This is the time of year when people pause to look both backwards and forwards. As I look back on the year 2007, I am struck by the tremendous intellectual changes the deacon and I went through this past year. The processes began years, even decades, earlier, but it was only within the past year that we set our minds free and dared to examine our lives, our world and the universe in ways that are, to us, completely novel.

Looking ahead to 2008, we have decided to use this New Year to mark the start of a new, faith-free life together. We will be doing this by renewing our marriage vows in a private ceremony. The vows we exchanged in 1979, which we composed, were heavily laden with Christian language and ideals. The vows we will exchange tonight, again composed by us, have been stripped of all religious imagery. The old ideals that constrained us will be replaced by a new vision of our life together. The new vows reaffirm our commitment to each other’s individual growth and fulfillment, as well as to our relationship, and express our joy in venturing forward into a future unbound by the shackles of religious dogma.

People who are steeped within religious traditions often have difficulty understanding how non-believers can face the world. They ask, what is your purpose in life? Or, what do you hope for? At this point, the deacon and I are still developing our answers to such questions. We are excited by the idea that we are free to design our own purposes for living. Our hopes are to live our lives in ways that will honor our families, our friends and ourselves, and to do whatever lies within our small powers to leave this world a better place than it was when we entered it.

I think these excerpts from two well-known humanist authors, one still very much alive and the other long dead, summarize our thoughts very nicely.

The first selection is excerpted from Richard Dawkins’ lovely essay, To Live at All is Miracle Enough:

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here….

[W]e have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with colour, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked — as I am surprisingly often — why I bother to get up in the mornings. To put it the other way round, isn’t it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it?

The second excerpt is from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass collection:

O me! O life!… of the questions of these recurring;
Of the endless trains of the faithless–of cities fill’d with the foolish;
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light–of the objects mean–of the struggle ever renew’d;
Of the poor results of all–of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me;
Of the empty and useless years of the rest–with the rest me intertwined;
The question, O me! so sad, recurring–What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.

That you are here–that life exists, and identity;
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.

I hope all of you will join the deacon and me in contributing a few humble, worthwhile lines to the drama of life!

–the chaplain