The power of celebration

People of our time are losing the power of celebration. Instead of celebrating we seek to be amused or entertained. Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation. To be entertained is a passive state–it is to receive pleasure afforded by an amusing act or a spectacle…. Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one’s actions.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

It’s official! Kickass Canada Girl is now also Kickass Brit Girl! Hooray, hoorah and huzzah!

In a citizenship ceremony that will take longer to write about than it actually took to perform, the Girl acquired a second citizenship to go along with her Canadian one. The registrar briefly confounded by asking the Girl why she wished to take such a step now, but we concluded that this had merely been a way of extending a ceremony that otherwise – consisting as it did simply of reading a brief pledge of allegiance, being welcomed as a citizen and listening to a rendition of the National Anthem played on a small ‘ghetto-blaster’ secreted behind a display of flowers and Union Jacks – would have barely have justified the fee that must be paid if one requires a private ceremony.

Well – it is done now – and apart from the elegantly boxed certificate itself having to go back to have the hyphen removed from our surname (tut!) the Girl’s progress is complete. I suspect that my own journey to acquire a similar status in Canada will take a great deal longer, though to be fair she does have 8 years of residency under her belt, so I suppose I shouldn’t complain.

The Girl was most impressed that Her Majesty had chosen to mark the event with a four day celebration in London featuring a flotilla on the Thames, fireworks over the Palace and lots of soldier-boys in pretty uniforms. She thought that some of the acts at the concert on the Mall were a tad on the ropey side, but gave full marks to Stevie Wonder for blowing everyone else away. Oh – and she liked the little African girl singers too!

After the events of the last week the Girl also now knows more of the words to the British national anthem than she does to ‘O Canada’ – even if she still doesn’t know the second verse (she is, of course, in good company there).

I have put my foot down concerning the now defunct sixth verse with its references to ‘rebellious Scots’…