Ritual: Religion in Action

Copyright 1995 by John R. Mabry

*This article previously appeared in an issue of _Creation Spirituality_ magazine.*

I used to think that ritual was evil. I had a moderate Protestant evangelical upbringing in which "ritual" was the second half of the longer word "emptyritual," which sums up most evangelical attitudes towards ceremony as a means of worship. I learned that the "emptyritual" of Catholics was demonic and there was to be no evidence of symbols or ceremony in genuine, Godly religion. Thus, worship was solely an intellectual exercise. The body, which was repugnant to God because of our sin, could never be used as an instrument of praise (the vocal chords were okay, though). It was in college that I began to note the fallacies of world-hating theologies. I had seen too much, I suppose. I had noticed God in the majesty of the wild, in the cathedrals of caverns, in the ecstasy of passion, and in the eyes of even my "infidel" friends. The God of my experience burst through the boundaries of my childhood theology, and demanded to be expressed. It was through a bit of synchronicity, or as Charles Williams calls it, "holy luck" that I discovered the glory of Catholic worship. I could barely contain my exhilaration as, for the first time in my life, I engaged the mystery of the Universe with the fullness of my being. I understood, as Evelyn Underhill states in her classic Worship, that rituals are "therefore more, not less valid expressions of the Spirit of Worship, because they belong at one and the same time to the world of sense and the world of spirit: for this is the actual situation of the amphibious creature by whom these means have been devised and used." "I am not a disembodied brain!" I rejoiced, and, in crossing myself, kneeling, singing, smelling the smoke of incense, and tasting of the Eucharist, I began to discover the holiness of myself and my world at every possible opportunity. A Mass junkie was born.

This was the beginning of my love affair with ritual. As I started to explore ritual outside of the Christian tradition, I discovered it to be an integral part of the religious life of nearly all peoples in every time. Ritual is the norm of human religious expression, it was my upbringing that was the anomaly. In discovering ritual's power, I not only found myself at one with the historical church, but also with the whole of humankind throughout history.

What It Is
Victor Turner, in his book The Ritual Process, describes ritual as "a stereotyped sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered place and designed to influence preternatural entities or forces on behalf of the actor's goals and interests." This description-the best I could find-is inadequate. Though it does describe the actual action, such a definition cannot hope to convey its essence. To quote Underhill again, ritual provides worshippers with "something to do, and also incites them to do it...exhibiting its kinship with the dance. For, as we must abandon ourselves to the dance, lose ourselves in it, in order to dance well and 'learn by dancing that which is done;' so with the religious rite. We can never understand it without taking part in it; moving with its movement, and yielding to its suggestions." It is more than movement and words, it is spirit in action, it is art. Turner's definition hints at this by calling the participants "actors," for that is exactly what they are. Ritual is sacred drama, and as such, if the performance is good, this art, like music or painting or dance, can capture our imaginations and emotions, and have the opportunity to transform us. In ritual we may create a thing of great beauty in collaboration with the Spirit, that may nourish all that it touches.

What It Does
Ritual is a method for relating to universal Mystery and the mysteries of our personal lives. With it we are able to create boundaries within which we can order our world. Setting aside sacred space is an example of this. By ritually identifying an area as special, holy, we can contemplate the meaning of holy ground; get to know it, learn how to step in it. Then, when we think of all of the Earth as sacred ground, it means something to us. We know what holy ground is, we've felt it, and we can enter it with our full appreciation and wonder.

The same is true of sacred time. Time that is identified as sacred time cannot be described or measured by linear, chronological means, nor, indeed, any means at all. Ritual provides us access to Kairos, the Dreamtime, God's time. Time as God perceives it is at once instantaneous and eternal, since the Creator of Time must by necessity reside outside of it as well as inside. Speaking figuratively, for God, to look to the left would be to behold the Creation, the parting of the Red Sea and the Crucifixion; to look to the right God would see what is future to us now, even to the end of the worlds and beyond. All time exists at once, and when we enter Kairos, all times are directly accessible to us.

For the Jewish faithful, the Seder does not recall an event several thousand years ago to the memories of the participants, but it transports them to the event themselves. In eating the bitter herbs, they don't merely remember the pain of their ancestors, they participate in their suffering. Drinking the wine doesn't help them remember the joy of their salvation from the pharaoh, it celebrates and communicates that joy and that salvation.

Similarly, when I, as a Christian, celebrate the Eucharist, it is not as an isolated event taking place on Sunday morning or Thursday afternoon, but an event out of linear time when I return via the ritual to the actual moment of Christ's crucifixion, witnessing God's sacrifice not alone, but in the company of all who have engaged in this ritual through the long corridors of history. The ritual provides for us a way to make history, experience.

