THE SEVENTH TRANSFORMATION
RITE MAKING
We human beings are by our
very natures Ritual Makers. We
have rituals for all sorts of things.
All sporting events, for example, begin with the ritual of standing and
singing the National Anthem.
Fathers give their daughters away at weddings, those daughters who are
wearing, "Something old, something new, something borrowed, something
blue." The bride usually
wears white, and at the reception, turns her back and throws the wedding
bouquet over her shoulder into the anxious arms of a hopeful female friend or
relative, who is then supposed to be the next to marry. Hockey players skate around the rink
before the start of each game and slap their goalie on the rear with their
sticks. Pilots give their ground
crews a "thumbs up" signal before take-off. Rabbits' feet are supposed to bring good luck to anyone who
carries one with them (although apparently they didn't for the rabbit!) and St.
Christopher is supposed to make people better drivers if his medal is affixed
to the dashboard of the car.
Why to we do these things?
I believe that we perform
rituals because they help us to make sense of our existence and express for us
deep realities that words are inadequate to express. We perform rituals because we intuitively know, at some very
deep level of our beings, that we are not alone in the universe. There are things much bigger and much
more mysterious in the cosmos than us mere mortals. There is good and there is evil. We hope to find favor with the goodness of the universe
while avoiding the effects of the evil.
Rituals also have much to do
with symbols. Sign and symbol are
reminders to us. People wear
wedding rings to remind themselves of their commitment to another person. My college class ring is very important
to me. It is a reminder of an
important part of my life and of all that I accomplished in obtaining a college
degree.
For people of faith making
ritual has profound significance.
It is a significance that is rooted in our being called to be
"storytellers".
STORYTELLING RITE MAKERS
Sometime during the
thirteenth century B.C.E., a rag-tag lot of Hebrew slaves left their captivity
in Egypt and made their way to a land called Canaan. There they were formed into a nation - the nation of Israel.
It was a nation founded on a
firm belief in the one true God, who created the cosmos and was known by the
name, Yahweh.
In the 3,300 years since,
many nations have risen and fallen, many religions have come and gone. The people of Yahweh - the Hebrew
people - have survived. Not only have
they survived, they have survived what no other people in human history have
survived.
They have survived to see
the re-establishment of the State of Israel after nearly 1,900 years, and the
re-awakening among Christians of our roots in Judaism.
Why have the Jewish people
been able to survive for so long in the face of such overwhelming
adversity?
In no small part, their
survival is due to a spirituality and a self-identity which is centered in
creation, and an ability to recognize and ritualize the sacred in the
ordinariness of life.
The Jewish people have an
unshakable belief in Yahweh, creator of the cosmos.
"In
the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was a formless void, there was darkness
over the deep, and God's spirit hovered over the water."
Genesis
l:1-2
God is the energy, the
being, the existence that creates and orders the cosmos and all of creation is
good. Add to this a deeply rooted
sense of being God's Chosen People:
"I
will make you a great nation: I
will bless you and make your name so famous that it will be used as a blessing. I will bless those who bless you: I will curse those who slight you. All the
tribes of the earth shall bless themselves by you."
Genesis
12:2-3
Because the Jewish people
are chosen of God, they have a keen awareness of God's acting on their behalf
throughout their history. This
awareness is kept alive by RITUALS
that enable the telling and retelling of the stories of the Great Acts of God,
and of the heroes and heroines of the Jewish people. These stories are handed on from generation to generation,
keeping alive the ever ongoing and unfolding creation of the universe. Storytelling, therefore, is at the
heart of Jewish life. No Jew can
truly call himself or herself chosen of Yahweh unless he or she is a
storyteller.
The primary forum for
telling and retelling the stories is the ritual
life of the Jew.
The enduring genius of
Jewish ritual is its setting. It
is based in the home. It brings
together the basic unit of the Jewish community - the family - to share the stories
of the Chosen People of God. Family
in the Jewish understanding extends far beyond the so-called "nuclear
family". It includes
grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, and even strangers.
This has had a profound
effect on Jewish family life, and is one the primary reasons why Judaism is
still alive today.
