The topic for this e-bulletin is liturgy for life celebrations in sacred community. This is somewhat of an urgent task inasmuch as so much of what happens during a church worship service seems out of touch with modern sensibilities. In these few paragraphs, however, I would like to tackle another issue, and that is to find words for life celebrations that would be appropriate not only in sacred community, but in society at large. The scope of the task is daunting, and so what appears here will be but an initial offering.

The so-called holiday season will soon be upon us, a time when America’s secular/sacred schizophrenia becomes painfully apparent. At Thanksgiving, on the one hand, we seek ways to give thanks for the blessings of life so lavishly bestowed upon us, but at the same time food and football play a large if not dominant role. A month later, most of us proclaim that Christ should be kept in Christmas, but more time and energy is spent on shopping than religious practice. Other times of life are no different. Non-religious parents will have their newborn baptized. Weddings often manifest a strange combination of religious and secular elements. At the end of life, members of an atheistic family will call in a professional clergyman to conduct the sendoff. Our culture has difficulty living in a sacred/secular world.

Whereas I don’t consider myself personally schizophrenic, I also live in two worlds. On the one hand, I was baptized, went to Sunday school, was confirmed, majored in religion at college, added a few graduate degrees in theology, was ordained, wrote books on Christian theology, ministered at two churches… On the other hand, religiosity makes me uncomfortable. Although I have wonderful friends who are what one might call religious, generally speaking I feel more at home with secular humanists. I like to preach, but not do the liturgy. I find it difficult to lead public prayer.

The question then becomes: how do these worlds come together? Why is society, and individuals therein, forever struggling to figure out how to relate secularity and spirituality? What is the path that enables us to be as one in our celebrations of birth, marriage, end of life, as well as the cultural celebrations like Thanksgiving and Christmas?

One answer, of course, is that they don’t and cannot come together. Cosmic dualism asserts that there is a spiritual, sacred realm, and a material, secular realm, that these realms are at the least side by side, and at the most, fighting against one another. A side-by-side dualism today would say that yes, we do in fact live in two realms, and that any confusion that you as an individual or society as a whole may have, is simply due to not being clear about where to draw the line between the two. Go to church and be religious; go to work and be secular.

The “fighting against one another” brand of dualism sees the history of the universe as a battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil. The secular, material world is the place of evil, so shun it and cultivate the religious life. There are those even today who see life as a battle between Satan and God.

An alternative to dualism is monism, the idea that there is only one reality. Monism comes in two flavors. The first, more popular in Europe than America, is that the only reality is that presented by a detached, strictly observational science. The natural cosmos is what it’s all about. There is no spiritual dimension.

Most Christians, however, have a different take on the monistic approach, and believe that a divine presence inheres in all that is. God is. And God is everywhere, although hidden except to the eyes of faith. As progressive Christians, this is where we must take our stand. The sacred and the secular co-inhere. The one is in the other. With this as our basis, the questions now become: what language do we use? to whom are we speaking? do we speak directly of God? Let’s assume that we are at a ceremony of some sort, perhaps a wedding, a Thanksgiving dinner, a Christmas day gathering, a funeral. Let us also suppose that the crowd is mixed: some Christians, some Jews, some secularists. Is there a language that not only will not alienate anyone but will also communicate to them the depth of the moment? I believe there is.

First, each and every one of us, from the moment of birth if not before, filters incoming sensation and begins to form a pattern of interpretation unique to us. We create our own world, one that is different from the worlds created by others. We have a parochial pattern of interpretation by means of which we comprehend realty. The process is well documented and is inescapable. The problem of course, is that we assume that every one else sees the world as we do, or at least they should.

Second, the world in and through which we interpret reality is broken into on occasion. We have moments in life when we experience life directly rather than through our filter. We can’t make them happen, but we have to be open to allowing them to happen. They don’t last, but we can remember them. Every dimension of life has the potential to become a moment, no dimension more pregnant with potential than any other.

Third, aware of moments, and also aware of their absence, it is easy to develop a sense of loss, of emptiness, of living in a world where something is missing. We find that feeling uncomfortable, and so we find all kinds of ways to fill the void.

Last, it seems as though we all need some form of loving community, whether it be just one other person, or one hundred. It is in community that we have others to lift us and comfort us when we are down, and it is in community that we have others to be critical of us when we forget that we are provincial in outlook after all.

These dimensions of life have direct theological parallels, which we’ll not get into here, other than to say that from a religious perspective, moments can certainly be interpreted as encounter with God.

This language represents a deliberate decision to avoid terminology that is obviously religious, but which points to the spiritual dimension of reality. It speaks of God without speaking of God. It speaks of sin without speaking of sin. It speaks of emptiness and hope by speaking of emptiness and hope. It speaks of loving community by speaking of loving community. As such, it represents a language that can be used in any setting, regardless of who is there. It allows all persons to communicate about the depth of life without using a God-language that would alienate some.

Communities of religious folk will still be gathering to celebrate in ways meaningful to them, and, as mentioned earlier, new and increasingly meaningful liturgy will continue to evolve. In addition to that, one can hope that a language will also evolve that will enable secularists and spiritualists to communicate and to celebrate together.

The US Forest Service, in describing a Native American historical site, asks tourists to respect all artifacts and structures inasmuch as “because people once lived here, the place is sacred”. The sacred and the secular cannot be separated. There is one reality. We must continue our search for a language that describes this realty to the fullest.