Something strange seems to happen at one of the most important and terrible moments of life and I hardly believe it is only to me; throughout one of the central moments of our culture and our personal experiences one has to keep editing out, so to speak, the bits that one truly cannot accept. This is even worse if one is unlucky enough to have a silly or tactless vicar, a rash intruding priest who tramples on gentle Anglican ambiguities and uncertainties.<\/p>\n
I feel the same reading religious poetry or sermons, some of which I love. Poetry, like religion, is supposed to be about truth, or at least to be truthful, and yet if one has constantly to translate, so to speak, some of its central ideas into another idiom \u201d\u201c if one has to translate the religious notion of redemption into something secular, for example \u201d\u201c there comes a moment when it loses its power, or at least when one cannot take it seriously.<\/p>\n
Some people I talked to, a couple of them actors and agnostics, were not troubled by any of this. They said that they are affected by sound, performance, the power of words; they don\u2019t seem to be confined by my literal-mindedness. I do see that literal-mindedness can be petty and reductive; a great deal of communication happens outside literal meaning. All the same, for an unbeliever what meaning can there be at all in Julian of Norwich\u2019s saying that all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well? Words are only partly music; they must offer sense as well as sensation.<\/p>\n
Yet what alternative can there be to one\u2019s own tradition? It is hard, unilaterally and suddenly, to create a new ritual…<\/p>\n