Ship of Fools: Hatches, Matches, and Dispatches, the secular versions

Thread: Hatches, Matches, and Dispatches, the secular versions Board: Oblivion / Ship of Fools.

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Posted by S. Bacchus (# 17778) on :

I'm not sure this really belongs here, as it's more to do with 'non-worship' practices than with worship practices.

I've been think a lot about the way we do rituals in 21st century Britain. Specifically, and how badly we do them. Outside of religious settings, and sometimes within them, we seem either to have lost the ritual element of life or to have created new rituals that are sadly lacking, and can sometimes really only be described as emetic.

Take birth. The secular world doesn't seem to mark births as anything special at all, which must make secular western society an anthropological outlier.

Take marriage, which is really what interests me the most (because of my orientation, I will have to have a civil rather than a religious wedding if I ever do meet the right man). In a church wedding, a couple make a binding and sacramental commitment before God and in the presence of one or more of his ministers and an assembled congregation. It's a relatively easy service to 'get right', start with 'Dearly beloved' (but probably leave out the 'brute beasts' bit), plight your troth, choose some nice hymns everyone knows, get the organist to play some Bach or Vierne and if you can be more musically ambitious perhaps have a polyphonic or Viennese Mass. Receive communion together for the first time as a married couple. A magnificent occasion to mark an important life event. Not so the civil wedding, which seems to consist of, well, not very much to be honest: people meeting in a squalid little registry office or maybe hotel with pretensions, then two people signing a legal contract. As much as one might want to share the joy of a wedding with friends and family, I can't really see asking people to travel great distances to see the signing of a sheet of paper, nor how such an act could justify having a big party afterward. (Full confession: I've never actually been to a civil wedding, as all of the very few weddings to which I've been invited have been in churches, and usually full nuptial masses).

Now, take dying. This is in some ways the clearest sign, in my mind, that we live in debased times. I really can see no excuse for what has become the typical modern British funeral, located in some ghastly crematorium chapel and lasting 15 minutes. As if we wanted our dead relatives out of sight and out of mind, and gone as quickly as possible. Fortunately, unlike any potential marriage, I can have some control over my funeral (I also know that, even if I remain perpetually single, I will definitely die) and have stipulated that I want it done properly and with the same dignity that one might expect for any dead person: body received in the church the night before, office of the day and of the dead chanted with the body present, requiem mass, then the BCP committal service.

It seems to that we've moved away from a society that celebrated communal rituals, to a society of closed doors. Unless we are in the religious minority, we don't mark births, we hide weddings away in darkened rooms (English weddings used to take place outside, on the church porch) or else make a big deal of the reception and neglect the ceremony, we hide our funeral rites on the edges of towns and design them to be over in the blink of an eye. Frankly, one could be forgiven for thinking that we find these events embarrassing rather than important, something to be hidden away and discussed as little as possible.

Am I just over sensitive about these things? As far as I can tell, I'm the only to be bothered by them, but it drives me mad.

Posted by Belle Ringer (# 13379) on :

quote:
Originally posted by S. Bacchus:
Am I just over sensitive about these things?

No, you are pointing to a truth I have noticed - our culture has adopted an informality that banishes ritual.

I'm not much of a ritualist - if the reason we are doing something is tradition, I vote we change it! And yet -

I learned long ago it's important to celebrate Christmas because if you don't, a month later you realize Christmas came and went and you didn't notice, and that can hit hard with depression. Milestone birthdays need to be celebrated.

When I say "need" - probably there are people with as little interest in Christmas and birthdays as I have in Sunday morning liturgical ritual. (I put up with it, and stay home sometimes to avoid over-exposure to it's boringness.)

I think humans have some kind of emotional need for rituals to mark passage of time and to mark major changes.

Birth - is it less of a sudden change emotionally because we know the sex 5 months beforehand and have been looking at pictures all that time? Marriage - by far most people I know have been living together, it's not a huge change. Death, alas, none of my friends who died had a funeral, their families are atheists and don't see the point, how do you do a funeral with no prayers? I wanted to go to a funeral for y own sense of expression grief and transition - but they didn't see the point, too much trouble. Or the grief is a "private, family matter."

None of these things are "whole village that all knew each other since forever" celebrations anymore.

Are we celebrating other things instead? Halloween has become a big adult fest. Christmas, gosh how it's grown in importance. What else?

I'm wondering if we have as many rituals, just different ones? That's a question not a statement.

