Secular Sacraments

There's an article up in Slate on the ways in which secular and "spiritual-but-not-religious" people are crafting ceremonies to mark moments of transition in their lives - marriages, funerals, new births - that have traditionally been observed through religious ceremonies. It's an interesting piece, on a subject I was only dimly aware of, which I recommend highly.

My one beef would be with the "Catholic unity candle" in his description of a wedding of a hybrid Sikh-Catholic service:

For a wedding between a Sikh man and an Irish-Catholic woman, for instance, the ceremony included the lighting of a Catholic unity candle (slightly modified: The couple didn't extinguish their individual candles after lighting the joint flame, as is the tradition) and a Sikh ritual in which everyone is given cooked grain as a sign that the temple feeds and blesses all.

This paragraph creates this misleading impression that the Unity Candle has some place in the "Catholic" "tradition". It doesn't. While it may be true, as this author suggests, that it was Catholics who brought this blight upon the face of the wedding ceremony (although this page suggests a possible alternate origin), the Unity Candle is most certainly not something emerging from the Catholic Tradition, nor is it a regular part of the Catholic rite of marriage today, as this site indicates. The practice is only 20-30 years old, is rumored to have been inspired by a soap opera, and is strongly discouraged from use in Catholic marriages, since it's thought to promote heterodox religious ideas (or somesuch).

Father J.C. Maximillian has a description of his run-in with a couple that just had to have the Unity Candle over at CatholicRagemonkey.