The Not So Secular Olympic Ceremonies

Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer!

The "Queen" arrives at Olympic Stadium.

I mentioned in yesterday’s entry the fascination of a billion people with the opening “liturgy” of the Olympics as compared and contrasted with the dwindling and graying congregations at Sunday Mass.  But what really drew my attention to the opening ceremonies of the Olympics was not the questions it raises about liturgy but what it said about British secularism as differentiated from American secularism.  So, did you catch in the opening sequence Sir Hubert Parry’s fabulous hymn based on William Blake’s poem Jerusalem?  

And did those feet in ancient time.
Walk upon England’s mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On England’s pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land

And Blake’s “Jerusalem” was not all.  Checking the playlist I could not find the John Hughes/William Williams Welsh hymn, “Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer” a perennial favorite of the Royals, but I know that I heard it—the refrain: “feed me till I want no more” is an inside joke among several of us and it caught my attention, plus the tune itself is a great melody. Even as the Blake lyrics represented England, and “Flower of Scotland” (another of my favorites) represented the Northern Kingdom, I suspect that the Hughes/Williams piece was a tip to Wales.  All well and good in Britain, but could you imagine if two ardent Christian hymns were ever included in a civic ritual in the United States?  People would be screaming about Separation of Church and State.  Of course England doesn’t have separation of Church and State—the Church of England being by law established, but that isn’t the point.  In America we want religion and all its vestiges banished from public life, that is every religion except for the lack of religion.  Too bad, for as we saw at Danny Boyle’s spectacular, religion—all religion—has some great tunes.    And I love a good tune, religious or otherwise. 

Four Hours--not in Church! Olympics vs Liturgy

I am not sure what to think of the opening ceremonies of the 2012 London Olympics   can you imagine sitting for four hours through a Church service?  And yet there I sat—and how many others worldwide—for a four hour “liturgy” celebrating—well I am not sure what it was celebrating.  It was so, well, post-modern.  I can’t say that I didn’t like it.  I did, for the most part.  Particularly the Queen’s parachuting in with James Bond.  The old lady is a good sport. (Well, we all know it was a stunt-double for the parachute part, but she went along with act and played her part at the palace and stadium.) But what did it all mean? 

I think one of the significant problems with the Liturgy of the Western Church (as opposed to the Eastern Churches and their various rites) is that we western Christians tend to over-define our doctrines so that the experience of liturgy leaves nothing with which to inform the intellect. I mean you get all these doctrines all the time so that when you get to Mass the actual experience of worship has nothing left to reveal to you.  And that approach of doctrine first leaves everything in the head rather than let the head learn through the experience of the heart.  (The various rites of the Eastern Churches, Catholic and Orthodox, leave much more to the doctrinal implications unfolding from an encounter with the Mysterium.)  On the other hand, the Olympic ceremonies had no coherent doctrine to unfold and so created sentiment without content, and though they did that splendidly—to what purpose?  But I think that triumph of amorphous form over vapid content is the hallmark of post-modernism. 

So I really don’t want to write about the ceremonies except to draw our attention to the fact that hundreds of millions of people—allegedly a billion people worldwide—are able to sit through a four-hour ritual, however vapid.  Why are these same people so bored with Sunday Mornings at Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility?   I must say that the new translation with its complex syntax isn’t helping, but I think the problem is much deeper than that. 

Years ago when I was in grad school I remember one of my professors (Jewish) saying that Christianity is a religion of orthodoxis whereas Judaism and Islam is a religion of orthopraxis.  She meant—and I think she assesses it quite well—that Christianity is all about doctrine and Judaism and Islam are about experience.  Perhaps we Christians, at least western Christians, need more experience of the Divine to balance out the heavy doses of doctrine.