Posted by Galloping Granny (# 13814) on :

Bacchus – if you do meet the right man, you can marry in a church in New Zealand, though not a Catholic one, or in several other countries. But it mightn’t be recognised back home.

The funerals I’ve been to have been in churches or in funeral directors’ chapels, and have never been hurried occasions. An atheist friend with a wide circle of companions was commemorated in a gathering in beautiful Old Saint Paul’s, the earlier wooden cathedral, with a string quartet, songs, readings and spoken tributes; his clergyman brother, before we finished, came forward and said he knew there would be people present who’d like to say a prayer, and he was sure nobody would mind if they joined in the Lord’s Prayer – and I guess almost everyone did join in, Jews and maybe atheists as well.

As for my friend David who took his own life – I’d known only his ebullient manic side and nothing of the depressive episodes. Asked to conduct a ‘non-religious’ funeral’, I made a place for a few minutes’ silence, when I invited people to say their farewells to David, or tell him how angry they were with him, or say a prayer, and that worked very well.

GG

[ 18. September 2013, 06:04: Message edited by: Galloping Granny ]

Posted by Arethosemyfeet (# 17047) on :

I wouldn't be at all surprised if you were able to marry in Scotland in due course, S. Bacchus. These gentlemen seem reasonably convinced by their nuptial mass:
http://thurible.net/2013/08/24/congratulations-3/
It may not have legal force but you seem unconcerned by that.

Posted by Kaplan Corday (# 16119) on :

quote:
Originally posted by S. Bacchus:
we hide our funeral rites on the edges of towns and design them to be over in the blink of an eye.

I had just got home from a funeral for my cousin when I read this post.

When I arrived, after having driven for about an hour from a far eastern to a far northern suburb (Melbourne must be one of the most spread-out cities in the world), the whole service took a total of twenty minutes.

It was conducted by a funeral celebrant for a congregation of about thirty people, and was not Christian or New Agey or defiantly pagan or humanist – just vaguely sentimental.

There was was no singing, no praying, no Powerpoint presentation, and no contribution from children, grand-children or friends.

One slightly religious song (One Day At A Time) and two secular ones were played.

The cadences, if not the theology, echoed the past; the celebrant dismissed us with a triune wish that the “power of love, and the strength of love and the power of love” (or something like that) would be with us as we left.

My cousin was ninety-one when she died (twenty-seven years older than I, because her father married very young, and his brother, my father, married well into middle-age), so she came from an era when most people had some sort of religious affiliation – in fact, our ancestors were fiercely Welsh Nonconformist.

In her case, all the faith appears to have been leached out over the years, and she was probably not untypical of trends in our culture.

In my evangelical milieu, funerals tend to be huge, with lots of singing, prayers, readings, projected photographs, and interminable tributes from innumerable friends and family members, followed by refreshments at the back of the hall.

The service often goes on for far too long, and lacks ritualistic / liturgical shape and focus and sense of purpose, but at least it is a vibrant, participatory, live tradition.

Posted by Kaplan Corday (# 16119) on :

Sorry, that should have been "the strength of love and the endurance of love and the comfort of love".

Posted by Cenobite (# 14853) on :

quote:
Originally posted by S. Bacchus:

Take birth. The secular world doesn't seem to mark births as anything special at all, which must make secular western society an anthropological outlier.

When master Cenobite was born three years ago, we were given in the hospital a leaflet about Naming Ceremonies offered by the local council. We didn't pay any attention to it, as we were always going to have him baptised. I also don't know how many there are annually, compared to baptisms.

But the reality is that "naming ceremonies" are - certainly by some councils - being actively promoted to new parents. I don't know too much about them except that they are explicitly non-religious, and that they generally cost £100 or more.

It would be interesting to know if any shipmates have actually been to one, to hear about what it was like, and what significance it seemed to have for the parents.

On an aside, we have lots of baptisms in our parish, and many of them are in families where the parents have not married. In a number of cases, at least part of the reason for having the baby baptised is to celebrate the couple's relationship with families and friends (in other words, the baptism replaces the wedding, at least to some degree).

Posted by Adeodatus (# 4992) on :

If we're talking birth, marriage and death, then we're talking rites of passage theory, which I can claim a certain minor expertise in.

