Ritual Hash

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about ritual, trying to understand how I define it and what role it plays in my life.  I’ve been reading some interesting stuff on the topic.

One guy defines rituals as “repetitive human activities that reduce the raw and seemingly random stuff of experience to manageable proportions” (Aidan Kavanagh in Roots of Ritual).  I like this definition because it admits that reality doesn’t come in nice packages.  It’s messy and chaotic and on its own doesn’t make much sense a lot of the time.  Rituals help us feel like we can handle that.  Through some of my most difficult seasons, it’s been mundane tasks (rituals) that have helped keep me sane:  exercise, washing dishes, preparing food, morning and evening hugs.  I’ve a hunch kids need routines every bit as much as adults do for this same reason; in a world like ours, we all need tactile things we can trust, expect, and depend on.

Sages in the Vedic tradition take this thought even further.  They say creation is always only begun.  As humans, we’re like artists handed roomfuls of media:  pens and pencils, canvas, clay, all assortments of colors and paints and brushes.  And all we’re implicitly told is, “Go for it.  Make something of it.”

In cosmological terms, what is merely procreated by the creator god is not a cosmos or a universal whole made up of ordered parts.  The origins of true cosmos are found not in this primary generative act but rather in a secondary operation – a ritual act that lends structure and order to a chaotic creation…[Rituals are] the workshop in which all reality is forged (Brian Smith in Reflections on Resemblance, Ritual, and Religion).

This way of seeing ritual resonates well with my recent thoughts on religion.  In many ways, religions seem like offspring of this “secondary operation.”  Every artist is different; even if working with the same materials, each one creates something unique.  And this is true of those sharing similar worldviews, as well as those inhabiting entirely different cultures, geographies, languages, contexts.  The reality forged by an ancient, disillusioned Indian prince will be quite different than the one forged by a Semitic prophet, or a Roman king.  And too the rituals established to sustain those realities.

I’ve been thinking about the rituals in my life and in the culture around me, asking what reality they’re creating and propping up.  I’m not a member of a religious community per se, but I participate daily in rituals that for all intents and purposes are religious.  Is consumerism not a type of religion?  Or science, or novel-writing? Or marriage, friendship, pregnancy?  Each part of my life has a set of assumptions and values and beliefs and expectations that I share with people beyond myself.  Each one has rituals to sustain such things.

But here’s the rub (isn’t there always one of these?):  a life of devotion to this many “religions” begins to feel a lot like chaos again.  For all the rituals involved, order, as created by each “religion,” can only go as far as the boundary of each “religion.”  When my religions are all on relatively equal terms, which voice do I listen to?  Whose reality gives me that necessary comfort that all is not chaos, that over-arching, undergirding meaning can be found?  Or created.

I miss the simplicity of my childhood faith, and the ways it so completely ordered my universe.  I miss nestling into rituals created by other people who I trusted understood the cosmos fully and had full grasp of Life and God and humanity.  In many ways, I miss being a child. Is it not the blessing and curse of a mindful, adult life to find peace with the fact that nobody knows it all; that owning one’s faith and values takes time and a lot of hard work; that no matter what big groups of people say, there still exists an inner Voice, beckoning us to be and say and become who we uniquely are?

Catherine Bell says rituals can create a form of “redemptive hegemony able to exercise some dominance over other activities in the world” (Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice), and maybe that’s what I’m looking for.  A “redemptive hegemony” I can trust.  A redemptive hegemony that can help me make order from the chaos of my little life.