Spiritual Sense or Nonsense? Ritual...

When the Tao is lost, there is goodness.
When goodness is lost, there is morality.
When morality is lost, there is ritual.
Ritual is the husk of true faith, the beginning of chaos.

From Verse 38 of the Tao Te Ching

I like this passage and wanted to focus on ritual, a topic that I’ve never posted on. Ritual hasn’t played a large role in my spirituality.

When I was a young child, every Sunday I received communion at church services. Coming down the aisle with the wafer in my mouth (you weren’t supposed to chew) I’d feel very holy. It felt like my soul was becoming white, an organ that I pictured as maybe ten to twelve inches long and an inch wide with a vertical orientation and standing about halfway between my back and chest. In-between communions it picked up dark spots that were whitened-away every Sunday.

In divinity school I remember seeing a sacrament defined as “a medium of grace.” Symbolic church activities that are official sacraments are thought to be conduits of grace from God to humans. Personally, I’m not convinced that grace reliably flows through bureaucratically established channels.

My most meaningful experiences of ritual occurred in childhood and youth, but weren’t especially religious – unless you could call it the religion of home and family. For example, Christmas was about decorating our tree, the gathering at my grandmother’s, my mom playing Christmas music on the piano there…

But that soon came to an end. By the time I was nineteen my grandparents were dead; my parents owned no property. Before I'd graduated from college all the sacred places had been sold, including the house where I grew up, which was owned by my maternal grandmother’s second husband.

As an adult, my experience of “ritual” probably doesn’t really qualify for that designation. But certainly I did find enjoyment in the repetition involved in the round of activities that were part of my ordinary routine and that brought me a great deal of happiness – things like jogging, meditating, writing, and some of the little tasks surrounding these things like washing my hands fifty times a day.

Anyway, it seems to me – maybe as a “ritually challenged” individual (no... the hand-washing thing was just to see if you were paying attention) – that rituals would work best when connected to corresponding beliefs. So if you believe that the wafer and wine really are the body and blood of Christ, then for you the act of eating and drinking is an act of communion.

What spiritual sense have you made of ritual?

The Copenhagen Ritual

End result...

Each nation developed a list of things they’ve volunteered to do – but the list is non-binding.

The stated goal is to prevent global temperature from rising more than two degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels – but what they’ve got on their to-do lists won’t accomplish this.

So it’s not a real agreement. However, I’ve heard it referred to twice now as a “roadmap to an agreement.” I guess we can file it right next to the “roadmap to peace” in the Mideast.