Spiritualities for a Secular Society
C. Watson
Yesterday, many of us were deeply moved when five couples described their experiences when married by Celebrants; we heard the hurt in Julie’s voice when she told us of their disappointment with a Celebrant who ignored their wishes. She told us that the celebrant’s behaviour took the sacredness from the occasion. I have no idea what her ‘religious’ position is, but I think we could learn a lot by reflecting on what she said and the passion with which she said it. She was talking about a significant passage in her life, a failed opportunity to mark what was important about it. I think one of our purposes here is to deepen our understanding of what people mean when they talk about the spiritual or the sacred in a situation where they probably don’t find much relevance with things offered by the traditional religious beliefs, practices, and symbols.
I am speaking in front of a wall with several pictures on it. One is a painting of a Pentecost scene, with apostles kneeling in a worshipful position around Mary while tongues of fire appear above them. This might have profound spiritual significance for those Pallottines who placed it here, but it does little for my spirit and probably even less for those not brought up in the Catholic tradition. Beside it are several prints of aboriginal patterns. I can only dimly interpret them; they are not my tradition, yet they move me and suggest a deeper spiritual significance, in their suggestions of the shape of things, the relationships among the elements of the world.
In front of me is a glass of water that was recently mayim hayim, “living waters” as the Hebrew so beautifully puts it, collected 30 minutes ago from a fresh stream flowing 100 yards away, and a dish of earth I scooped up beside it, rich with decaying matter. A person standing on that spot 250 years ago might have had a very strong feeling of the spiritual significance of these things; we can only guess at what this would be, because these people were quickly removed by European settlement. In another mood or occasion, I might take a very practical approach to the place and these things: energy for a hydro-electric power station, potential place to grow crops; mud on my boots! But I can also see them as spiritually significant, especially if made part of a ceremony that draws out their meaning. One way of re-imagining spirituality in our times is to rewalk that land, to feel its textures, colours, and rhythms – while interpreting them in the light of our existing sense of things.
Australians have an additional problem to those of industrialised societies in the northern hemisphere. The festivals we inherited from Europe are all six months out of line from the seasons. The symbolism of an Easter wedding is not the same when the flowery bonnets aren’t accompanied by that exciting sprouting of new life that my wife and I felt so strongly when we first experienced a northern hemisphere spring.
Juliet Batten’s Celebrating the Southern Seasons is an interesting attempt to deal with this. She talks especially about Celtic rituals, and how these were incorporated in Christian festivals that settlers subsequently brought with them. She looks at how the earlier inhabitants of New Zealand have marked their seasons, and suggests family ceremonies which could be a meaningful way for people to establish connections with the seasons and vegetation of their own country, while keeping symbolism from their European heritage. Some of these are very specific to New Zealand, but I’d love to find a similar book for Australia, to which our surviving indigenous people could surely contribute much.
Symbols, which are so important in all of this, are powerful things; they can be taken over, by business interests, by religions, by totalitarian governments. They can also be resilient and we can reclaim them. Julie Ruth’s use of traditional Jewish symbols in her ceremony yesterday reminded us of one of the ways celebrants can perform an important service for those who have stepped away from institutions and their theologies, but want to hold to other things from that heritage. Then we saw in David Oldfield’s presentation the fascinating way that a yin-yang symbol, commercialised to sell more records, reappeared when a young person instinctively chose it as part of a healing process. I expect that celebrants will find people turning up with symbols that have come from sources that make it hard to recognise the instinct of the spirit that leads people to seek them, then need to unravel them, re-invest them with dignity.
Here is a poem by John Shaw Neilson, an Australian writer who spent much of his life doing hard physical work in country and city. It is set in Melbourne’s Exhibition Gardens, overshadowed then by St Patrick’s Cathedral, and near Fitzroy, in his time a home for many of the very poor.
THE POOR CAN FEED THE BIRDS
Ragged, unheeded, stooping, meanly shod,
The poor pass to the pond: not far away
The spires go up to God.
Shyly they come from the unpainted lane;
Coats have they made of old unhappiness
That keeps in every pain .
The rich have fear, perchance their God is dim;
‘Tis with their hope of stored-up happiness
they build their spires to Him.
The rich go out in clattering pomp and dare
In the most holy places to insult
The deep Benevolence there.
But ‘tis the poor who make the loving words.
Slowly they stoop; it is a sacrament:
The poor can feed the birds.
Old, it is old, this scattering of the bread,
Deep as forgiveness, or the tears that go
Out somewhere to the dead.
The feast of love, the love that is the cure
For all indignities — it reigns, it calls,
It chains us to the pure.
Seldom they speak of God, He is too dim;
So without thought of after happiness
They feed the birds for Him.
The rich men walk not here on the green sod,
But they have builded towers, the timorous
That still go up to God.
Still will the poor go out with loving words;
In the long need, the need for happiness
The poor can feed the birds.
As well as what it suggests about alternatives to religious institutions, let’s think about his use of the word ‘sacrament’, in traditional theology, an external action that has an internal effect, but also – as in the Eucharist – a means of linking people to each other and to what they consider divine.
Rather than talk about a secular spirituality, as Dally did, I want to talk about a range of spiritualities that we might find in our society. Rather than attempt a philosophical definition of the spiritual or the sacred, I want to look at some of the things that seem to be involved when we use such terms. Things of the human spirit, things that are set aside from the everyday or “profane”, the term Mircea Eliade contrasted with the sacred, yet in other ways profoundly connected with those everyday matter-of-fact activities. I am sure, too, that there are some cultures, and some people in ours, for whom the distinction scarcely exists. Not everyone has the same experience; Pamela Bone said recently:
“If I want calm and peace, I’ll sit in Fawkner Park for a while on Sunday afternoon and look at the sky and the trees, listen to the sounds of cricket balls on bats, and watch the children playing on the swings. Some people might call the feeling I have then “spiritual”. I don’t.” (The Age, 26.3.99)
Civil celebrants serve those who want a ceremony, but not an institutional service, for themselves, or for those they come to bury, a ceremony that says something about their yearnings beyond the everyday mundane details of life. To be fair, let us also acknowledge – and hope for dialogue with – those from within Church traditions who also offer something more personal than simple orthodoxies. Where traditional religions are accepted by fewer people, yet leave their influence, many people are going to offer or request things that are a rather jumbled and semi-articulated collection of suggestions, and a task for the celebrant is to interpret and translate these, giving them form and coherence.
The Venerable Bede, around 730, describes an incident where an early missionary presents his version of Christianity to a king and his advisors, who discuss their response. One of them answers with this passage:
“Your majesty, when we compare the present life of man with that time of which we have no knowledge, it seems to me like the swift flight of a lone sparrow through the banqueting-hall where you sit in the winter months to dine with your thanes and counsellors. Inside there is a comforting fire to warm the room; outside the wintry storms of snow and rain are raging. This sparrow flies swiftly in through one door of the hall, and out through another. While he is inside, he is safe from the winter storms; but after a few moments of comfort, he vanishes from sight into the darkness whence he came. Similarly, man appears on earth for a little while, but we know nothing of what went before this life, and what follows. Therefore, if this new teaching can reveal any more certain knowledge, it seems only right that we should follow it.” [Ecclesiastical History of the English People, II, 13].
Faced with a puzzling universe of which they wanted to make sense, they accepted the package. Many people now, it seems, are accepting much stranger ones. The need to find meaning and to make connections, is there, and civil celebrants are in a position to offer an authentic rather than a bogus product.
I remember reading a very moving story by a psychotherapist. A Jewish agnostic woman who was suffering deep depression eventually lit the candles appropriate to one of the feasts, broke into deep weeping, then moved beyond her depression. This says something about the urge to connect with one’s traditions and what they can represent. I often wonder what really goes on with those Catholics I heard so much about in childhood who rejected the Church only to make a deathbed confession and communion. What need were they meeting? Was it merely a matter of playing safe just in case? Was there a huge conflict between their intellectual convictions and the spiritual needs that they could see no other way of meeting? A friend showed me an article he wrote about life at a Jewish school which seemed very rigid; he commented on sending his own children there and finding a perfect reflection of the spiritual desert of consumerism which in his view has overtaken contemporary Judaism. He feels that the effective loss of beliefs and practices has left nothing in their place. He is somebody, quite intelligent and thoughtful, who follows the religious practices of Judaism and seems to have no problems with the theology that goes with them. He is also fascinated by younger people who reject, for example, the Sabbath prohibitions, but are fascinated by the Talmud. But what of those who want to maintain the deep connections with their ancestral practices, but find the underpinning theology unacceptable? I don’t believe it is enough to describe them as “cultural” Jews or Christians.
Recently I heard a talk about Matthew’s Gospel and the early Christian community for whom it was written: thrown out of the synagogue, committed to their beliefs in Jesus, but desperately needing to be connected with their own Jewish roots. For Matthew, this meant a heavy use of Jewish scripture. In our world this rediscovery of roots can be a matter of finding new metaphors, new rituals that can build on their traditions in ways people find credible. In some cases, they’ll be looking to their rabbis and priests for this, but some will be looking to people like yourselves. Divorced Catholics or Jews marrying outside their community might have little choice.
