RITUAL SHAPES THE DAY

by FlipFloppery at Deviant Art

Ceremonies and rituals, even the ones as commonplace as the habitual sequence of actions on rising and dressing, serve as markers and harmonizers, reconciling necessity with desire and possibly cueing shifts in the brain connectome to a new cat’s cradle pattern for the next part of the day.

The little lymph tubes that were recently discovered draining the lymph from the brain were both hidden and discovered because they followed along the side of the larger and more obvious blood vessels.  The body is organic and “just grew” over the millennia, but it still tends to imitate itself.  Everything takes the path of least resistance.  Everything builds on what came before.  The morning ritual is both physiological and mental.

There are two completely different nervous systems that only communicate in the brain.  Otherwise they are parallel but don’t share their information, dividing it according to what is being monitored.  One is the peripheral system of sensation and action that is obviously connected to organs like skin, ears, nose and eyes.  The other is the visceral system, the autonomic system which is automatic: breathing, blood pressure, temperature, and the like.  Most of the effects of the latter system are expressed and driven as “emotion.”  It appears that one of the functions of ritual repetitions, intense experiences, and time-linked transitions is to reconcile the two nervous systems by conditioning them to act together.  No one knows how or even if that’s exactly true, but it’s the guess for now.

Those two systems, in their interaction, also have something to do with memory.  One clue is that an intense experience, something sudden and startling, makes an indelible memory.  They call it “the flashbulb experience” (scientists are geezers and don't know that flashbulbs are passé) and relate it to something like the news about 9/11.  You will always remember where you were and to some degree re-live that moment.  Likewise, moments like birth, marriage, graduation, hiring for a coveted job, loss of a parent, are going to be “made neon” and memorable forever afterwards.  The skill with which the traditional ceremony is designed and executed is less important than the intensity of the feeling produced by the event, as marked by both nervous systems and the body reactions.

The dimensions of participation in the world -- emotion, sensation, and action are important precursors of meaningful ceremony.  If people are shaking and blowing their noses, likely the moment has meaning.  Substances that blunt and dull the mind, turn movement to violence, make mush of words, prevent the shaping of life into meaning.

We are used to denominations that define themselves by dogma.  In fact, this is illusion.  The real definitions are made by the lifestyles of the people who are grouped by income, ethnic ways, education, stage of life, and so on.  But these things are judged by a larger world, so they may be defensive facades to let troubled people pass as "fine."  The weddings and christenings become show, performances with little meaning except boasting of status and wealth.  Money corrupts and even prevents meaning.  

Then there are two levels going on:  the demonstration of respectability which makes street people and punks unwelcome, and the true emotional experience of entering liminal space as equals who share.  In that way, a group of dubious characters gathered to mark a shared milestone may be far more spiritual than the investiture of a new formal leader in a covertly corrupt institution.

Like the brain structure, organic is better than engineered.  One layer of thought always has to deal with the realities of whether a PA system is needed, whether there is time for the leader to go from his or her seat to the point where he or she speaks, whether people know the song.  That’s engineering.  Organic is whether people are in the mental space to focus on the subject and whether that subject is of real concern to them.  What is the pre-existing emotional focus -- are they afraid?  Are they angry?  What comforts them?  What will bring them together in the beginning: a prayer, a song, a familiar action?

I once heard about a minister who used his summer vacation to write the entire year’s worth of sermons because his subjects were theological, in a reasoning sequence, elegantly framed, like a professor's lectures.  This was his understanding of what Sunday services were “for.”  He did pretty well in big churches where demographics and function carried the crowd along into communitas which doesn’t necessarily need a charismatic leader.

An infant ICU

One summer morning, still dark, when I was serving as a hospital chaplain fulfilling my Clinical Pastoral Care obligation, I was called to the infant ICU where a baby in trouble and its father had just come in by Life Flight.  The mother was left at the smaller local hospital where the baby had been born.  She was still too hurt to move.  The father wanted the baby christened immediately as a protective ceremony, because he believed that if it died, then it would go to heaven. 

I was a UU, which is a remnant of an Anabaptist movement that resisted infant baptism.  In Catholic terms, using a ceremony of dedication to prevent death or guarantee entry into Heaven was simply magic and superstitious.  But in human terms, this man needed a sustaining ritual that made him feel that everything that could be done, WAS being done.

The few nurses on the ward, the father, and myself formed the “community.”  We gathered around the isolette where the baby was being warmed with lamps and nourished through needles.  I poured a bit of sterile water onto a cotton ball, reached my hands in the sleeves, and wrung out a drop of water onto the baby’s head.  All this is engineering.

Just then the rising sun burst through the window and I had my theme:  “This is the day the Lord has made.  Let us rejoice and be glad in it.”  Our faces were bright with sun and slick with tears.  This was organic -- it came out of the recognition of the feelings of the moment, validated by a daily event that all humans know and sometimes salute.

Never mind that I don’t believe in any lord or even the hierarchical concept of “lords.”  Never mind that this baby wasn’t going to any heaven because there IS no heaven.  Never mind even whether the baby survived.  In terms of a memorable event that helped one man and several nurses feel their participation in the universe and their united desire for the tiny infant’s recovery, it worked.

The engineering part of any ceremony has to be done well enough to keep it from interfering with the emotion, but in this case the universe played an unpredictable and literally moving part as the sun went up the sky.  We did not plan to do this at sunrise -- that just happened to be the moment.  There was no music, only the sounds of the pumps and alarms of an ICU.  There were no vestments except the sterile hospital gowns we were wearing.  The right words came.

Infants are saved every day but there’s no need for moments this dramatic to be the only rituals of attunement and feeling.  Rather the need is to increase awareness of what’s going on in the people who are present and “where” they are, which might have nothing to do with the local setting, but everything to do with “where their heads are.”  The ability to meet them there is what makes it spiritual.  Willingness to make time and space for it, makes it possible.