6 – Sofia 6

SOF MAGAZINE 6, SUMMER 1991 5 LETTERS A SERVICE OF SILENCE from Mrs P Waggett (Lyme Regis) I heartily agree with Ronald Pearse, in the last edition of SOF Magazine, that bible readings should not be presented as the undisputed word of God and that it should be openly made known that people attending church were free to interpret the content of the service according to the dictates of their own consciences. It does not seem likely that this will happen for a long time and like so many of my friends and acquaintances I have very sadly ceased to attend the Anglican church where we had our roots.

Most of us no longer attend any form of service but I personally find occasional Quaker meetings fill a deep need in my life.

This has led me to wonder if some more liberal minded clergy would find it possible to hold from time to time a service of silence modelled along Quaker lines to which less conventional worshippers could go with a clear conscience. In the beautiful surroundings of so many of our parish churches the service could commence with organ music followed by a topic for meditation (not from the bible). A side chapel or a corner of the church would need to be used where attenders could sit close together joined by the priest dressed in ordinary clothes. After silence, perhaps half an hour or longer, there could be handshaking, a little conversation and perhaps music to conclude.

The topic for meditation could even be given by one of the gathering. I wonder if it would be worth trying ?

— Mrs P Waggett, Lyme Regis

RITES OF PASSAGE from Ronald Pearse (Loughborough) In a radio discussion programme on 5 June, concluding the series S_ecularC_ere_monies, it was asked if the Church itself should be doing something about the increasing demand for secular or near-secular, notso-much religious, ceremonies for the rites of passage ? In one response, Don Cupitt commented : "Is a ritual a ritual at all if it is just made up by the people who are going to take part in it ? Surely a ritual has to be publicly intelligible ; it has to be public property. Again, I was concerned that some of the humanist rites I heard /in earlier programmes in the series/ appeared to be devised by people themselves and therefore could have no value as ritual because they wouldn't be intelligible to anyone else. They were purely personal expressions of feeling." This raises an important issue. I am searching for an answer to the first question. Will it be sufficient for the Church to acknowledge that its services are capable of symbolic interpretation ? Would the language of baptism, marriage and funeral services be then sufficiently meaningful to express what needs to be felt and said by all citizens in celebrating the significant events of life ?

We need to be careful about the technical language.

The basic rituals involved (as distinct from the rites, including words, used) may well turn out to be common to both 'religious' and 'secular' ceremonies. (These two adjectives themselves beg a number of questions !) Actions speak louder than words. Joining hands in marriage, burying or committing a dead body to be burned and (arguably) the essential-to-life / dangerous-to-life contact with water in baptism speak very clearly in their turn of commitment in marriage, of a life ended (and needing to be both celebrated and mourned) and of joys and difficulties to be expected in any baby's developing life.

But do the traditional words of the Christian services, even if publicly announced as capable of individual symbolic interpretation, over-power the actions in these celebrations of birth, partnership and death ?

— Ronald Pearse, Loughborough

SOF MAGAZINE, SUMMER 1991 HEAD VERSUS HEART ? from Angela Barkshire (Rickmansworth) When I left the R.C. Church a good friend of mine (a traditional realist) said, "If you go to those Don Cupitt Conferences it will be 'all head and no heart'. You've lost your faith so I'm putting you on my prayer list." Catholics in my area were instructed not to watch the Sea of Faith series on TV because it was "dangerous". My friend is religious in an emotional, sentimental way that nearly drives me dotty but because she is sensitive and easily hurt I refrained from saying that it was just as bad to be all heart and no head ! (She would maintain that she was "being as a little child".) However, this isn't just an outside view. Some conference members have expressed concern (and sometimes irritation) with the bias toward the intellectual. "What about love ?" is a question I've heard more than once. One contributor to our magazine said of Don Cupitt :- "He wouldn't say 'suffer the little children to come unto me—. True - but one has to ask why not ?

May I suggest that a mature person has head and heart in balance and that the people I've listened to at conferences seem to have that balance. If Radicals were really just cold intellectuals I'd give them a wide berth ! May I also suggest that the reason that love isn't mentioned very often isn't because it is considered unimportant ; it is because the love side of things is taken for granted. One can know that love is the answer and at the_s_ame time use the intellect to explore a non-realist interpretation of Christianity as a means of promoting it.

I am more evolutionist than revolutionary. The Church has great assets in its buildings, historical continuity, parochial system and professional pastoral skills.

Could it use them to assist the evolution of meaningful, satisfying and recognisable rites of passage, using traditional rituals, tested principles and structural forms, with greater freedom of language ? Is this a pipe-dream, a hopeless scenario or a possible way forward ?

— Angela Barkshire, Rickmansworth