When the Jew celebrates the
rituals, something profoundly renewing and re-creating takes place:
"The
home is transformed into a sanctuary where rituals and observances change
family life and where time, secular time, the time of everyday life experience,
suffers a transfiguration: it
becomes sacred time. It is a time
paused in eternity, a time rooted in the passage from bondage to desert to
freedom, a time in solidarity with other moments of painful history, a time
sensitive to present oppression.
But it is also a time of renewed Jewish hope in the ultimate victory
over evil, and the final reality of the Kingdom of God."[i]
This causes the participants
in the ritual to not just tell the story of some past event, but to add to it
their story as well, thus making the whole story, "my story". The event is then both re-created and
newly created. With each new
telling, some one new is added to the story. The great acts of God become greater and more life-like with
each retelling. The universe
continues to be created and unfold.
These are the four
cornerstones, then, of Jewish spirituality:
o Yahweh
God is the author and life force of the ongoing creation of the universe.
o Yahweh
has blessed the Hebrew people by choosing them and creating with them a covenant
by which God has continued to act in history on their behalf.
o Succeeding
generations are brought into that covenant and the stories of those great acts
are told and become new again.
o The
home-based, family-centered rituals provide the forum for the telling of those
stories.
Why all this talk of Jewish
spirituality?
Christianity is a way of
life born out of Judaism.
Unfortunately, we have become like immigrants to a new land who have
forgotten where we were born! We
have lost a basic part of our story, as well as the means to be transformed by
that story, by loosing touch with our Jewish roots. To fail to grasp Judaism and the wisdom of its ritual is to
fail to fully appreciate Christianity.
Jesus was not the first Christian - he was a Jew. He was born, lived his life, and died a
Jew. Sacred scripture is the story
of our people. It is really a "family album".
Our past determines our
present and shapes our future. To not
know where we have been is to not know where we are or where we are going. Our past provides the power to move
into the future. As Tevye said,
"tradition keeps us all from becoming 'Fiddlers on the Roof'". Our tradition is the source of our
hope. We tell and retell the
stories of the Great Acts of God on our behalf throughout our history and we
move into the future with the promise that God will continue to act on our
behalf there as well.
The past also provides
perspective for our present. If we
can recognize the presence and action of God in our history and live with hope
for a continuation of that presence and action in our future, then we can more
clearly recognize that same presence and action in our present lives. And so, we must become storytellers in
the ancient tradition of our Jewish ancestors.
"...if
we continue to place our emphasis on doctrines, what persons ought to believe, and
on the Bible as sacred literature to be memorized by verses, we will continue
to prevent the development of a historicist perspective. We rather need to focus our educational
efforts on storytelling. We need
to find ways to transmit the story of faith as our story. From the earliest years in the context
of a celebrating, faith community children, youth and adults need to experience
the faith story through song, dance, drama and the visual arts. Educational efforts which teach about
our history need to be avoided. It
would be better to return to the fireside and supper table where we can
dramatically retell the story of the mighty acts of God, and to our places of
worship where we can celebrate our faith story. We need once again to become story telling people who use
all the senses to recount our history of the living presence of God among
us. We need to help persons regain
their God-given ability to wonder and create; to dream, fantasize, imagine, and
envision, to sing, paint, dance, and act.
We need to enhance our natural capacity for ecstasy, for appreciating
the new, the marvelous, the mysterious; to develop our God-given talent to
express ourselves emotionally and non-verbally. Then God will be real and faith will be alive."[ii]
THE NEED TO TRANSFORM OUR
RITUAL
Westerhoff's statement
points out the deep relationships between storytelling, Community Building,
Mirth-Making, and Rite Making. As much as we need to transform our
abilities as storytellers and mirth-makers, and the form and structure of our
experience of church, so too do we need to TRANSFORM our approach to and
experience of ritual.
Rite making has two aspects,
worship and celebration.
Worship Making Ritual
"Worship
is a deliberate and disciplined adventure in reality. It is not for the timid or comfortable. It involves an opening of ourselves to
the adventurous life of the Spirit.
