Spiritual Weddings
By Rev Jim Burch
The spirituality that Christ delivered came into a world that had its own
knowledge and perspective. The message of Christ, who spoke in parables, was transmitted
through the filters of people who knew only what and how they knew then. Up until
just a couple of hundred years ago, we human beings had relatively little knowledge
about how the physical universe, including our bodies, worked. So people in Western
cultures just figured that "God did it," and presumed anything they did not understand
was a "miracle."
As science learned more and more, Western people discovered that God does not
directly intervene in daily occurrences. For example, when people, who had thought
that God sat on a throne in "heaven" which was up above the sky, discovered that
above the sky was a galaxy, and then billions more galaxies beyond that, they
wondered where God went. When people who thought God created us as the final masterpiece
in creation discovered that we are products of a continuing evolution, they often
lost their belief in our specialness. When people learned more of how our human
consciousness worked, they saw fields of "natural" energy at work that they had
previously attributed to God's direct intervention.
The spirituality of Christ was hung, in the Roman and Greek world assumptions
from pagan philosophy (largely Plato and Aristotle), on a structural perspective
that has collapsed over the last few centuries. For many, this realization has
left them spiritually homeless. Some others are conservative Christians or fundamentalists
who believe that the bible is the literal word of God, and are intolerant of those
who don't see God as they do. As a result, there is currently great turmoil in
society.
At the same time, science has discovered more about this wonderful universe within
which we live. We know that the universe came into existence between 15 and 20
billion years ago, when the energy of Infinite Potential moved. Thus began an
amazing evolutionary story, in which one cannot but see a Plan, a Purpose, in
the leaps of possibility that pushed all this forward. And today, when science
looks at atoms, it has discovered that beneath sub-atomic particles, the stuff
of which all the physical universe is made is energy waves! So, this same Energy-
Power- Intelligence- Spirit-Life that got everything going is the same Energy-
Power- Intelligence- Spirit-Life that sustains it.
What we now think of as this "new" spirituality was actually the more pervasive
spirituality of the early centuries of the church. Throughout Northern and Central
Europe, and particularly in the British Isles where Celtic spirituality endured
the longest, the generally-assumed perspective was that there was no division
between God and the world. The world was infused with God, and it was good.
These beautiful theologies and liturgies were gradually extinguished, however,
by political decrees of the Roman emperors seeking unity throughout the empire,
and by minor potentates seeking Rome's favor. There was nothing wrong with this
competing theology or perspective; it just got edged out in the political maneuvering
of the times.
In the Celtic spirituality whose latent embers have re-ignited as today's "New
Age" spirituality, adherents do not see "God" as some external entity who keeps
a checklist: those with enough good checks go to "heaven," and those with too
many bad checks go to "hell." Rather, they see this Energy- Power- Intelligence-
Spirit-Life (perhaps the word "God" is too limiting to this new perspective)
as being the Ground of our Being, the Depth of our Humanity, the Connectedness
we have with all life and with all creation and with each other. Humanity is
not basically "sinners," but is primarily "Loved from the beginning!" When any
of us see a sunset or a magnificent vista, when we are touched by the illness
of a sick friend, when we hear of physical devastation in some part of the world
and then are touched to hear of an outpouring of help and support, when we love
our children or our parents or our friends - and particularly when we love that
person whom we have chosen to be our spouse - it is in those times that we realize
that feelings of love ARE the experience of God.
That is what Celtic spirituality is and new age spirituality is at its core.
And we have a ceremony that expresses that.
Rev Jim Burch is the Managing Director of weddingceremony.org
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