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Ritual Versus Routine
November 18, 2008
Ritual has such a poor reputation that we don't dare use the word in its true sense. It's okay to talk about our morning ritual of coffee and the paper, but if we talk about ritual and transformation we are likely to get strange looks from our friends.
The reason why we turn up our noses to ritual is because the early anthropologists gave it a bad name. In her book Purity and Danger (a really great book!), the scholar Mary Douglas demonstrated that the early anthropologists simply condemned what they couldn't explain. They arrogantly dismissed primitive rituals as the childish and confused expressions of backward, sub-European species of human beings. Eventually, it became a common place among educated people that rituals are irrational, atavistic holdovers from our primitive past.
But ritual is a tool, universal, simple, and almost completely misunderstood.
Ritual is such a huge part of our lives that we don't even see it. It is like speaking: we all do it, but not many people do it well. Some people study the craft of speech, and because they do they attain a remarkable degree of power. If we study ritualing -- the conscious use of ritual -- even a little bit, we will be vastly more able to navigate our way through the chaotic world that surrounds us.
Ritual consists of two aspects, like two sides of a coin. The first is the rather benign part that we often associate with the word routine. Routine appears in ritual when we feel that the ritual is working. We repeat what works. That cup of coffee in the morning is a typical example of this aspect of ritual. Marriage vows are associated with successful marriages, so they are part of the wedding routine.
So much for the routine side of ritual.
Actually, ritual is what we resort to when the routine falls apart. We are never more alive than when we are participating in the simple, three-part framework that is ritual. So, this other side of ritual is dynamic. It is a response to our environment that reflects a need to change and to grow.
When we examine ritual in depth, we find that it is a symbol-producing engine of transformation.
Alas, as soon as we discover a symbol that works, or an idea or a gesture or whatever, we repeat it. Our ritual becomes routine, and if the routine lasts long enough it can evolve into a real tradition, with all its great complexities and powerful resistance to change.
However, since ritual is at the very heart of our traditions, giving them their form, sometimes the minor alteration of a ritual can give new life to an old tradition. Just as altering a single note in a melody can make it come alive for us, ritual can breathe new life into old routines. Despite the change of a note we still have melody; if not the exact melody we started with, we still have music -- and it still brings us joy.
Traditions, cultures, communities, and individual Selves, just like melodies, are living, evolving symbols. This is our world, that we have created. We are just now realizing that we have to take responsibility for it. Ritual can help us.
Ritual is like imagination, as Coleridge defined it. It is the living power and prime agent of all human perception. Imagination (and ritual!) dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible...it struggles to idealize and unify. It is essentially vital...Ritual, like imagination is a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.
Ritual, like imagination, transforms the world as we know it, re-ordering it in new and ideal ways. In the process it stimulates a vital sense of self and community among its participants. The imagination of the community comes to life in its rituals.
Never mind that Coleridge sounds like an acid-head out of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test; what this gobbledygook means for us is simple enough: ritual is to the community what imagination is to the individual.
This must be emphasized: Ritual is to the community what imagination is to the individual.
The key, though, is learning to improvise, and that means taking time to practice the art of conscious ritualing. If we neglect this beautiful instrument of ours we will fail to transform either our selves, our communities.
Be Qualiadelic. Be Conscious. Change the routine.
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