Tuesday, August 09, 2005
(7:53 AM) | The Young Hegelian:
Take Your Alter to the Altar
So I was at this wedding at the weekend, and very good it was too, but it did make me think about some things, not least about modern audience-friendly Catholic church services. If you can imagine Vatican III this was it. Couldn’t you turn away from the congregation towards the altar, Father A, we’re actually seeing rather too much of you? This one was particularly Catholicism-lite, perhaps a surprise for those Protestants in the audience dreading a lengthy ordeal of full-on Christianity. “Those of you with young ones shouldn’t feel anxious about them making a lot of noise,” Father A reassured everyone, like a children’s TV presenter, little guessing that his homily would be drowned out by hyperactive toddlers.The readings were a little predictable: the Song of Songs and 1 Corinthians 12 – 13. And though these passages have been chosen for weddings since the year dot, it struck me for the first time that there is a somewhat uneasy relation between the two. The Song of Songs does not, as Father A tried to gloss it, tell us that “for the Church love is sacred”. It’s saying something quite different. And I’m not sure that it’s all that easily compatible with the privilege of agape over eros that Paul is giving us in the letter to the Corinthians. Songs wallows in its erotic, desirous imagery, and rightly so. Paul on the other hand would pale at such language. It would only encourage those licentious Greeks.
I tried to think about this at the reception as the wine took effect, but found myself having to struggle more with conversations about DIY and gardening, the lives of those who had long ago sung their Song of Songs and traded it in for the sexless 1 Corinthians. Not the bible but pop lyrics and poems came to me, Janis Ian’s “high-school girls with clear-skin smiles / who married young and then retired” and Philip Larkin’s “something is pushing them to the side of their own lives”. These bleak thoughts on middle-class domestic bliss loomed in and out of my despairingly critical consciousness as the dancing whisked everyone away in a blur.
