Our 30th wedding anniversary falls on April 13. In normal times, my husband and I would have held a party to celebrate. Writing speeches about your spouse’s better qualities, joking about the irritants — “she’s a hoarder who never throws anything out, including me” — facilitates perspective. Marking family milestones by gathering the generations together is one of the few things I feel sure we did right.
In the past year the shifting rules affecting weddings, funerals and baptisms have been tricky for families. For those living alone, the maintenance of faith, hope and love in social isolation has been even harder. Physical gatherings and ceremonies are essential in every civilisation and religion.
Rituals can formally reflect our values, aspirations and beliefs, investing them with solemnity and a sense of spiritual presence. Adding sensory beauty to a special occasion with clothes, flowers, music and language is something like taking a photograph for the soul, entrenching memories.
The element of ritual validates a ceremony for which you prepare and rehearse. By following a ritual, you know you have done it correctly, and that the witnesses understand. At our wedding, I felt touched that a Jewish friend, unable to leave work for long, chose to attend our church service, not the reception.
At weddings, couples follow in the footsteps of others. There may be personal attachment to the place where vows are taken, or a sense of sacred space. As TS Eliot wrote: “You are here to kneel/ Where prayer has been valid.” You are doing something that feels right and joyous, committing in front of your future supporters. In marriage, we all need the support of our friends, because nobody knows what external events may happen — for better or for worse.
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Baptisms may point us back towards faith, looking for protection: “Loving Shepherd of your sheep, all your lambs in safety keep” (Jane Eliza Leeson). The birth of a child is a miracle and a blessing. You experience unconditional love, but also how it feels to create someone with free will, whom you cannot control.
And so to funerals. The Duke of Edinburgh’s in the coming days will provide the public with an opportunity to say thank you for shared love that “many waters cannot quench” (Song of Solomon, viii, 7), to look forward to a future with God and, again, to declare this is not the end but the beginning. Funerals can be transformed by anthems or the right hymn, combining beautiful music and language such as “Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all its sons away” (Isaac Watts).
My brother-in-law’s wife died aged 37, leaving three children and a baby. His brave quotation at her funeral of Blake’s words, “man was made for joy and woe”, has stayed with me. The Australian priest Richard Leonard writes that “when people come for a hatching, matching, or dispatching, many are open to hearing a hopeful word that speaks to the joy or sadness they bring with them. [By] attending to the dignity, beauty and flow of the sacrament we enable them to ask some of the deeper questions and seek the answers about life’s meaning and the grounds for faith”.
Access to family gatherings and religious services have sadly been limited during lockdown. However, we have had more opportunity to reflect on who we are, what matters to us and what sort of world we want to live in post-pandemic.
To change habits, we need routine and rituals. For anyone who, like Philip Larkin, has been surprised by “a hunger in himself to be more serious”, the shared ritual and community of restored Sunday church services offer an anchor.
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As we approached our silver wedding anniversary at Easter 2016, I did something I knew my husband would find annoying, saying slyly as I did so: “For better, for worse.” He replied: ‘Is that a question?’ To record a memory of the jokey, tolerant moments of our long relationship, I ordered a bottle stopper engraved with “For better or worse?” We can ease our burdens about human failures by forgiving and letting go.
After a difficult year, Easter symbolises the triumph of love and the opportunity for forgiveness and renewal. On release from lockdown, in thought, word and deed, in ritual and ceremony, we should embark on a trajectory informed by the desire to do good, not only to do well.
Emma Thompson is a solicitor and freelance writer