A review of the film "Rachel Getting Married"
The director, actors, and screenplay were excellent, you could not have a hipper wedding than this, with jazz-Indian-Caribbean-Black-Chinese music and food and the cool Connecticut mansion with the long green lawn and the dysfunctional family. No doubt many new brides and grooms will want to duplicate this hippest of weddings.
Here's the problem. You cannot replace sacred with hipness, even with this high level of hipness. What could be hipper than a Black groom singing a Neil Young song to a White bride during a secular marriage ceremony? Yet all the problems, and they were numerous—the drug addiction, divorced parents, the general overall hedonism—were directly and precisely the consequence of the rejection and abandonment of the sacred.
The only way to correct this tragedy is to return to the sacred, but this seems virtually impossible in the present world. What science-minded person, what truly hip person would want to return to religion? Do we wait for the hipness to fade, do we wait for the culture to fall? This we know. The sacred will return. But will it return in the form of the traditional sacred?
Science-rejecting, evolution-rejecting religion will be reformed by a deeper sacred which includes science and religion. Then, at last, the Rachels of the world can have a sacred traditional wedding, in a traditional sacred church, with a sacred traditional family attending. There will be human troubles, of course, but religion knows how to handle all the problems that hipness creates. Nothing else can.
The director, actors, and screenplay were excellent, you could not have a hipper wedding than this, with jazz-Indian-Caribbean-Black-Chinese music and food and the cool Connecticut mansion with the long green lawn and the dysfunctional family. No doubt many new brides and grooms will want to duplicate this hippest of weddings.
Here's the problem. You cannot replace sacred with hipness, even with this high level of hipness. What could be hipper than a Black groom singing a Neil Young song to a White bride during a secular marriage ceremony? Yet all the problems, and they were numerous—the drug addiction, divorced parents, the general overall hedonism—were directly and precisely the consequence of the rejection and abandonment of the sacred.
The only way to correct this tragedy is to return to the sacred, but this seems virtually impossible in the present world. What science-minded person, what truly hip person would want to return to religion? Do we wait for the hipness to fade, do we wait for the culture to fall? This we know. The sacred will return. But will it return in the form of the traditional sacred?
Science-rejecting, evolution-rejecting religion will be reformed by a deeper sacred which includes science and religion. Then, at last, the Rachels of the world can have a sacred traditional wedding, in a traditional sacred church, with a sacred traditional family attending. There will be human troubles, of course, but religion knows how to handle all the problems that hipness creates. Nothing else can.
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