A few weeks ago, on a Saturday afternoon in the beautiful countryside setting of Devon, an event involving about 50 friends and family gathered to mark our latest grandson’s birth. Called a ‘naming day’, it represented a kind of non-Christian christening.
Partly, perhaps because paganism pre-dates Christianity, my son and his partner hoped, like themselves, that everyone would be touched by a deeper and more meaningful experience of creation. Obviously, as infants, we would have been present when our parents had us either christened with names or prayed over with thanks to God. This event was markedly different and more interactively engaging than a traditional Christian service. As the ceremony began all those present were recognised as having different religious or non-religious backgrounds. This implied, for me at least, that some unspecified acceptance of religious diversity was expected.
Of course, along with the friendly picnic beforehand, the ceremony itself was deliberately arranged to blend with the natural environment. Using primitive technology, my son set a fire in our midst and his partner, our grandson’s mother, engaged us all in singing with her a simple mothering invocation she recalled from her time in Burkina Faso; we repeated after her the words she sang as we all queued to greet their son with our own personal welcome.
I imagine the implication of all this was that our grandson’s welcome into the world of human community also meant our celebrating that elemental and indefinable something which had brought each of us into existence. It was poignant, I felt, because it gave effect to a meeting between two families and many longstanding friends who would otherwise have remained complete strangers. This only child, a child born in their middle years, was gifted to them as seeming to represent something unusually auspicious.
In me personally, the occasion also produced a sense of pathos. I had felt it necessary to keep that pathos under control until, seized by an opportunity to speak, my words were soon stifled as my feelings gave way to deep sobs. I had tried to share my thanks to God for my own son’s life. I said that, for me, my son’s name could never be detached from the peace I had received from God nine months before he was born. (Oliver represents my peace with God).
I think it is vital to know and have the personal name of God declared in Jesus Christ. He is a person and not an imagined creative life-force in nature. The pagan mind is never willing or able to confess Him as Lord. It is the tragedy of paganism to appeal to a blessing mystically attributed to an ‘unknown god.’ A god which the Apostle Paul spoke about in Athens; a god impervious to any invocation to give or be a blessing, and impervious to the truth that creation is the blessed reflection of God’s glory and power.
It is beyond any creature, pagan or otherwise, to invoke a blessing on them-selves. To seek salvation in ourselves is a dreadful and fatal error. Only God lives in the blessed exaltation of joyful union between God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. Exulting in man-made idols exalts our value above that of Jesus Christ. The true praise of God’s people must involve the Holy Spirit’s mission on earth to bring glory to the name of Jesus Christ.
