Saturday 30th August. A beautiful wedding day in a traditional English church at Burghfield, south-west of Reading. St Mary the Virgin has a traditional lych-gate, a traditional graveyard, a traditional pair of stone effigies inside the main door and a traditional peal of bells. To my delight, I later discover that you can see the bell ringers at work in their chamber, outlined by a window. It is the perfect setting for a traditional English wedding, with the bride in white gown and veil. The St James music group turned up to sing at the wedding because the bride had been nanny for the children of one of the families. It rather reversed the "traditional" pattern of an Irish girl looking after the children of an affluent English family. Here an English girl had looked after the children of two YIPLIEs (Young Irish Professional Living In England).This wasn't the only old tradition overturned; the vicar is a lady....as permitted by the Anglican communion since 1994. And the bride and groom have, of course, enjoyed horizontal relations and produced two children long before the posting of the banns. Nothing said by the vicar suggests that this is anything unusual or incompatible with "traditional" Christian teaching, such as her church advocated up to c. 1970. After all, with congregations falling through the floor, savage internal dissension and complete doctrinal disintegration, you can't afford to alienate the customers and lose what little market share you have left.
Sunday 31st August. I am listening to the "Morning Service" on Radio 4 while driving to St William of York for 9:00 pm Mass. Unusually, this broadcast service includes a wedding rite.
The happy couple, Stephen and Zoe, are "cementing their partnership", as the celebrant explains. So I think we can assume that the traditional "wedding night" will be no surprise to the bride. And this example of Christian witness is being broadcast to the nation. Holy Cow. With Christians like this, we don't need the professional atheists like Professor Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens.As one editor of "Faith" magazine commented many years ago, we English, with our upper-middle class, "public"-school educated ways, do know how to do things.....even blatant fudges of basic Christian morality are done much more elegantly and smoothly in the Anglican tradition than in English Catholic services, where the ominous shadow of Roman authority is somewhere in the background, even if it is ignored much of the time.
From a rationalist perspective, it is amazing how many people still feel the need of religious endorsement at the crucial stages of life. The old jibe about "Hatch, Match and Dispatch" (Baptism, Wedding and Funeral) being the only times most British people enter a church is still applicable. There are now numerous alternatives to a church for a wedding service apart from the grim public Registry Offices. (think Secretary of State premises, only without people queuing to renew driving permits). Recent changes in British marriage law have allowed numerous hotels and stately homes to enter the marriage market and make more money out of their beautiful premises and gardens. They have not yet entered the christening and funeral markets, though of course they are happy to entertain guests after a baptism or funeral elsewhere.
Yet people know in their bones that there is something extraordinary about these "boundary" moments of human life - arrival in and departure from earthly existence and the promise of new life with the union of two existing lives. All these events demand some exceptional ceremonies, even if God is sidelined for much of people's lives. One of the saddest aspects of life in the old Soviet Union was the disposal of the deceased at prefunctory crematorium ceremonies. It must have been an unwitting recruiting agent for the Orthodox Church, just to allow your loved one some sense of dignity and Divine splendor at the very end, even if they had lived their lives ina two room apartment.
I remember the service for a local councillor who had been active in civic life in Reading for many years and whose pasing was marked by a humanist commemoration in the old Town Hall some years ago. The Town hall is a stunning example of Victorian architecture and it does have an organ, but I could not help feeling a hollow chill as I read about this service. What did his widow and daughter feel? When you're a humanist, this is As Good As It Gets, to quote the film title.A few months ago, a young man who had been a pupil at Blessed Hugh Faringdon School, our local "Catholic" high school, died in a road accident. Blessed Hugh Faringdon used to be Abbot of Reading Abbey in the 16th century....until he was beheaded under Henry 8th. Now the young man had his farewell service at Reading Crematorium chapel, attended by numerous ex-BHF students. It was a humanist ceremony. How many more ex-BHF students will be laid to rest/committed to the furnace attended by a humanist facilitator rather than a Catholic priest? Mind you, how many more BHF students will there be if this is the widespread result of a "Catholic" education? How can we argue for separate "Catholic" schools or justify their massive cost?
The austere crematorium chapels around Britain are among the few places where you can hold a humanist funeral, but I suspect that demand for different styles of humanist send-offs will require a wider variety of funeral venues, just as the non-religious wedding market has expanded. I have yet to see a humanist "welcoming" ceremony for babies, but the obvious market vacuum invites innovative businesspeople. You can see why churches still have a powerful, if completely incoherent, appeal to the great Unchurched.Yet how long can the powerful emotional appeal of Church services survive the total demolition of the spiritual foundation? Having abandoned belief in the Resurrection, the soul, Revelation, Hell, Sin, the Incarnation, the reality of a Church founded by and sustained by God, with no clear idea of the nature of God, no sense of the power of the coherent arguments for premarital chastity and an orderly Christian family life....
Probably more consciousness of the morass into which we are moving will awaken some people. I heard of one young black man, also an ex-Blessed Hugh Faringdon student, who was stunned, as a 13 year old, to discover that the girl sitting next to him in class was his cousin. Imagine his turmoil when he discovered that another girl in the same class was his half-sister, of whose existence he had hitherto been utterly ignorant. Not surprisingly, it really messed him up to the extent that he would not date black girls and has a white partner.
In a perverse sense, he is fortunate because, as a member of a racial minority, he had a foolproof DNA test without asking any prospective white girlfriend to undergo a formal DNA test. The white majority lack that assurance with any partner they casually associate with. The old saying "It is a wise child that knows its own father" now obviously translates as "It is a wise child that knows its own sibling".
Not that you need a string of genetic disasters to waken the wise. You might have thought that the very visible misery caused to so many children by widespread infidelity and marriage breakdown would be more than enough. The utter relational confusion experienced by this sensitive 13 year old is just the tip of the iceberg of human misery resulting from the permissive society. Of course the Permissive Society was all about Freedom, wasn't it? Except it takes decades to work out the consequences in reality. The Pakistani community in Britain has been the subject of scrutiny because of the practice of first-cousin marriages, leading to a spate of rare and horrible genetic defects in their children. (Every cloud has a silver lining; as a result some British doctors are among the top experts in the world on these conditions). Serious proposals to forbid such marriages have already been aired. Apart from the misery and pain, the UK Government has a financial interest in paying for the care of such offspring. The next step logically would be compulsory genetic testing for all UK couples, to see if they are unwitting blood relatives. You can hardly discrimnate only against Pakistanis, can you? As a Dostoyevski character says: "Starting with unlimited freedom, I end with unlimited tyranny"......