Rites of passage are about managing individuals' changes of role within their society. The original anthropological work on rites of passage was done in the context of traditional cultures where there was a highly developed series of rituals to mark the transition from, say, child to adult through puberty. There were three stages to any rite of passage: a rite of separation, in which th individual is removed from their social context; a rite of transition, which is complicated and involves all sorts of sub-theories about states of social uncertainty sometimes called "liminality"; and a rite of reincorporation, in which the individual is reintroduced to society in their new role.

A good example is the 20th century British wedding. Everything up to and including the marriage service is the rite of separation: look at how much significance many forms of marriage service place on separating the couple (particularly the bride) from their former families.

The rite of transition is actually the honeymoon. The couple go away from their former homes, but significantly don't yet have a home themselves. The consummation of the marriage is a significant step in the rite of transition.

The rite of reincorporation is when the couple return from honeymoon and enter their own home as a married couple for the first time.

All of this raises a number of questions about rites of passage in contemporary culture, and whether we're harming ourselves by giving them less significance. I think an important factor here is our lack of attention to death and bereavement rites, and the phenomenon of pathological grieving, which seems to be a lot more common than it used to be. The sociologist Tony Walter has done a lot of good work on modern death rituals, and is worth a read.

For a longer discussion you'd need to get me several beers and be prepared for a conversation that would involve werewolves, doorsteps, and a small island on Lough Erne.

Posted by SvitlanaV2 (# 16967) on :

The decline of ritual is being presented here as principally a problem of secularisation. Non-religious people either have to buy into religious ceremonies, as in the case of Galloping Granny's story, or else they have to invent something that more authentically represents their lack of faith, but also lacks the gravitas and beauty of those religious ceremonies.

I don't know how all this will develop in the future. In the UK churches might actively choose to promote themselves as a 'hatching, matching and dispatching' service, advertising their best churches for beautiful ceremonies. Apparently Ripon Cathedral held a bridal show a few years ago:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-12442599

Googling suggests that more churches are now holding wedding fairs. Maybe christenings could be promoted in a similar way. Death is probably too much of a taboo for us to start holding 'funeral fairs', but it'd be a good idea IMO!

[ 18. September 2013, 11:28: Message edited by: SvitlanaV2 ]

Posted by Gwalchmai (# 17802) on :

To begin at the beginning . . .

A baby born into my wife's family was welcomed with a naming ceremony offered by the local counicil. We didn't go, but I was told afterwards, by the baby's great-grandmother who would have preferred a baptism, that it was a very moving ceremony.

Any marriage in England (church or civil) requires an exchange of vows in the presence of witnesses. When civil marriage was introduced in the 19th century, the vows were lifted straight from the Book of Common Prayer and edited slightly to remove the references to God. I have been to a number of civil marriages and the ceremony can be every bit as meaningful as a church wedding - there are commonly readings and music.

I have also been to some moving humanist funerals and some pretty dire religious funerals. There are humanist officiants who can be engaged to conduct a non-religious funeral and who bring the same professionalism to the ceremony as an ordained clergyman.

The problem with non-religious funerals is that there is nowhere to go except a ghastly crematoium chapel. The problem with funerals in crematoriums is that a crematorium is essentially a disposal facility. Nothing else happens there. It is dead. Contrast that with a church which is a place of life. When you walk into a church for a funeral, sonewhere there is the children's corner with their art work displayed. There are notices about all the activities in the parish. There is the knowledge that people are baptised and married in this building (and it is always especially moving when the funeral is in the church the deceased was married or baptised in or sometimes both). Above all there is the knowledge that this is a place of worship day by day. And in a church you are unlikley to be hurried out thorugh a side door at the end of the service because the next funeral is waiting to come in.

And if you have the funeral in church, you can have the committal at the door as the coffin leaves the church and only the funeral director and the priest / minister need go the crematorium.

Posted by S. Bacchus (# 17778) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Gwalchmai:
I have been to a number of civil marriages and the ceremony can be every bit as meaningful as a church wedding - there are commonly readings and music.

But what could they possibly say or sing that would get the balance right for a public ceremony. There are plenty of romantic sentiments (I'm partial to Sidney's 'My true love hath my heart'; or to Beethoven's 'Unsterbliche Geliebte' letters), but they're intimate, not public. They don't have anything like the sense conveyed by a typical religious wedding service ('which is an honourable estate, instituted of God in the time of man's innocency, signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church' or what you will). It's not just a matter of removing God, it's that, once God is removed, it is very difficult to find a focus that isn't either a brutally utilitarian legal contract or else a superficial exercise in the worst excesses of romantic sentimentality. Religion grounds the service, it gives it purpose, it says what the service is for. Without the religious element, it can start to seem terribly self-indulgent (this can happen in religious weddings as well, of course, but even then it's usually a case of secular silliness upstaging the basic rite).

