Ritual

It has been a while, and I have a reasonable amount of guilt for ditching the habit for a week. Hey – Mardi Gras: when life calls, start living and stop writing. But that will only get me so far, namely about five days. So today I am back, and I want to finally tackle a term whose collected presumptions have been in the midst of this blog since the beginning. Today is the day for Ritual.

And what better day to talk about rituals. Yesterday was Ash Wednesday, and we saw a particularly ritualized Mass at the chapel, with very little singing, loads of irregular Catholics in attendance, and the whole extra ritual element of the ashes. And tonight I will be gathering with the Vespers community to ritualistically sing the ritual songs. I enjoy ritual more than most, and I purposely surround myself with ritual throughout most weeks, but this is super-ritual week makes me extra keen to tackle this huge topic. In so doing I will try to channel some of my favorite thinkers, especially Chauvet (Prof. Knieps would be proud).

Rituals are moments in time specifically designed, by ourselves or someone else, to be impersonal. That is to say, when performing a ritual (rituals are necessarily experienced in participation, not observation) we perform actions not of our immediate design. Religious rituals, for example, are inherited over generations, and we pass them on without major alterations.

Take the Mass for example. Nothing about the clothes, music, architecture, seats, smells, or even the words spoken is apparently practical. They come from another time and place, and are specifically designed to be different. Dancing between preserving their otherness (get used to that word) while adapting them to particular circumstances is what defines good ritual.

Experiencing otherness means being taken out of a personal comfort zone, being put off routine, and lowering defenses. Experiencing otherness, embracing otherness, helps us avoid objectifying the other. Rituals create that experience with the hope that the unusual elements help stimulate the brain to be open to new experiences. That part of the brain, the openness to new experiences, will hopefully translate into an openness to the other, empathy, and relationship. For religious ritual, that other to be experienced is God.

So rituals are codified weirdness because God is weird; they are programmed otherness because God is other. Rituals remind us that the world is full of not-us, that custom-made is not the greatest good. Ritual preserves Truth over opinion. At least that’s the thought.

Of course, ritual also collects barnacles. Just as we modify our traditions with, say, acoustic guitars and microphones, previous generations have modified traditions with the elements that suited their context. Many religions are trying to find the bright light at the end of the vale of misogyny. In Western Christianity, a history of violent persecution has led to rituals predisposed to morbidity and guilt. Protestant churches, founded and developed as a minority, are friendly with populism and/or judgment.

Take the Tridentine Mass, the pre-Vatican II Latin liturgy that is making a comeback in the US. The priest facing away, chanting quietly in Latin, the hyper-reverence for the eucharist, all of these preserve tradition at the expense of the comfort of the people in the congregation (and of the priest). That is to say, the Tridentine Mass focuses on – it considers its purpose to be – the other, God, not the congregation. Post-VII churches are all about the altar in the middle, the congregation interacting with each other; not so with Tridentine churches, where all of the action is directed towards the altar on the back wall. In a Tridentine church, everything is literally directed to outside of the church. Can’t get more other than that.

But it all feels obnoxious unless people know what’s going on. Ritual is much easier to appreciate if you are aware it is happening, and of its general purpose. Perhaps if we lived in a more ritually-minded society this could happen, but that’s a non-starter. Education goes a long way, but it usually starts and stops with the simplistic explanation of symbolism, which is misleading. I think that if we were aware of the purpose of ritual in general, not just the item-for-item metaphors that compose the periphery of ritual, we would allow ourselves onto the ride. That’s my personal experience.

But maybe not, too. My personal experience presupposes a broader comfort with symbolism, storytelling, and fable. I appreciate being circuitously lead to notional meaning. I fear that is an underappreciated virtue. Scientism (the derogatory cousin of science) does not get along with ritual symbolism.

The other caveat is that ritual must be balanced with relevance: the other must be approached with a hefty dose of the self; the unfamiliar will be exhausting without the comfortable. Very good liturgical directors, priests, and other moderators of ritual are sensitive to the requirements of the community. That’s why different masses are set up for the youth, or old people, with different attitudes towards the tradition. But even then, the larger the community the more impossible providing a rich ritual for everyone becomes. I like to improve my mass experience (pun) with more intimate rituals that can adroitly change to meet our needs that day. I like the Vespers, of course, where no more than ten of us can pretty much figure out how to communicate the other meaningfully using an ancient program.

So rituals: newer or more relevant is not always better; be explicit about its foundational meanings; and try to do it in small groups. Get to know your God by knowing your grandparents’ God, and Cyril’s God, and Moses’ God, and your great-grandchildren’s God. Practice feeling uncomfortable, lowering defenses, really knowing someone else, and you’ll be better at knowing God. And knowing God, transcendence, is the root of any spiritual/religious inclination.

And 1000 words makes up for a day?