It makes all of the religious paraphernalia of temples and priests and
rites and ceremonies irrelevant.
It involves a willingness to 'Let the word of Christ dwell in you
richly, as you teach and admonish one another in all wisdom, and as you sing
psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness in your hearts to
God'. (Col 3:16)".[iii]
Worship is deliberate. It is
something we choose to do. While
living life in the Spirit is spontaneous - it comes upon us, often in the
moments when we least expect it, worship is something that we initiate. It is, however, something that we
initiate in response to the
initiative of God in our lives. It
is a response to religious experience.
"Religious
experience...means a moment of knowing and feeling which carries someone beyond
the ordinary limits of their everyday world of meaning...it is a kind of
awakening to the uncontrollable scope of reality".[iv]
Worship is disciplined. This
means that it is ordered, it has a pattern to it. But it also means that it is something that is practiced by
a disciple. Discipline and disciple come from the
same root word. By virtue of the
fact that a person is a disciple, he or she worships.
"Worship
is our response to the overtures of love from the heart of the Father...while living our the demands of our day, we
are filled with inward worship and adoration. We work and play and eat and sleep, yet we are listening,
ever listening, to our Teacher."[v]
Worship is an adventure
in reality. It is an exciting, often risky
undertaking because it turns our concept of reality upside down.
"The
power of God is the worship. He inspires. That religion is strong which in its ritual and its mode of
thought evokes an apprehension of the commanding vision. The worship of God is not a rule of
safety - it is an adventure of the Spirit, a flight after the unattainable. The
death of religion comes with the repression of the high hope of adventure."[vi]
Celebration Making Ritual
We make ritual because it
brings us joy. Even the rituals
surrounding death - vigiling, funeral, commendation and burial have moments of
joy; the joy of gathering with friends and family to remember the deceased; the
joy of the prospect of new life and resurrection.
Celebration helps us to live
with joyful spirits.
For people of faith, our
celebrations help us to "insert God" into the twists, turns, and
transitions of life.
"In
sacred moments our depths resonate with the web of life; we touch on
ultimate
meanings and mysteries. The birth
of a child and the death of a
parent
- intense moments of connection and loss - set us vibrating with the
wonder
and pain and beauty of our existence and dump the question of
ultimate
meaning squarely in our path. In
loving acts and their aftermath
and
in moments of being forgotten, we are touched at the primal roots of
human
living.
Such
moments are not ours to command; they accost us, upsetting the everyday
schedules
which are our normal preoccupation.
They flow over into everyday
living,
touching us deeply at least for a time".[vii]
That is why we celebrate our "ordinary"
moments and turn them into "sacred" moments - sacramental
moments. It is important,
therefore, for us to create celebrations for such "ordinary" moments
in life as:
o changing
jobs
o moving
into a new home
o children
leaving the nest
o retirement
o adoption
o graduation
o anniversaries
to name but a few.
Celebration is closely
related to Mirth-Making in that
it requires becoming childlike.
Celebration necessitates the "letting down of one's hair" in a
chorus of song, dance, laughter, and noise-making.
Celebration also calls upon
those creative human gifts of fantasy and imagination.
When Joan of Arc told the
authorities of the Church that God spoke to her, they told her that it was all
in her imagination. Her reply was,
"I know, that is where God speaks to me". It is where God speaks to us as well. Open the ears of your imagination to
the voice of God.
"We
who follow Christ can risk going against the cultural tide. Let's with abandon
relish
the fantasy games of children.
Let's see visions and dream dreams. Let's
play,
sing, laugh. The imagination can
release a flood of creative ideas, and it can
be
lots of fun. Only those who are
insecure about their own maturity will fear
such
a delightful form of celebration."[viii]
There was a time in the
history of the Church when mystics and visionaries were canonized and made
saints. Let us pray for the return
of those days so that vision and imagination can return to our rituals.
