Midlife Meditation

Everybody's got to believe in something. I believe I'll have another beer. W.C. Fields It's that time of year again: the time when the thoughts of pious folk turn to the objects of their piety, and they engage in cultic rituals to observe that it is, indeed, that time of year. I'm speaking, of course, of baseball season. No, seriously, this is about Easter, and a little about Passover: religious festivals that happen to coincide with the beginning of spring (and baseball season, but that's really not relevant to this topic). A year ago, I started this blog with some of my long-festering objections to Easter. At the time, I muted my criticism in acknowledgment of my part-time employment as a church musician. Since then, I have left that position to concentrate my attention on full-time music teaching. I love my work, find it challenging and rewarding, and feel no desire to return to a church setting, despite having spent, prior to last November, ...

I've written thousands of words in this space about things I no longer believe, and why I have lost my faith in them. Ironically, my favorite part of the church service used to be the recitation of the creed. Methodism is not a creedal faith--the church has no official statement of beliefs (don't tell the conservative Good News lobby this unless you're up for a thumping of Biblical proportions)--but most Methodists spend a couple of minutes every Sunday speaking a creed in unison. Because none of them is official, there can be a different one each week. I liked the Apostles' Creed for its conciseness, and because I could say it from memory; and the Creed of the United Church of Canada for its contemporary social justice orientation. The Nicene Creed, on the other hand, felt like an exercise in dogmatics, which is exactly what it was intended to be from the beginning: a bureaucratic summary of those beliefs deemed essential to Roman Catholicism. For much of the histor...