Funerals Without God: A Practical Guide to Non-religious Funerals is by Jane Wynne Willson Prometheus Books, 1991, pp.64, ISBN: 0879756411 For more information please see International Humanist and Ethical Union: www.iheu.org / British Humanist Association: www.humanism.org.uk/ site /cms/ National Secular Society: www.secularism.org.uk/nsshome.htm www.secularism.org.uk / The Freethinker: www.freethinker.co.uk / Religious Ritual For ~ A Secular Society Jill Harris explains the importance of ritual and describes the experiments with ritual undertaken by a New Zealand group known as The Ephesus Group.
We are all very familiar with the cultural shift in our society, shaped by the modern, scientific world-view.
This shift is requiring us to re-think and re-imagine our religious beliefs, and to find ways to express and pass on that re-shaped faith. A vital way of doing so is through ritual. Ritual retains its importance in this secular world.
For example, Martin Rees, Britain’s Astronomer Royal, describes himself as ‘a practising but non-believing Christian’. He says, ‘I don’t believe in any dogmas.
But on the other hand I do believe there is a benefit and value to be gained from participating in common rituals.’ Mythologist Joseph Campbell described the funeral for John F. Kennedy as ‘an illustration of the high service of ritual to a society.’ He continued: ‘[The public murder of a president] ... required a compensatory rite to re-establish the sense of solidarity.
Here was an enormous nation, made those four days into a unanimous community, all of us participating in the same way, simultaneously, in a single symbolic event.’ What might Campbell have said, I wonder, about community, transition and transformation.
It’s hardly surprising then that many of the people who no longer go to church say they feel a sense of loss.
Christian rituals have met some pretty fundamental human needs for two thousand years. However, the majority of people never, or no longer, take part in the rituals of the church. If ritual is so critical to human well-being, what does this mean for our society? According to Tom Driver, in The Magic of Ritual (1991), ‘for those for whom such rituals have lost all power, there is often to be found a pervasive sense of anomie, a directionlessness that haunts modern life and carries with it a sense of doom’. The same idea is expressed by Joseph Campbell: ‘If you want to find out what it means to have a society without any rituals, [look in] the New York Times [where you'll read about] destructive and violent acts by young people who don’t know how to behave in a civilised society.’ Where do we ourselves find opportunities for making sense of our experience, expressing what is of ultimate worth to us, reaching out beyond where we are, strengthening community, tapping into there’s a great deal more to ritual than «particular faith tradition, and fostering a sense of the numinous defining our framework for living? The word worship is a contraction of the Anglo Saxon word for worth-ship, so the millions of people worldwide who went into churches after the destruction of the Twin Towers in search of a centre which would hold in the face of the fear and loss?
Most of our ritual has traditionally been the preserve of religious institutions. Even secular military and civil ritual has tipped its cap in the direction of God and his sponsor, the church. Many of us will have participated in those rituals for significant portions of our lives. For two millennia, church services of worship, for example, have undoubtedly concerned themselves with order, where and how do most of us ascribe worth to our lives and the life of the world?
The performance of ritual has not, of course, been confined to the church, and has always occurred in many other settings. One has only to think of service clubs like Rotary, sporting events, gangs, school assemblies, lodges, to mention a few. However, in the past 20 years or so various other forms of ritual have emerged in our society, which seem to indicate attempts to fill the vacuum left by declining church attendance.
The increasing demand for the services of secular celebrants for all sorts of ceremonies, and rituals created Sof 63 January 2004 by Wiccan, Celtic and New Age groups are examples.
We can use only the language of metaphor and symbol, silence and gesture, music and images in our attempt to convey the ‘religious’ qualities which have traditionally been associated with the presence of God but, powerful though the sense of wonder and the ineffable are, there’s a great deal more to ritual than fostering a sense of the numinous. It confronts power with power. It transforms. It puts us in touch with our humanity — warts and all. It articulates a framework for living. It defines our highest aspirations and challenges us to live up to them. It empowers us to change ourselves and the world.
I think rituals are religious when they respond to those age-old needs to express wonder and awe, thanksgiving and commitment to society; to seek forgiveness and succour for ourselves and others; to experience individual and institutional transformation and liberation; and to give worth to our lives.