Ritual presents us with a
vehicle for not only retelling and reappropriating the stories, but also for
awakening the artist, the poet, the playwright, the singer and dancer in each
of us. For ritual is made up not
only of words, but also of symbols and actions. Through these words, symbols, and actions the stories of
faith come alive and are made real in a way that no other forum makes
possible. It is through ritual
that we make concrete and real those things that without ritual would remain
abstract and unreal. Ritual can
awaken our natural capacity for ecstasy; for celebration; for expressing
ourselves emotionally and non-verbally; and for sensuality.
There are a number of ways
in which our ritual can be transformed to recapture its ability to do these
things for us.
The first is to restore the
family-centered, home-based ritual of our Jewish heritage. The vast majority of Christian ritual
is performed in a church. The few family devotions that once
existed in our various traditions have generally fallen into disuse.
There is a need to return
the storytelling and the celebration back to the home and to the house
church. There is a hunger among
households to do just that amid the hustle and bustle of daily life that pulls
people away from one another with unrealistic demands.
Secondly, there is a need to
recognize the significant relationship that exists between our corporate or
community worship and our private worship experiences. Unless we learn how to pray, ritualize,
and celebrate in our homes, we cannot expect to fully understand nor appreciate
our church-based parish rituals.
It is a case of "learning to crawl before you can walk".
Thirdly, there is a need to
restore the sensual to our rituals.
One of the common failings of so much of contemporary Christian ritual
is its over intellectualization.
For many people, God has been theologized right out of their lives. This is especially true in the case of
children. It is difficult, if not
impossible, for most children to understand Christian ritual. It should come as no surprise that
teenagers, when they start making decisions for themselves, often tend to
"opt out" of going to church.
The ritual frequently has little meaning for them. We could change that if we relied less
on the intellect and more on the five sense. Our most powerful rituals are those that involve the senses: the Easter Vigil, Ash Wednesday, the
Mandatum of Holy Thursday. One of
my strongest liturgical memories from childhood is the ritual of St. Blaise
Day. The theology has long since
been lost, but the feel of the crossed candles around my neck will remain with
me forever. One of the strengths
of the Roman Catholic tradition has always been its use of earthy symbols like
water, salt, oil, ashes, and so on in its ritual. It has been a "body oriented" ritual system. We would do well to begin all of our
rituals by first reminding ourselves that we are invited to "taste and see
the goodness of the Lord" (Ps 34:9).
Fourthly, our rituals must
be designed to impress upon us over and over again that the sacred, the holy in
our lives is to be found in the ordinary, the mundane of our lives. Our rite making must use the "ordinary"
stuff of our lives to make our lives sacred. This is the heart of incarnation - the ordinary becoming
divine. This is most dramatically
demonstrated by the use of meal for the primary activity of most of our
celebrations.
Finally, we need to be aware
that rite making has much to do with our survival as a People of God. When we speak of our heritage we often
use the image of "family tree".
This is a very powerful and descriptive image. The stories that we tell of our ancestors and of the Great
Acts of God in Human History form the "roots" of our family
tree. The roots of the tree
provide the means for the tree to be nurtured and continue to grow, as well as
providing stability for the tree against outside forces such as wind and soil
erosion. This is true of our
spiritual family tree as well. If
we sever our historical roots our ability to survive spiritually would be
severely impaired.
"Our
rituals shape and form us in fundamental ways...while we are worshipping
God,
we are also expressing and experiencing what it means to be the People
of
God."[ix]
And so we come together, in
churches, in homes, as families and friends around the dining room table to
tell and retell the stories that shape us and make us. The stories of the memories of the
Great Acts of God.
"There
are dangerous memories, memories which make demands on us. There
are
memories in which earlier experiences break through to the centre-point of
our
lives and reveal new and dangerous insights for the present. They illuminate
for
a few moments and with a harsh and steady light the questionable nature of
things
we have apparently come to terms with, and show up the banality of our
supposed
'realism'. They break through the
canon of the prevailing structures of
plausibility
and have certain subversive features.
Such memories are like dangerous and incalculable visitations from the
past. They are memories that we
have to take into account, memories, as it were, with a future content."
Johann
Baptist Metz
Faith
in History And Society