The Case for Secular Liturgies: A Shared Spiritual Language

 Since 2019, I’ve been the chaplain of a high-fee independent school which has historically been ‘non-denominational’. But what does that even mean in 21st century practice, especially when the school community is reflective of the wider culture’s religious affiliations? 2/3 of the school’s enrolments claim no religious affiliation, and 1/3 claim nearly every religious affiliation on earth.

So what should its chapel services look like? How do you create cohesive spiritual experiences in this context? My answer has been to offer secular liturgies. That is--language, texts, and music that are not explicitly of any particular religious tradition. This approach to spiritual development creates a truly inclusive spiritual awareness, and has become a key point of difference from other independent schools.

To clarify this, think of a how a hospital works:

Imagine doctor going into a hospital to operate. Let’s say this doctor is religious, specifically Jewish, say—an observant Jew who has been raised that in that faith, reads the sacred texts, and regularly goes to temple. While he is operating on a patient, a particularly apt prayer for divine healing from, say, the Talmud, comes to his mind. Now should he, as an observant Jew, pause the operation to offer that prayer to the God he worships? If your child were the patient, and you knew the doctor paused operating on them to be prayerfully observant, would you appreciate that? And if your child’s surgery went wrong, would you applaud the doctor’s piety? Or sue him?

Regardless of his religion, this doctor operates in a secular context

Of course, that imaginary hospital scenario never happens. Because any religious doctor--Jewish or Hindu or Muslim—knows it’s for them to treat the patient in that context. The doctor operates for that hour etsi Deus non daretur, ‘as if God were not a given’. Does that make the doctor a religious hypocrite? Does it make the doctor a bad Jew if he suspends his Jewish practices for the time he operates? No, it does no such thing. The world we live in is not as simple as that.

It’s complex: the world is becoming BOTH more religious or less so. In some parts of the world, religious sects and their followers are increasing in numbers. In places like Australia though, religious affiliation is in steady decline overall. Both things are true—the world is getting both more religious in total numbers, and also less religious in certain places like ours. So there’s this big split, and institutions like hospitals have to accommodate that split. Hospitals have BOTH doctors AND chaplains. They have BOTH operating rooms AND prayer rooms. The institution of the Hospital operates in BOTH ‘secular’ terms AND in religious terms. BOTH. Which means the reality is not ‘either you’re one or the other’; the reality is you can be both—folks can and do ‘operate’ in both religious and secular terms interchangeably. But for the time he operates, the good doctor suspends his religion and makes his religious beliefs and practices strictly irrelevant for that time. However, in his life more generally, the doctor operates in both frameworks, switching depending on whether he’s at temple or at hospital.

Modernity means choice

Like a hospital, an independent school is an institution that must serve the needs of all who come there. Our school, our country, and indeed the whole world is increasingly religiously plural—meaning there are many different religious flavours to choose from. At the same time, secular developments in science and technology are discovering and creating realities that religions never dreamt of, things like biomechanics, quantum physics, and artificial intelligence. A world containing both religious pluralism and non-religious secularism is how things are, and have been for some time.  Embracing that reality and learning how to work with it in schools, is only just beginning. In effect, I have placed the school at the vanguard of this emerging awareness.

2020’s attempts to offer chapel via Zoom have reminded us that we humans crave live gatherings where we seriously consider meaning and purpose together. And if we see the benefit of such gatherings, HOW should they be expressed in a multicultural, multifaith community? What language can we all share in them, when we meet as one institution to worship together?

Well, our students have been living in the answer for the past couple years. They will have noticed that chapels have not exactly Bible-bashed, nor indeed bashed any particular book. Nor have chapels used especially churchy language. Not that there’s anything wrong with any of that, particularly, in its place. After all, religion is the most continuous human experience, secular society is young by comparison. We could just pick one or two religions and unpack them. But once you focus on a select few, you automatically exclude other stories which also have great truth, beauty, and goodness. And we can’t do justice to them all. We could just have focussed on Christianity, say, since it’s dominant in our colonial culture, and our mid-century chapel already fairly bristles with Cx crosses. But to submit to what’s dominant because it’s dominant, is not about theology or meaning, but about power. ‘Cultural might makes right’ is the ethic of slaves and the mark of fascism. Besides, since when has dominance guaranteed worth? No, choosing what’s dominant because it’s dominant is a choice based on fear. To make a choice based on the opposite of fear, a religious choice, a choice based on love, would be to use language that can bring all together on equal terms, and exclude no one.