The problem with music is similar, although perhaps less obvious and acute. Take away hymns and obviously religious choral music and you're left with either wordless instrumental music (which is probably your best bet), or else what can only be described as silliness, rather of the 19th century operatic variety (why people chose to get married to music from Lohengrin, given the way things end up for that couple, is a complete mystery to me), or worse to pop music of the last 60 odd years.

[ 18. September 2013, 13:58: Message edited by: S. Bacchus ]

Posted by Belle Ringer (# 13379) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Adeodatus:
All of this raises a number of questions about rites of passage in contemporary culture, and whether we're harming ourselves by giving them less significance...

For a longer discussion you'd need to get me several beers and be prepared for a conversation that would involve werewolves, doorsteps, and a small island on Lough Erne.

Fascinating, thanks, I'm coming for that conversation!

I've had a vague feeling "people need rituals to mark changes in life" but hadn't thought about the, whoops, obvious! implication - if we need rituals, then there's got to be a negative effect in ignoring rituals.

I've seen depression hit people who "skipped Christmas" because they were away from home and "it isn't Christmas without family."

The thing about death transition - *my* life is different because my friend LD died. I'm still mad at him for dying, wish I had been a better friend, know his drinking indicated emotional pain he is hopefully free from now - all that normal jumble of emotions. There was no funeral, just family at graveside, I'm not family. I needed a funeral, but the family controls.

Because of this thread I was thinking last night again that *I* needed a funeral, it's not just the family who are deprived of him and have to transition.

And last night it finally occurred to me, I still need that funeral for LD, even if it's just me in my living room. God and me and a few hymns and prayers and the spirit of LD that LD didn't believe in. [Smile]

(I wonder what "there is only the physical" folks think when they find out experientially otherwise. I think God enjoys/is cheerfully amused by their surprise. I don't believe in hell for those willing to accept the primacy of love.)

Posted by Galloping Granny (# 13814) on :

I'm not sure that my post was illustrative of 'buying into religious ceremonies' as Svitlana wrote

quote:
The decline of ritual is being presented here as principally a problem of secularisation. Non-religious people either have to buy into religious ceremonies, as in the case of Galloping Granny's story, or else they have to invent something that more authentically represents their lack of faith, but also lacks the gravitas and beauty of those religious ceremonies.

Old St Paul's is a beautiful building used for concerts, weddings and funerals, both religious and otherwise. The funeral I wrote of was to me a good example of how a secular ceremony can be both moving and meaningful – that someone wanted to acknowledge the fact that there would be mourners for whom a prayer would be appropriate did not, to my mind, make the whole thing resemble a religious event.
I've only once been to a funeral service, conducted by a celebrant, in a crematorium, and it wasn't a rushed ceremony. Funeral services, if not in a church, are in funeral directors' chapels or other suitably attractive venues. David's funeral was certainly unlike any church funeral, but I left the opportunity open for prayer for those who would feel the need. Otherwise there were many spoken tributes (but nobody rambled on!), his children spoke of him and played a recording from the Pirates of Penzance (because he'd been an enthusiastic Gilbert and Sullivan performer), his wife read an appropriate poem by a local poet.
I think there are many ways in which a dignified and appropriate funeral ceremony can be devised without imitating a church service.

GG

Posted by SvitlanaV2 (# 16967) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Galloping Granny:
Old St Paul's is a beautiful building used for concerts, weddings and funerals, both religious and otherwise.

Ah. You didn't say that the funeral you mentioned was non-religious, simply that the deceased and some of his friends were atheists.

Perhaps more churches should be available for hire for non-religious funerals. Then atheists would get the best of both worlds - a beautiful setting, but none of the God stuff, if they don't want it.

Posted by georgiaboy (# 11294) on :

SV2

Having worked for a church which 'hired out' its facilities for weddings and other events of non-members, I can report that it was almost always a hassle and frequently more disruptive.

There was occasional thievery (though that sometimes happened with 'our own' as well; there was always lots of additional work for the cleaners; there was often evidence left of questionable behavior.

We finally stopped hiring out -- the extra income just wasn't worth the aggravation, particularly as these events were almost always Saturday afternoon or evening. Other venues' mileage may vary, of course.

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