple comes to mind, the one who comes “from the end of the earth,” as Pope Francis put it on the night of his election. He urges us to move with him as he responds to the refugees, to the prisoners and to those left behind; as he tries to awaken us to the spoils of creation and the call to care for our common home; as he decries violence and the arms race and presses for peace; and as he summons us to a renewed moral reasoning, a discernment that helps us to accompany one another. Like the architectural vision of that Berlin church, the words of Kennedy, the direction of Pasolini and the leadership of the Argentine pontiff, may we too find those wise insights that deliver solidarity and hope throughout 2017 and beyond. Assuredly, we will need them.