The Ritual of Life

I have recently been watching tutorials and attended a Q & A session on the new procedures for weddings. Come May it seems that folk like myself, who act as “Authorised Persons”, that our lives will be different, easier. Everything is finally going digital and onto a single schedule which will become a certificate to be collected from the registry office after the wedding. There will be several changes to the certificate, the main one being that they can now include up to four parents. In the past you only stated who your father was. So finally we are acknowledging the changing nature of families and family relationships. It is about time that this change came about. I am still frustrated that I can only conduct weddings in the two buildings I serve as minister, maybe one day this will change. We are making progress, but it is slow.

Within our Unitarian tradition we are free to create the marriage ceremony that fits the needs of the individuals. There are of course certain words that must be said within the service, for it to be a legal wedding, but beyond that the ritual is open. I recall there were one or two issues over the first wedding I had the pleasure to conduct for two women. They had to make their vows to wife and wife and one was a little uncomfortable with this, but there was no bending there legally. That said the rest of the ceremony allowed us to shape the service that they wanted.

I recently met a couple one of whom engages in Viking reenactments. With this in mind we are going to ensure that we include some of this tradition in the ceremony. This will include a particular ritual, namely a Viking guard of honour as the newly married couple leave the chapel, Covid restrictions permitting of course.

Obviously due to the circumstances of the last year or so our rituals around rites of passage and worship have had to adapt to a certain degree. I was thinking of this as I invited people forward to share readings, last Sunday. People are asked to sanitise their hands and remove their masks to speak. Other rituals have had to adapt too, such as how we greet one another. We do not hug and or shake hands as we would have done in the past. We have found other ways to greet and show affection. I have adopted the Eastern tradition of bowing, I like it and wonder if I will continue it once we finally get through all this.

This all got me thinking about rituals in general. We all engage in them, even if we are not aware of it. Life in so many ways is made up of rituals. Just think about your daily and weekly activities, they involve oh so many rituals. Just think about how you have had to adapt them over the last year or so.

There are of course formal rituals that take place in a time and place, such as wedding ceremony or an act of worship. Think of an act of remembrance or a funeral. There also less formal rituals that we engage in too. Are these rituals any less sacred or important? I don’t think so. The social anthropologist Edmund Leach has argued that ritual ought to be understood as existing on a spectrum, stating:

“Actions fall into place on a continuous scale. At one extreme we have actions, which are entirely profane, entirely functional, technique pure and simple; at the other we have actions, which are entirely sacred, strictly aesthetic, technically non-functional. Between these two extremes we have the great majority of social actions, which partake partly of the one sphere and partly of the other. From this point of view technique and ritual, profane and sacred, do not denote types of action but aspects of almost any kind of action.”

The suggestion is that every activity, even the seemingly mundane is a kind of ritual, if treated in that way. What makes it ritualistic, it would seem, is the pace and intention of the activity; it is about the attention and symbolism adopted; it is about the meaning we make in conducting the activity; it is about the meaning that we put into the activity and object, it is about intentionality; it is about recognising the sacredness of what we are doing.

If you think about some of the rituals we have adapted and adopted this last year or so, surely they have been done in recognition of the sacredness of life. In engaging in  them we are paying respect to each other, in love and consideration. They are deeply religious activities, they have a deep love and spirit flowing through them. The cleansing we have engaged in has become deeply ritualistic. They are not merely habit though, they are done in love and consideration of others.

I suspect that some of the cleansing rituals that are part of many religious traditions began for similar practical reasons. Yes, they are about respect for the Divine, but also one another. When I bow to others I am recognising their sacred uniqueness, I am doing the same when I cleanse my hands when using the equipment in the gym or wearing a mask when going food shopping at the supermarket.