Love includes, fear divides

So our chapel worship services are, in effect, secular liturgies, using secular language and music, the same language which BOTH doctors and chaplains (whatever their religion) use to function together in their institution day to day. Secular language alone is the shared language through which all in our institution can connect TOGETHER as a School community. If this were a church community, we’d probably be using different language. Using this secular language common to people of all faiths and none, is thus an intentional and loving act of inclusion, rather than an act of division, of privileging one faith over others. Doesn’t the hospital include all patients in treatment, not just the religious ones? Shouldn’t we as a school, try to include all our students in worship, not just a few?

Don’t misunderstand: this is not anti-religion. Religious language can be rich and moving and wise. Religious texts can be models of beauty, clarity, and insight. But religious language does not have a monopoly on such things. Secular language has poetry with deeply felt and timeless spiritual wisdom–English teachers could provide abundant examples. Secular language has moral power—read the Uluhru Statement from the Heart or, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And your CD collection has secular music that lifts your spirit just as sacred music can.

Both are real; one offers a common language

Secular language, secular texts, and secular music is the language we all CAN share in chapel, because it’s the language we all DO share in school every day anyway, whatever our flavour of religion and whatever our flavour of no religion. And if we happen to put a family’s chosen faith aside—like the doctor puts his--for the time school is ‘operating’, we don’t deny their religion, nor do we make religious hypocrites of their students by worshipping in a language that brings us all together as one school. What religion does not seek the fullest possible bringing together of all God’s children?

If you get sick, you can certainly pray for healing and use whichever of the many religious languages you choose. But I hope you will ALSO go to a hospital. If you seek an education, you may choose a single book of wisdom as a foundation. But you’ll ALSO go to an institution called a school, where students read and draw wisdom from many books. Like a doctor going to operate in a hospital, a teacher going into a school may believe with all their heart that there is an invisible world beyond this one, a world populated with intelligent beings we can communicate with, if we use a special language of words, behaviours, rituals. But that invisible world is not on the school curriculum. Learning about this one is challenging enough. During the hours the teacher is operating, their professionalism bids them operate, like the doctor, ‘etsi Deus non daretur’. And like the doctor, they do not betray their own religion by using our common language, rather than the language of their faith alone.

Now, more than ever, in our shrinking world of many faiths and many of none, we need to find ways to come together, rather than endlessly split into ever-multiplying factions, we need to seek meaning and purpose together, to celebrate living together. If we want our world to come together in mutual respect and tolerance, small worlds like schools have to come together in mutual respect and tolerance. In a world of endless choices and great uncertainties, our chapel services aim to bring together all our students, that they may feel the spiritual power that comes from connectedness rather than division. May they feel there is indeed strength in such unity.

Is Chaplaincy sustainable?

I'm not trying to talk myself out of a job; I'm trying to see things for what they are. 

Years ago when I was in seminary, Unitarians and other non-conformist church students were debating whether or not the role of Minister was sustainable in the 21st century. 

Want information about religion? Want motivating religious talks? Gee, if only there were an online source for such things... 

Want live gatherings that make you feel good, spark the mind, and touch the heart? Take your pick of the ever-multiplying ways of gatherings out there...

Want inner peace? Do yoga or meditate...

Want to mark a life transition--birth, marriage, death (the traditional institutional function of church--hatch, match, and dispatch)? Most now prefer civil celebrants with their own personal brand niches...

Want one-on-one advice your personal problems? We have these things now called counselling, psychiatry, even 'life-coaching' (whatever the hell that is)...

It's not 1854 anymore, and we should stop pretending that it is. The traditional expectations of Ministry have been more than covered, and with greater expertise by a broader range of professionals, than ever before.

The Rationalist Society of Australia has recently published an important report called: Religiosity in Australia Part 1: Personal faith according to the numbers 

The aim of the report is to drill down and gather data about actual religious attitudes and behaviors (vs. the perfunctory government census data). These attitudes and behaviors will have implications not just for my own school's future 'pitch' in relation to chapel and chaplaincy, and for Ministry more generally. I've digested the highlights for you, dear reader, but they are hard for me to swallow:

• Claiming 'affiliation' is a weak stat. (e.g. can be family history vs. actual practice)
• Most claiming affiliation are not active
• Gen-X to millennials low affiliation numbers indicate continued decline (so, even less in future of what's currently low)
• Religion ranks last place in influencing personal identity (71% claim not important)
• Even for birth-death-marriage rituals, 80% prefer civil to religious celebrants
• Religious metaphysics (God, heaven, hell, etc.), even among the committed, are no longer seen to offer validity to moral/ethical debates
• Most reject religious authority as the ultimate interpretation of law.
• Religious households most likely to have low incomes (i.e. not my wealthy school's target demographic anyway)
• However, there is a disconnect between this new reality and Australian government policy, which favors minority religious policy at the expense of the emerging non-religious majority 
• Schools are at the frontline of this struggle between public policy and the social change in actual religious behavior (e.g., most Australians oppose religious schools' legal right to expel students or sack staff on the basis of sexual orientation)

Our chaplaincy model (and its attendant chapel facilities, etc.) is still quite traditional. But given this emerging reality, is it really sustainable? 