Diarmuid Ó Murchú talks about elements of what he sees, perhaps too uncritically, as the new spirituality:
It is a spirituality that belongs to the world and its peoples and not to some distant God in heaven or to an ultimate state of nirvana. It is a spirituality that transcends what each and all religions claim to represent. It is a spirituality that engages with the search for meaning as people struggle to inter-relate more authentically in what we progressively consider to be an interdependent world, within an eternally evolving universe. It is a spirituality that invites us to break out of all our anthropocentric enclaves – religious and political – and reclaim the whole of creation as our one true home. (Reclaiming Spirituality , 171-2)
Significantly for our interests here, his final chapter goes on to talk about the need to ground spirituality in appropriate ceremonies and rituals.
This book is one of many recent ones that talk about Celtic Spirituality, which seems to be fairly popular, as I notice from bookshops and from the e-mail circuit. Probably the most significant thing about this interest is that it represents a search for something mostly lost in the mainstream Christian tradition and in the post-Christian society that has succeeded it: a connection with the rhythms of the natural world.
Pilgrimage is a powerful metaphor for our life, since it involves movement in both space and time. For Bunyan in The Pilgrim’s Progress., the desirable route was marked out, as were the perils of straying, and the destination – only for the elect – was the heavenly kingdom. Few now would accept its underlying theology. But the metaphor remains a strong one and appears in other ways in modern literature. Patrick White’s novels frequently show people whose travels have a strong element of spiritual discovery. For example, Ellen in A Fringe of Leaves is a white woman captured by an aboriginal tribe who learns and suffers much before returning to her own society. She learns more about evil and peril: Bunyan was comfortable in identifying evil and how to combat it. Ellen, though placed in the nineteenth century, is also a figure for the contemporary person who has to develop different resources in face of peril – those within our banqueting hall, within ourselves, as well as whatever is “out there”. It is hard to mention the dark forces at a marriage ceremony, but I also wonder if the ceremony might mean more and arm people better if people were asked to confront them amid all of the warmth and glamour of the big event.
Amanda Lohrey, “The clear voice suddenly singing”, a long essay in the recently published book, Secrets, discusses recent interest in unaccompanied singing groups. She quotes Tony Backhouse, a brilliant gospel singer based in Sydney, discussing his own group:
“Jesus is our culture’s prevailing metaphor for spiritual excellence, and while the religion built around this metaphor has an unstable and unsound history, Jesus’ contribution (non-violent, non-sexist, non-racist, to say the least) is a wonderful thing. I feel comfortable working with the Christian metaphor. Others working in the group re-translate the words we sing into political terms or more general spiritual terms. There has to be a place for non-specific spirituality.” Lohrey goes on to ask, “What is ‘a non-specific spirituality’ and is the singing group one of its natural sites?” and then quotes Stephanie Dowrick, a writer who accompanied him on a gospel singing tour. She talks about healing, “I was parched, the music was like water”, and feeling connected to other people, “a collective energy which reminds you that you are not alone” (244-9).
My own singing group sometimes sings the following, emerging from the South African struggle for racial equality: “We are going, heaven knows where we are going, but we know within that we’ll get there; heaven know how we will get there, but we know we will; it will be hard we know, and the road will be muddy and rough but we’ll get there, yes we’ll get there…” The pilgrimage metaphor again, in a world where we don’t have a prepared map, but we do have our own courage and communities. We also have our music. The response to the music played last night with a poetry reading was a reminder of the ways music can meet spiritual needs.
Finally, what of those that come after us? When most people coming to marry are taking steps not to have masses of children, and often bring the ones they already have, the traditional statements about being as fruitful as the vine could sound absurd. Yet a metaphor of fruitfulness is important. Do marriage ceremonies help equip people for the kinds of fruitfulness that should apply, not only to each other but the others whom they touch? If spirituality is about connection, our commitment to the future is also an important dimension.
Items mentioned in talk on “Spiritualities for a Secular Society”
Diarmuid Ó Murchú. Reclaiming Spirituality (Gill & Macmillan, Dublin, 1997)
Bede. A History of the English Church and People. – completed in 731. (Penguin, 1955.)
John Bunyan. The Pilgrim’s Progress. first published, 1678 (many editions)
Amanda Lohrey, “The clear voice suddenly singing”, in D. Modjeska, A. Lohrey, & R. Dessaix, Secrets. (Macmillan, Sydney, 1997)
Patrick White. A Fringe of Leaves. (Jonathan Cape, London, 1976, then Penguin.)
Juliet Batten. Celebrating the Southern Seasons (Tandem Press, New Zealand, 1995)