I observed some fascinating rituals when sat in the barbers chair a couple of weeks ago. I visit this barber regularly and I almost know exactly what he will do next and how he will do so as he cuts my hair and shaves certain elements, including ears and even a trimming of the eyebrows. Some elements are more difficult at the moment due to the wearing of masks, especially around the ears. As he comes close to finishing I observe him putting a new blade on the razor as he shaves around the loose hairs and around my ears and hair line. It is a marvel to watch the attention to detail, a craftsman at his work, all completed in silence. I like him because he doesn’t speak as he works. There is care and attention, there is deep intention, it feels like a sacred ritual is taking place. Ok he is paid for the work, but there is more going on in this ritual. It is a deeply religious activity in my eyes. To this man the work really matters.

How we are in the world matters and the way we act toward others really matters. We can do so recognising the sacredness of each other and all life or we can do so without any care or attention at all. I suspect our little moment by moment rituals of living help us to do so with love and attention and with deep intention, a bit like the barber I go and visit every few weeks.

Ritual is about repetition, but it also about the care attention that we put into the repeated action. When such repetition is done through the spirit of love, those seemingly mundane activities become sacred action and in so doing we begin to sanctify life.

Sport is one area where you witness all kinds of ritual. Whether it is a golfer perfecting their swing, or a batsman his forward defensive stroke or in more modern times the reverse sweep. Or the different warm up rituals that teams go through before a game and again at half time. There also the other rituals that take place before the game begins as the team meet and honour one another. One that has stood out over the last year has been the taking of the knee, in acknowledgement of racial intolerance, again an act of love recognising the sacredness of life. It is response to the fact that some life is not treated equally due purely to the colour of someone’s skin. Something else that we humans ought to have evolved out of by now, sadly we have not yet done so.

Everything we do in life can be done ritually and thus can become meaning filled. Even the most simple basic task  can be done reverentially and thus can become meaning filled. We sanctify life, if we live reverently. If we see life as a deeply sacred thing. If we bless it with our true presence. The real beauty of life lays in the ordinary, in observing and experiencing the meaning of life in the seemingly mundane. By so doing the great moments are created.

Ronald L. Grimes captures this near perfectly in “Marrying and Burying: Rites of Passage in a Man’s Life”

"Ritual practice is the activity of cultivating extraordinary ordinariness. It is necessary, because human activity has a kind of entropy about it; life, like love, runs down. Things get tiresome and difficult. Body and soul cry out for something different, hence the impetus to ritualize. But if the ritually extraordinary becomes a goal or is severed from ordinariness, it loses its capacity to transform, which, after all, is what rites of passage are supposed to do."

To live spiritually alive, is to recognise the sacredness of the ordinary, the seemingly mundane. To do this all we need to do is pay attention to the world and the people around and truly inhabit the space in which we live and breathe and share our being. All we have to do is to pay attention, to live in such a way as to recognise the sacred in everything.

There is something very powerful about coming together in love; there is something very powerful in opening ourselves up to one another and recognising what connects us what makes us wholly human, by living ritually we can begin to do so. Worshipping together is one way to do so, but it can happen in all aspects of life. It can occur in deep encounters with others, when love and attention is paid.

The congregations I serve gather together seeking something, as we engage in the ritual of worship and other activities spiritual and secular, something that has been challenged over the last year or so. People come for a variety of reasons, some are not sure why they come, but if they don't they feelt hat soemthing is misssing. When we congregate for worship we attempt to create through words, music, silence, imagery and more a sacred time and space that will enable us to open our hearts and connect to the Greater mysteries of life, to the web of being, to know the spirit of life and love, to experience the Divine and for this to impact on how we live our day to day lives.

In this sacred space at the sacred time where generations have worshipped we opened their hearts to the greater mysteries of life. In so doing we begin to connect to the greater realities and mysteries of existence. It is this time that can help us to open up the lives we find ourselves in and to pay attention to the life around us and to touch the people we meet in our daily living. In so doing we make all life sacred, by blessing it with our presence.

The hope is that when folk leave this time and space that they are touched in those deeper aspects of their humanity and that they bless the world with their sacred humanity by recognising the sacredness of each person they we meet and bless life with their loving presence.

Here is a video devotion based on this "blogspot"