AN INVITATION FOR FAMILY MEMBERS AND OTHERS
“Grandpa, do you believe in God?” That was Pablo, and running in my head in uneasy counterpoint with it is the observation a friend makes,that when she discusses details with people who don’t believe in God, she discovers that she too doesn’t believe in the God that they describe.
I know that several of you would have preferred that Fran and I not have a religious ceremony. Nevertheless we’ve decided to do so, for reasons that are sufficient and convincing for us, and I want to share with all of you whom we love a bit of our rationale and motivation. First of all I direct your attention to two recent documents: Alain de Botton’s book Religion for Atheists, and Karen Armstrong’s talk Let’s revive the Golden Rule in the TED Talks series at https://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/karen_armstrong_let_s_revive_the_golden_rule.html.
To my delight, they combine to offer a strong and rational rationale (I can never resist wordplay) for our instinctive unwillingness to abandon the inheritance from two millennia of Christian practice.
I’d already moved a considerable distance in that direction during the years that I worked with Wayne Hilliker at Chalmers Church. Like a good science journalist, Wayne excels in bringing accounts of current research to a lay audience, with a clarity that makes the results comprehensible without over-simplification or a facile skipping over difficulties. The principal element that I learned from Wayne was how very non-literal the Hebrew literary tradition is; and how easily it becomes falsified when it falls into the hands of a self-consciously pedantic culture like that of the first-century Greeks. Karen Armstrong makes a similar point when she suggests that CREDO meant a different process, and a less objective and restrictive definition, than the English I BELIEVE has come to mean in the years since Descartes and the wars around the Reformation.
Of course, as Alain de Botton makes clear, there’s much to value in religious traditions that has little or nothing to do with belief. Does the celebration of the Eucharist in an Anglican cathedral mean exactly what it says? There’s lots of room for debate about that, and the debate’s ongoing. But for people with an ear for language and an eye for spectacle, there’s little doubt that it’s a fascinating interplay of poetry, music, gesture, and objects with associated meanings—Wagner’s Gesamkunstwerk in a much older, much more widely shared form, and without the nasty anti-Semitic persona of Wagner himself.
And beyond that, it’s part of our inheritance. I welcome newcomers to this country, and it’s part of the Canadian way that we encourage them to retain the good things from their own traditions. But despite the urgings of the politically correct, such multiculturalism doesn’t benefit if we give away all the things that originally defined our own society. My neighbour is not enriched if I poke fun at the parliamentary tradition, or mock Medicare; and to deny our own cultural inheritances doesn’t really make theirs more secure, or more meaningful. It just confirms them in the idea that the Anglo-Celtic inheritance is intrinsically brutal, money-grubbing and emotionally flaccid.
So we celebrate Christmas (though very few of us believe in Santa Claus!); we party on Guy Fawkes Day, or Canada Day, or the Fourth of July; and for some of us, we maintain the old art form that is Christian worship at its best. Naturally Fran and I stand closer to this than many people, because without belonging to the churches we served, we nevertheless devoted a great deal of our labour, our artistic sensibility, and our love to church music, and music in the liturgy. Of course we want our celebration, after a quarter-century together, to take the form we find most meaningful and intense.
So we invite all of you, our siblings and children and grandchildren and your partners, and our friends to join us wholeheartedly in that celebration. Jubilate Deo! (and put your own object of worship in place of the last word).
David