Any serious quest for the meaning and purpose of what I do demands that question at least be asked.

The traditional role expectations of chaplaincy are almost fully secularized or outsourced at my school already. Even school leaders muddle the terms "Assembly" and "Chapel" as though they fulfill the same timetable function. Assemblies trot out a list of desirable character values--decontextualized, random, perfunctory, and numerous, though they are. 

Though I've taken pains to clarify that I am NOT a counsellor (even distributing a report that distinguishes Spiritual Direction from clinical counselling) I am still regarded as one by both students and staff, and I am woefully under-skilled to be that for them. I listen and care, but lack the tools to strategize a fix or a management of their issues.

Student and Old Scholar rites of passage do not default to my keeping--in three years I have performed one staff wedding, but as a private gig, off-campus. That's it. There have been births and deaths, and I've not been called to officiate, nor do I expect or even want to be.

What seems to remain is an occasional, highly specialized performance art--a live mass speech event that shares frontiers with sage-on-the-stage teaching, but without the teacherly validation of evaluations to see what they're getting from it. All you get are sort of google reviews that say more about the person than the event. Those that are susceptible to this form of rhetoric approve, those that aren't, don't. What a surprise.

As my boss reminded me, the decline in religiosity doesn't mean a decline in the need and desire to search for meaning and purpose. But do you need a chaplain for that? Someone in religious orders with all the cultural baggage that comes with that--the tradition of epistemic authority, the psychological pressure of that perceived authority, the emotional manipulation people are still susceptible to by anyone 'of the cloth'. 

It seems more like a case of the right person for the job, ordained or not. 

A {Redacted} Epistle to a Fellow-Traveller, on moving on

 

Dear XXX,

First, please forgive the less-than-personal feel of this word-processed reply. My handwriting is reputedly (and admittedly) deplorable, even to those used to my crabbed scrawl. I really enjoyed getting a handwritten letter for a change. During my church tenure, handwritten notes were generally a red flag. But it was SUCH a pleasure to read what is essentially an epistle, the only aim of which is deepening and broadening relationship between fellow travellers.

Quite without meaning to, I seemed to develop an M.O. as I read it—circling parts that jumped out at me that I felt I wanted particularly to respond to or reflect on. Inevitably, that will say more about where I’m at than some forlorn pretence of ‘objectivity’. Some were things I could relate to, others were an ingrained pastoral-care reflex, a deformation professionelle from years of teaching and Ministry and now chaplaincy. Anyway, I’ll plunge into some of these circled bits in order over the next few days, and see where my reflections take me. May they be ‘dulce et utile’—pleasing and useful.

First, though, I want to reiterate that you’re one of the best XXXX I’ve seen on three continents. Measured, strategic, persistent, inclusive, knowledgeable, analytical, deeply moral and heartfelt—the conclusions to which you led even the most ideologically resistant in my church were inescapable. That said, you are allowed to stop, to have boundaries that are no one’s business but your own, and which require zero justification from a free, self-directed adult. That UU 1^st principle of the ‘inherent worth and dignity of every person’ applies even to the politically non-engaged. You’re no good to anyone if you’re broken, least of all to yourself. Your energies have been outward-directed for a long time. Give yourself a break. If you don’t, who will?

“I contain multitudes” Walt Whitman said. I don’t know about you, but as a fellow neurotic, I have always had this voice in my head as long as I can remember who tells me I’m not good enough, that I’m a fraud, that I will struggle to deserve comfort or happiness. You experience this as the gaslighting imposter syndrome. Only quite recently, I have become better at telling myself that this voice inside me has never done anything in life other than be mean to me. One of us is sad and sick and useless, and it ain’t me. Becoming best friends with yourself, as you say, is telling that voice regularly to go XXXX himself, whenever it pops up. That is absolutely required to be able to grab your oxygen mask, don it with a clear conscience, breathe deeply, and enjoy the benefits of not suffocating. Our self-flagellation serves no one.

Talk about unproductive...