The key issue for me is how do we create religious rituals for people who can no longer accept the theological assumptions that lie behind most Christian services of worship - we who live in the secular society? According to the religious sociologist Raimundo Pannikar, ‘What does not express the belief of a person, a community or a religion can no longer be considered an authentic form of worship.’ Given that inescapable reality, and the fact that we human beings seem to need religious ritual, we have no choice but to find new ways of making rituals or of investing old rituals with new meanings. After all, that 2000-year-old Christian liturgical history began with a group of people sitting around a table at a Passover meal. As Driver puts it: “The ability to innovate [in ritual] while at the same time echoing ancient customs is what keeps traditions alive.’ The Ephesus Group in Wellington, New Zealand, comprises some 30 people who are interested in exploring new ways of understanding the Christian faith in the secular world of New Zealand in the 21st century.
Most of the members have belonged to churches in earlier years and a few still maintain the connection.
Most would describe themselves as Christian. The group has been exploring new ways of creating religious rituals for fourteen years. We call them liturgies because they are very much the work of the people in the group and that’s what liturgy originally meant in the Greek (leitourgia). Meeting in a church lounge twice a month on Sunday, from five to seven pm., we begin with a shared finger-food meal. Most liturgies begin at 5.30pm, though sometimes the food is incorporated into the liturgy. So how do we set about creating a liturgy?
A small group of volunteers meets two or three times for about two hours, with emails and phone calls as needed in between, to brainstorm the theme, purpose and shape of the liturgy. Planning groups usually include people who are knowledgeable about literature, fine arts, music and other performing arts, theology, traditional liturgical forms and other useful resources.
This is a high-energy, convivial, robust, creative Sof 63 January 2004 process (often over a meal) which generates lots of ideas and concludes with consensus about what we want to do and how. At the back of our minds is that liturgical framework that has served the church so well for 2000 years. It’s like a checklist.
People volunteer to write meditative material, find music, select readings, plan a mime or role play, facilitate a group discussion, organise the space and make sure we have the necessary equipment, and prepare any handouts and so on. The most difficult job is always finding suitable songs. There aren’t too many where good quality music and poetry come together with an acceptable theology. Eventually, after much jousting and revision, we have devised a 90-minute liturgy which we think will work. But how successful are we in responding to those age-old needs I referred to before?
We certainly do some of these things for some of the people some of the time.
It would undoubtedly be easier if we could centre our liturgies on an all-wise, all-forgiving, all-powerful, personal deity — the heart longs for such assurances - and that particular world-view has all the best lines! (Think of the Psalms and some of those wonderful old hymns and prayers). But when it is precisely this theistic world-view which we and others are walking away from, we have to make rituals which try to reflect and forge a new concept of Godness, create new foci for the sense of the numinous, empower people to envisage a new world and their part in bringing it about. We have to write our own wonderful hymns and prayers.
Many of the secular funerals and weddings and naming ceremonies I’ve experienced have been put together carefully and tastefully and have undoubtedly respected the wishes of the principal participants, but I sometimes feel they lack muscle — they’re pretty rather than powerful. Do they reach into the depths and brush their fingertips against the heights, I wonder? Do we achieve that in the Ephesus liturgies? Do most church services achieve that?
I find myself attracted more than ever by the transforming potential of the Christian faith with its message of liberation. I am moved by the artistry of its rituals and am deeply grateful for the legacy of music, literature and art which Christianity has inspired. So why don’t I just throw in my lot with the church again?
The reason is that when I do go back to church, fifteen years after I left, I still find scant recognition of the seachange in world-view which has caused millions of people to leave; little in its rituals which makes any concession to this huge cultural shift which, after all, has been happening for 400 years. My integrity requires me to wrestle with the necessary job of shaping religious rituals for a secular society outside the church because I can’t do it inside.
Jill Harris is a former teacher and librarian, now a writer. She was a founding member of the Sea of Faith Network in New Zealand 10 years ago, and the affiliated Ephesus Group 13 years ago. The Ephesus Group explores new ways of understanding the Christian faith in a secular environment.