"I don't go to the graduation ceremonies," said a colleague of mine in the school district. "I didn't even go to my own. I just don't do pomp and circumstance."
I thought about his words. Is he enlightened or impoverished?
Ceremony is part of human culture. We celebrate birthdays, comings-of-age, graduations, weddings. We honor the departing soldier, the returning veteran and the dearly departed. Some people pay close attention to the changing of the seasons. In Japan, there is a day set aside to honor boys; another to honor Girls.
The ceremonies we cherish, change over time. Christmas as we know it, is a very modern Western idea -- it would be unrecognizable to our forefathers, even the most devout Christians of them. Halloween is completely different today than when it began .... and at least where I live, trick-or-treating door to door is nearly dead -- certainly, dead is the idea of people offering apples, warm cookies and cider to the costumed pixies at their doorstep.
As the Western world continues to cut loose from the moorings of religion, will the time come when its sacred holidays fade completely away? If so, what will remain? Some people kneel at the altar of the Superbowl; the Wave becomes today's genuflection; and the grid-iron athletes are the new apostles.
Others offer their devotions to celebrities as fervently as a former generation did to the canonized saints. They don't burn candles but they devour People magazine.
Is this progress or retrogression? Praiseworthy or pathetic?
A thousand years from now, what ceremonies do you suppose we will cherish and what will be utterly forgotten? Remember that the whole idea of high school and even college is a novelty in world history; consider that marriage in the Western world is an endangered species; and that, even though Og the Caveman probably tossed a ball of animal hide or maybe his neighbor's severed head for fun, the sports we know today -- football, basketball, etc -- are babes in the nursery, basically fads.
Will we come full circle? There are devoted groups now attempting to resurrect ancient Greek paganism. There are people who fervently wish to reclaim the idea of "good witches" from its exile in fairy tale literature. Will they succeed or will the law of diminishing returns exact its toll?
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Pomp and Circumstance
Monday, October 13, 2008
Of Columbus
"Because, O most Christian and very high, very excellent and puissant Princes, King and Queen of the Spains and of the islands of the Sea, our Lords, in this present year of 1492 ... Your Highnesses resolved to send me, Cristobal, to India ... and ordered that I should not go by land to the eastward, as had been customary, but that I should go by way of the west, whither up to this day we do not know for certain that any has gone." -- The Journal.
On October 12 at two hours after midnight, the land was sighted at a distance of two leagues. The vessels were hove to, waiting for daylight and on Friday, they arrived at a small island [believed today to be Watling Island.]
If Columbus had not discovered America for Europe, eventually someone else would have. Would the indigenous inhabitants have suffered less if it had been Russia, crossing over from Siberia, not Spaniards? Or Turks, pouring in with the banners of Mohammed? Or if two more centuries had passed and Englishmen had been the first of the European race to plant their flag in the New World?
It is not reasonable to hate Columbus, as some do. He was a man of great courage, certainly. He was a man of many flaws, too, a man of his flawed era. But from Ottawa to Buenos Aires, for better or for worse, the world is a bigger place because of him.
We rightly honor him today.
Above is a church in the Canary Islands where he stopped to pray along his journey.
