Friday, December 2, 2011

The Rituals of Mourning

12/22011—My father was buried on Tuesday in a graveside ceremony conducted according to orthodox Jewish rites. It was tremendously satisfying. The ritual gave order and seriousness that felt right for the occasion. One practice stays with me—the mourners take turns putting earth back onto the coffin in the ground until it is covered.

The French atheist, Andre Comte-Sponville, writes in his marvelous book, The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality, “A human being can't be buried like an animal or burned like a log.” That is exactly right. And that is what the funeral did for me—it marked the occasion.

Public ceremonies are like that, too and the question of ceremony is one that the law has been quite wooden about—treating all such practices as either religious or not and not identifying satisfying public ritual.

But if one is secular, where do such ceremonies come from? I spoke at my old synagogue Wednesday night, after I had returned. A man asked, after I left Judaism, where did I end up? I told him frankly, nowhere. But that I was trying to live this nowhere to be faithful to secularism itself—to see what there is there.

The man was surprised. He was polite but unimpressed. Then you have no authority, he said. You are a rudderless ship. Why should anyone listen to you?

I felt he had described the situation very well. For a secularist, it is not a matter of authority. Reality is the authority and all human institutions that interpret reality are just that—human inventions. That includes religion but it includes everything else as well. This is not a comfortable place, but it is ours, or at least those for whom this is what they see.

I told the man, it is not a matter of authority but persuasion for those in the same boat.


12/22011—My father was buried on Tuesday in a graveside ceremony conducted according to orthodox Jewish rites. It was tremendously satisfying. The ritual gave order and seriousness that felt right for the occasion. One practice stays with me—the mourners take turns putting earth back onto the coffin in the ground until it is covered.

The French atheist, Andre Comte-Sponville, writes in his marvelous book, The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality, “A human being can't be buried like an animal or burned like a log.” That is exactly right. And that is what the funeral did for me—it marked the occasion.

Public ceremonies are like that, too and the question of ceremony is one that the law has been quite wooden about—treating all such practices as either religious or not and not identifying satisfying public ritual.

But if one is secular, where do such ceremonies come from? I spoke at my old synagogue Wednesday night, after I had returned. A man asked, after I left Judaism, where did I end up? I told him frankly, nowhere. But that I was trying to live this nowhere to be faithful to secularism itself—to see what there is there.

The man was surprised. He was polite but unimpressed. Then you have no authority, he said. You are a rudderless ship. Why should anyone listen to you?

I felt he had described the situation very well. For a secularist, it is not a matter of authority. Reality is the authority and all human institutions that interpret reality are just that—human inventions. That includes religion but it includes everything else as well. This is not a comfortable place, but it is ours, or at least those for whom this is what they see.

I told the man, it is not a matter of authority but persuasion for those in the same boat.

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