How It Works
Ritual admits us in our conscious state to what we are used to engaging only when we are dreaming: the world of symbol, of archetype. As a child in church, I was told that we couldn't worship the Eucharist like the heathen Catholics did. The elements, were, after all, "just symbols," as if symbols were of little account.

If only I had known then what I know now about the power possessed by "just symbols." These "just symbols" are "the point where physical and metaphysical meet-a half-way house, where the world of things and the world of Spirit unite, and produce a new thing possessed of sensible and supra-sensible reality. And [people, who partake] of this double character, find in it the natural means of access to God." (Underhill)

Also, like dreams, the symbol in ritual is not easily exhausted. It brings to us many gifts, for it is multi-vocal, speaking to us a chorus of meanings; much more than we are ever prepared to hear. It whispers to our psyche dark secrets from the collective unconscious which we can never fully know.

Rupert Sheldrake, author of The Rebirth of Nature, has also proffered the theory of morphic resonance, which he says is "the idea that similar patterns of activity do indeed resonate through time, rituals may be doing just what people think they're doing -reconnecting, bringing the past into the present. And they may be reconnecting the present performance of the ritual not only with the original one, but with all the people who have done it over the preceding years." The implication of this is that every time a ritual is performed, its power is reinforced in the collective unconscious, increasing the vitality of its active archetypes.

Another theory is that offered by the rediscovered Huna, the shamanic tradition of Hawaii. According to Huna, the person is a composite of three distinct consciousnesses: the lower self, or physical, animal nature, incorporating our instinctive and intuitive nature; the middle self, or the rational, thinking, and responsible nature; and the higher self, which is our spiritual, ultimate nature. This is not an unfamiliar model, but Huna's unique insight is that the middle self and the higher self are strictly incommunicado. The rational self's only means of communication with the higher self is through the assistance of the lower self. The higher self will only recognize information in the form of embodied symbolism. Richard Smoley, editor of Gnosis, comments that "the success of a [Huna] ritual, in fact, depends entirely on how well it involves the lower self." The body and mind must work together if the whole self, body, mind, and spirit are to live in communion.

The Promise (and Danger) of Ritual
Ritual deserves our attention and respect, especially in the present times, when so much of what we treasure is threatened, due to our greed and apathy. It has been said that nothing has power unless we give it. This is true of both the spirit of despair that hangs over our peoples and of the spiritual traditions we have neglected. Ritual can, like anything else in Creation, be abused. It can be used for selfish or destructive ends. It can indeed be "emptyritual," rendered impotent and boring by a poor performance. But like all art, like music and poetry, one only gets as much out as one puts in. True art is hard work, it can't be tossed off or immediately comprehended in all its complexity. Ritual isn't meant to entertain, it is a tool for us to work with, and whether we are the dancing shaman or the busy parishioner, we might as well stay home if we can't put forth the effort required to engage this mystery ourselves. Fortunately, one of the elements of great art is that when we are too exhausted or indifferent to give it our all, it is still powerful enough to touch us, to communicate its grace, to pick us up and carry us. This is especially true of the Mass, being a performance piece finely tuned for nearly two millennia.

Another danger is that of perspective. What does the rite communicate for us? To quote Underhill again, "Ritualism represents the constant tendency of the human creature to attach absolute value to his [or her] own activities." Our Christian rites have for too long placed the Mass as the center of Christianity, Christianity as the center of humanity, and humanity as the center of Creation. Fortunately we know today that we live in a much larger universe, and our rites must evolve, through either form or interpretation (and most likely, both), if they are to aid our growth rather than hinder it. Murray Hope relates an old Buddhist story "about a man who went searching for God beneath a stone, but in the process of lifting the stone he became so absorbed with its quality and beauty that he forgot his initial reason for raising it." Valid ritual for us today will serve to eliminate walls between peoples and cultures rather than building them; they will communicate to us our proper place in the cosmos, our kinship to the Earth and our citizenship of and solidarity with the universe.

Hsün Tzu describes the Confucian view of what ritual should accomplish: "When rites are at their best, people's emotions and sense of beauty are both fully expressed.... It is through rites that heaven and earth are harmonious and sun and moon are bright, that the four seasons are ordered and the stars are on their courses, that rivers flow and that things prosper, that love and hatred are tempered and joy and anger are in keeping.... He who holds to the rites is never confused in the midst of multifarious change."

Anthony Wallace says that ritual "is the primary phenomenon of religion.... Ritual is religion in action; it is the cutting edge of the tool. Belief, although its recitation may be a part of the ritual, or a ritual in its own right, serves to explain, to rationalize, to interpret and direct the energy of the ritual performance...[but] it is ritual which accomplishes what religion sets out to do." Rituals must speak to us the truth about who we are. They must awaken us to the larger realities to which our limited sensibilities are blind. They must be enacted because we are embodied creatures who should not divorce our flesh from our spirit. They must be celebrated because we have so much, even from day to day, to celebrate.