As a minister my joy lies in creating wonderful ceremonies, and ordinary prayer spaces, and small rituals that mark a moment. As so often happens in Interfaith Ministry it’s easy to trip over language – different faiths and cultures use different language and have different understanding of what it is we do when we come together as a community in the presence of God – ritual, prayer, ceremony, liturgy…… important to tease out what these terms mean even as we know that ritual takes us to a place known even before we had the language to explain. Ritual taps into archetypal memories that go beyond explanation, with the potential for uniting, for healing, for blessing.
We have two lodgers at home whose first language isn’t English, we have fallen into a ritual when we sit down for our evening meal together; someone starts with ‘bon appetite’, followed by ‘cheers’ from somewhere else round the table, ‘bismillah’, ‘guten appetit’, …..every week we seem to add another. It’s our own little ritual, not very original maybe but we’ve made it our own, we’ve developed it, it makes us smile and helps us feel like we belong right here, right now. And it connects us across boundaries of language and culture.
There is something very grounding about being in a place where we recognise the customs and rituals, we feel we belong, we feel comfortable, at home, peaceful. When we visit another country or find ourselves among people of another culture it can be quite disconcerting when we don’t understand the rituals that are being shared. We feel out of place, a bit lost - like we don’t fully belong.
There can be something deeper to ritual though. When ritual acknowledges the presence of God, it becomes sacred. When ritual becomes sacred it touches us at a deeper spiritual and emotional level. A place that connects us to universal energy, to our ancestors, to all creation. We are moved from our heads to our hearts. Depending on our culture or religion we may have different words for ‘sacred rituals’, many Christians would call them ‘liturgies’, pagans would term them rituals or sacred ceremonies others may speak of being in prayer. The term ceremony may also be used by many for larger celebrations such as marriage or baptism.
In my Christian family of 100 years ago, many rituals would have taken place at home. The rosary would have been said together every night, a prayer before meals and everything from the plough to the harvest would have been blessed. When someone died the deceased would have been cared for at home until the funeral, prayers would have been said around the body and customs helping the bereaved cope with their loss would have been led by friends and neighbours.
Over recent years religious rituals and ceremonies have moved almost completely into places of worship, death is something that happens in hospitals or care homes. The welfare state and the NHS has improved the health of the nation, it has lifted people out of poverty and life expectancy has increased exponentially. It has also moved some of our most intimate moments from the heart of the home to the hospital or care home. This together with many people now leaving institutional religion, ritual, liturgy or ceremony is in danger of being lost from our lives almost entirely save for the occasional wedding or funeral.
Sobonfu Some who died in January this year, was from Bukino Faso in West Africa. She moved to live in the West and became a renowned teacher on the importance of ritual in our lives. Ritual, she says, is the life-giving force of every human being.
There are an infinite number of reasons to create a ceremony,– a marriage, a birth, a new home, adolescent rite of passage or a significant birthday – it may be a loss; the death of a loved one or the ending of a relationship. It may be a community coming together in regular prayer or to mark a significant event. The richness of such gathering is to be found in the personal involvement of those gathered, in the acknowledgement of God’s presence in the midst of that gathering, and in hearts moved beyond the practical of everyday life.