Confirmation is a lovely word. It crops up in books, as “…she nodded, looking at me for confirmation.” And “It was all the confirmation I needed.” When I was 10, I had a Confirmation. For months I went to ‘Confirmation classes’ instead of Sunday school, and learnt strange things like Jesus is like an egg-timer. One Wednesday evening in June I dressed in white, with a veil, made some promises and got oil on my forehead. The following Sunday I received Communion for the first time. In the years that followed, I was to receive many different confirmations, from teachers, family, friends and even virtual strangers. They all had more impact than that religious leader who read my name off a card. When I was 29 I got a confirmation that seemed the culmination of my life to that point, through my whole adolescence and painful early adulthood, when Lyn told me I was all right. (at the very first LifeRites training weekend.)
For years I’d felt angry about the church allowing children to make promises they had no understanding of, or hope of living by. I’d made a fetish of truth telling, so I felt personally compromised. I’ve recently realised that the problem lay with my mother’s peculiar brand of reversed snobbery – the group I should have ‘gone up’ with were waiting an extra year, because in 1982 a bishop of some repute would be doing the honours in the cathedral. Not one to be impressed by such frippery, my parents were keen for me to go with the current group in our own church who were all two years above me at school. While they were ‘very nice’ to me, I was definitely on the fringe. The other problem was that, at 10 we weren’t ready to create responsibilities or a new role, and no one was interested enough (or felt able?) to organise them for us. When my mum asked me why I wanted to be confirmed I said I wanted to know what the bread and wine tasted like. She told me not to give that answer to anyone else! So I constructed a more ‘religious sounding’ one. Point being, the ceremony was meaningless on both counts – I neither moved with my peer group in a shared friendship-building experience, nor did I become acknowledged as adult by the rest of the community. Worse, it was understood that I no longer ‘had’ to attend Sunday School, so I lost touch with my own peer group entirely.
So I used to believe that the confirmation ceremony was a bad thing in and of itself. Then I decided a ceremony of some kind is useful in mid adolescence, but the lessons I draw from my experience is that either the ceremony must have an intrinsic meaning – it is not enough to ‘take communion’, you must be ‘in communion’ with your community. A new responsibility, task, respect.
For the person who offers this rite of confirmation, to be virtually unknown isn’t a bad thing. I barely knew Lyn when she offered her kind assessment, so I was free to project whatever I liked onto her image. But she did make a tremendous effort to seeme, to extend herself to stand in my shoes for a minute and feel the struggle I was having. I think this is essential, unless a person has decided to confirm herself, and feels ready and confident enough to simply want to share this assertion with chosen guests. (and how likely is that, brothers and sisters? By the time of the Croning ceremony, maybe!)
If my children are involved in a group that are offered a ceremony of this kind, I would (I believe) encourage them to move with their peer group, and not worry too deeply about the specific nature of the implied commitment. If I’m allowing their involvement in the first place the ideology is likely to be fairly sound, and there will always be time to debate and interpret the finer points of inner meaning. Whether or not I’d encourage the acceptance of any ‘instruction’ at face value may well be up for discussion…