Leaving things you’ve built behind, and letting attachment to them go. Yeah, that’s a tough one! It’s hard because it puts us in mind of our mortality and the ultimate, cosmic futility of individual human endeavour. The power-brokers at XXXXXXX are probably claiming what they liked of my work as their own, and burying what they didn’t. C’est la vie. Though I can’t any longer influence what they do, the clean, sharp break still seems the wisest course, not merely because doing so was a centuries-old protocol of free churches, but because it embodies and fulfills the self-effacement inherent in true service. The Ministry of the church is what matters, the particular Minister does not. Facing what I knew to be the end of an important and intentional identity felt like the most grown-up thing I’d ever done, and I hope I face my final oblivion with half such certainty.

When I begin to kick myself about it, I remind myself of the way I respond to those who belabour me about the importance of the person of Christ. If the ideas/values/principles he’s meant to have espoused were inherently good in themselves, then his historicity (the particulars of the magical birth, miracles, and resurrection) need never have happened, nor require my belief that they did. When I think of exemplary self-sacrifice at all (talk about a sharp, clean break!), I imagine his death to be the ultimate faith that the ideas will live in some form after him. The alternative to self-effacement is the personality cult, a species of idolatry, a flat denial of the transience of all material forms.

Unitarian churches, having a few central principles but no single text or narrative, necessarily tend toward personality cults, especially if Ministers don’t know when to leave, when enough of you is enough. This was happening in the latter stages at XXXXXXX Never trust anyone that puts you on a pedestal, no matter how flattering, because the pedestal itself always belongs to those who put you on it. Had I stayed, my contract would not have run out until 2023, and I’m not sure a graceful, emotionally intelligent exit could have been managed by then. Maybe this is the case in all intentional communities, XXXincluded.

It’s not false humility if you genuinely humble yourself to a greater good. This means sacrifice, and thus suffering, but also offers a way through suffering to equanimity. While it would be false to say I’ve achieved that state, I’m further along than I was a few months ago, so maybe it’s a process that will continue. I did some good things there, and one of the things that truly became my Ministry was the leaving of it. It was a hard thing to do well, given the ample ‘friendly fire’ and the enormity of the task, so I am allowed to be proud of all that and find something new that’s worth doing.

To venture into new lives, you have to leave old ones, knowing you can’t go back, not really. You can visit, but it’s never the same because the observer (you) will have changed (this is the Heisenberg principle at work in our own personal histories). Doing the kind of work you’ve done is a young man’s game, best done in the vigour of one’s flowering season. But flower is meant to become fruit, and fruit is meant to ripen. If that’s where you are headed now, that’s only natural: the bright promise of the spring becoming the hard realities of the harvest—what you’re damn well left with, what the scope of it really is, what you might usefully do with it for those who come after in the time remaining to you. Time to pick the fruit before it falls--and it must fall, if we don’t pick it.

How nature says "pick the fruit"

The Tolkien quote reminded me of Voltaire’s Candide, the eponymous character having finally settled down at the end of his wide-ranging, bizarre adventures to a quiet, domestic life. His teacher, Dr. Pangloss, still insists that since everything has worked out in the end, we still live in the best of all possible worlds. “Yes,” Candide says, “but we must still tend our garden.” The scope of his stewardship has shrunk, but it’s manageable, and needs his agency to yield what it can. He drinks the wine of the country, praises the God of all things, and lets the world be the world. There’s nowt wrong with that.

That we resist this, well, maturing, is a way of clinging to youth, and as much as I love Tolkien too, he wrote in, and never really left, the sheltered workshop of a school. Now that I’m back in an academic environment, I can see that even for the adults there’s something infantilizing about that culture. Plus he was writing the Rings as the British Empire was summoning up all its will and resources to conquer the great existential threat of its day, and the Judeo-Christian trope of glorious sacrifice was understandably at the heart of his work and that of many other of his peers (like C. S. Lewis). It always reminds me of their debt to William Blake and the promise that a new Jerusalem was at hand if only we took up our bow of burning gold, its arrows of desire, and mounted our chariot of fire. All that heat and light in the sacrificial fire of youth (no culture ever used the elderly for burnt offerings!). But fire is a temporal phenomenon. Stories that deal with what happens after this fire expends itself, as it must, don’t make exciting reading or viewing.

After the forward thrust of one story expends itself, it is always possible to begin a new one—having the learned the lessons of the old, and taken a break long enough to answer the question: “Well, what now?” I have complete faith that however you answer that, it will be well, and all manner of things for you shall be well.

Obviously this all comes through a tired old man’s filter, whose next story can only be how to face age, and then the only end of age. Naturally, it says more truth about where I’m at than where you are, but I hope these reflections are of use.

Thanks for prompting this epistolary. It’s done me a power of good to reflect deeply on issues that are alive in you. I hope we can continue. Say, do you mind if I blog this, if I keep your name and the organisation’s name out of it? Maybe others will find it useful too. No problem if not.

Yours in faith,

Rob