A good friend of mine, Greg Griffey mentioned the relationship between our narrated lives and ritual. One of the many ways that our culture works to help us to satisfy our need for order and understanding is by providing moments of ritual. We are all aware of the large rituals of our lives like christening our children or getting married. We also have many less noticed rituals. For many this is a small daily ritual that helps a person to feel on track and solid for the day. The ritual I like in the morning after waking up, is brushing my teeth and having a cup of tea from my favorite mug while I feed my cat Morgan.
What I have noticed is that our culture is full of missed opportunities for ritual and because we miss them, our brain does not solidify the event and we often lose it. Missed opportunities for ritual cause us to lose our moments of insight and understanding. Their are times when we realize that we are moving into a new awareness of the way we think about our learning but we cannot grasp the moment because rituals are not available.
In learning to tell your story, there are several places that call for moments of ritual. If the ritual is missed, then the story gets stuck.
The story can get stuck in the beginning and never get told.
It can get stuck in the place where you acknowledge the tricksters that you struggle with, but fail to follow through because your deep understanding was not solidified with ritual.
It can get stuck if you are prepared to give up the struggle and embrace being in relationship with the moment, but forget to let the ritual bind your mind to the new you.
Rituals need to have personal meaning and personal power. Some of the big rituals like a graduation tend to feel like an overwhelming experience being imposed on the graduate. It seeds real change in self-perception from outside the self.
Rituals can be personally meaningful and empowering even when they are small family rituals. For me, when I was a child, each year, late in august, my mother and I went out and bought new pencils and notebooks and paper and a few new outfits too. This ritual provided me with a fresh clean slate for a new school year where anything can happen. This was a wonderful ritual of beginning. The smell of the new paper in those fresh spotless notebooks filled me with images of a year filled with bright clean new ideas and numbers. Even the other children would be washed anew after a summer full of sunshine and vacation.
As adults we often don’t honor a new idea or mindset with enough ritual to keep it from fading into old habits and into a sea of no change. Ritual helps us to grasp the awesomeness of a new adventure. Ritual helps us to be empowered to act on our new agency.
The final ritual from learning to write your story is the telling of it.
More about this later.
2 comments:
Thanks, Bonnie for this. I look forward to reading and recognizing some ritual in my life.
I have a small hand-made plate and bent chalice that I use when sharing communion (I've used it both in larger worship settings but most often in one-on-one settings). It was made by a friend and mentor who is also a potter. The chalice is purposefully bent to remind anyone who drinks from it that no one needs to be perfect to sup at God's table. It reminds us of the parabolic realities of our imperfect lives and unfinished stories as well as the myths of reconciliation, promise, and hope that we need for successful narration and re-narration. Every time we share in the ritual of communion, then, the bent chalice interweaves our stories with God's stories (however we might understand God) and hopefully helps to solidify the moment so we don't get stuck through a ritual that has (unfortunately) become so routine in Christian circles that we often miss its transforming ability.
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