Public Outpourings of Grief

Kim du Toit turned me onto this piece by Mr. Free Market:

Perhaps all this public sharing of grief is merely an attempt to replace what used to happen every Sunday in those big buildings with spires on top. In the old days everyone would have rolled into church, the vicar would have talked about the tragedy, you'd have had a few prayers, sung a hymn or two and had a collection. Job done. Guilt assuaged.

Now society has more or less abandoned organised religion, there's no framework for handling a tragedy of this scale. But there is clearly still a need for it. Cue endless, cringeworthy attempts to find other ways of publicly expressing what individuals feel about the situation.

Kim adds:

You know what gets up my nose most of all? Those little flower-covered crosses at the side of the road, denoting the spot where someone wrecked their car and was killed....

....I remember seeing one of those little white crosses on the side of an interstate in Idaho -- then another, and another, and another, until I realized that the state had placed them there, undoubtedly to remind us to Drive Carefully Because People, Lots Of People, Die In Traffic Accidents Each Year.

I remember in my younger days, my Pastor had returned from a vacation to Japan. I'm guessing this was somewhere in the mid-1980s. He said one of the things that struck him was the roadside shrines to people who had died on that spot. He chalked it up to buddhist and Shinto ancestor worship. He made the point that you would never see such a thing in the US. Now twenty years later, states are enacting it.

The funny thing is that Kim du Toit is an atheist mourning the demise of organized religion. Mr. Free Market is no deep christian thinker either.

The real question is how do we in organized religion embrace the culture. Frankly it ain't by screaming about politics, thats for sure.