Rituals provide both space and time away from the routines of everyday life. They encourage us to involve our whole being in singing, dancing, gestures, prayers and stories. Through these activites we are able to form a relationship with the sacred.
Through ritual we are able to:
- communicate specific meaning about the sacred
- express, share and reinforce values
- internalise associated meaning through the repetition of traditional routines
- keep traditions alive and set aside our everyday identities in favour of an identification with the sacred.
- I believe that western societies, wherein rituals have often become empty, have needlessly lost the benefits that they provide.
Rituals as Performances
- rituals are social constructs. This helps us to see ritual as being dynamic and critical as well as traditional
- the awareness that a ritual is a performance need not lead to a crippling self-consciousness. It is possible to identify with something without needing to merge with it
Reflexive Rituals
- the self-awareness of the participants creates benefits. It frees rituals from being fixed to specific places and times. Also it prevents them making the false truth-claim that they are directly ordained by a divinity
- an authentic ritual expresses the bond of universal human fellowship which provides the potential for personal redemption
- such an approach to ritual protects us from the problem scrupulousness. This occurs when the participants forget the purpose of ritual and replace it with a zealous attention to the details
Rituals make our solidarity in the univeral human fellowship more concrete and more compelling.
The following articles may be of interest:
