Memes are rituals drained of transcendence.
— Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker
As religion recedes, politics takes its place.
— Peggy Noonan, The Wall Street Journal
joy unspeakable is
practicing freedom
while chains still chafe,
singing deliverance
while Jim Crow stalks
— Barbara A. Holmes, Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church
These three are not making the same argument. Noonan names a vacancy. Gioia names what tried to fill it and failed. Holmes names what ritual costs, and does, when the stakes are as high as they get. None of them are really about politics. Politics is the ultimate shape-shifting proposition. It wears the shape of ritual — rallies, chants, flags, repeated words — but carries none of the substance. True ritual is a vessel that holds meaning, depth, and transcendence.
Ritual, at its best, is a practice, a habit, a received process that reconnects us with meaning we could never create for ourselves.
Ask any working clergyperson, off the record, which duty they’d hand off forever if they could, and I’ll bet that most would say officiating weddings. That’s not a knock on marriage. It’s about what many weddings have become. A wedding used to be a ritual in the plain sense: two people making a promise in public, before witnesses, inside a form older and sturdier than either of them, so the promise would hold even on the days their feelings for each other didn’t. The ritual did the holding. Now the ceremony competes with everything the wedding-industrial complex can monetize and Instagram can memorialize: color palate suggestions for guests, personalized vows workshopped for laughs and tears in the right order, a whole apparatus built to be remembered rather than entered. This hasn’t left the ritual threadbare. It has left it overstuffed — so much activity piled onto the form that the form itself, the actual public promise, gets lost under the production.
This trend is beginning to impact funeral rituals too — impinging on a time that should focus, for people of faith, on the promises of God which sustain and redeem us. Instead, without the guiding light of ritual, families grow increasingly anxious that “people will expect more,” or that “we can’t be too explicit about God” for fear of offending.
We work hard to create meaning, instead of receiving the meaning that ritual already offers and dwelling inside it.
Ritual fails in two directions, never one. It goes threadbare, worn down by rote until it carries no more weight than a shrug; or it becomes overstuffed with manufactured cleverness to the point that the form itself can’t breathe. Both are the same refusal: we stop trusting the form and let it run on automatic pilot or try to do its work ourselves.
The hunger hasn’t disappeared. Here is Gioia, again: “In an overly digitized world, people embrace with intensity the few remaining ritualistic activities available to them.” Grown adults dress for Halloween now the way children used to; whole blocks are transformed into theatrical stages for a night that used to belong to eight-year-olds. That’s not evidence people have moved past ritual. It’s the opposite — people grabbing whatever ritual is still standing and over-stuffing it, to the point that it’s carrying weight it was never built to bear alone. Clever, not deep.
The project in front of us isn’t inventing ritual from nothing. It’s eviction. Many cultural memes have rushed to fill that vacancy. The question is whether we notice, and whether we’re willing to receive and embrace something truer in their place.
The old forms weren’t always good — plenty of ritual went dead long before Pinterest boards and slideshow tributes took over. It isn’t wrong to want more meaning. What’s wrong is where the meaning is now coming from.
None of this — the overproduced wedding, the deferred funeral, the vacancy that politics rushes to fill — gets fixed by trying harder. Trying harder is what got us here. What’s needed is something closer to surrender: trusting a sacred form enough to let it do the work it was built to do.
Abraham Joshua Heschel once wrote: “In the tempestuous ocean of time and toil there are islands of stillness where we may enter a harbor and reclaim dignity.” Let’s rediscover those islands. Let’s not wait for the tempestuous ocean to calm down before we venture out to seek and find them. And once we can delight in the rediscovery, we should stop re-decorating. Walk in. Inhabit the sustaining rituals we did not invent. Feel the welcome home.
No Comments