Ritual?

Another friend mentioned "I don't do ritual". My first response is to want to know more. What? Why not? No rituals? or just no religious rituals? What specifically are you avoiding? Is the blanket dismissal of ritual really based in some deeper philosophy of meaning and how meaning is demonstrated? Perhaps one reason this statement 'popped' in my mind was because I view myself in the same boat. But when I ask myself all the questions that I wanted to ask my friend, I realized that I am not really as much of a ritual-avoider as I thought.

For example, I have lots of rituals that I follow around sports. But in thinking about them, I put them on because you are supposed to have rituals around sports. The old don't-change-your-socks-all-season-for-good-luck kind of thing. These rituals are often good for team chemistry when they are corporate ritual, and good for mind-clearing when individual.

A second recent encounter with ritual was attending a funeral mass. I realized that this mass was 100% ritual. Four hundred people were in the room on a Thursday morning, all for a ritual. What is the value? I think that the passing of a loved one can be so painful that it is beyond our conscious ability to know how to process. You can't think yourself to acceptance or moving on. So you sit in a mass. You let your body participate and let your community do the work. In a ritual like this, there is no thinking necessary. And it becomes a way to be physically part of a process in time. Perhaps it provides the time for the sub-conscious to begin its work of healing.

In many ways, this use of ritual as a placeholder in time connects to the phrase "faith of our fathers". This means that if there are times when I do not have faith, I can rely on the faith of my ancestors, who modeled perseverance and belief. I will be able to trust in them, and that their faith will be strong enough for me. It gives me permission to believe solely because they believed, and it gives me time to doubt. So ritual is both an act of individualism and of community.

One final thought on ritual. As a pacifist, I have a deep belief in the wrongness of violence for any reason. And the most frequent questions about pacifism come in the form of crazy hypothetical situations that I will likely never encounter. "But what if someone was holding a knife to your child and you had a gun in your hand..." kinds of scenarios. My only response is that I don't know what I would do. But I can only practice nonviolence on a daily basis, hoping that if I ever find myself in such a crazy situation, that all my practice will result in actions true to my lifelong belief. This lifelong practice is yet another form of ritual. A daily ritual of nonviolence, in all of the ordinary and boring ways that such a ritual manifests itself - hopefully building confidence that under stress, reactions will follow that same ritual.

So I do ritual. But I also have a counter-cultural, non-conformist, obstinate streak in me that results in me refusing to participate in some rituals, perhaps just for the sake of being different. But that is for another post.