A book entitled The Hidden Powers of Ritual, The Journey of a Lifetime, by Brad Shore, points out that while a great deal of our life is influenced by forces over which we have little direct control, ritual gives us a powerful tool for helping to shape and reshape our lives.
A ritual comes into being when ordinary behavior is repeated until it begins to harden into recognizable action patterns we call routines.
Routines simplify our lives by offloading complex actions from our working memory so that we may do them without much cognitive effort.
But a ritual takes routine a step further. More than just unthinking action a ritual can be thought of as a routine with a significant symbolic load. Rituals mean something special. Rituals are a powerful way of tuning social relationships and keeping them in good form.
The American nostalgia for home and family is closely tied to the American domestic cycle whereby a family unit is created for a limited number of years only to unravel as the kids go away to school or for work, or to create their own family units. While families make rituals, it is equally true that our rituals make our families. In a mobile society where moving on, moving up, and moving out are ideals, what is left of the family is often the product our rituals and stories. Among the less obvious powers of ritual, two are of particular interest to the book’s author. The first has to do with creating rhythm and structuring time in our lives.
Humans operate simultaneously at many different rhythms. These include biological clocks that govern waking and sleeping, pulses specific to each bodily organ, cycles of respiration, down to the vibrations of our body cells and beyond that the hum of their atoms. Often we are not conscious of most of these rhythms. Their rhythm seldom causes our awareness to take note of them. But when the rhythm of our breathing, or the beating of our hearts, is interrupted it may be easier for our awareness to take note of them. Becoming aware of the vibrations of our cells and atoms often takes a conscious, or rather perhaps a not-conscious, effort to recognize.
At a different rhythmic time scale are the units of time that we orchestrate for our lives, day-to-day, month-to-month, and year-to-year. Here ritual is a most important way that we mark time and give our lives predictable shape and pulse. Think birthday celebrations, holiday observances, and significant historical landmarks. These are the way that humans mark and measure their time.
Humans have marked time by the time of the “birth” of the universe, “it has been 13.8 billion Years ago”; or the creation of the world “the world was created 4000 years ago”; or the historical documentation of the birth Jewish Messiah, Jesus, It has been 2024 years since the Year of the Lord (Anno Domini, AD). Or David and Solomon lived around the year 1000 B.C. (Before Christ). In our current era academics have substituted CE (for Common, or Christian Era) and BCE (Before the Common or Christian Era) so as not to be offensive to sensitive non-Christians.
While rituals provide us with important rhythmic markers, the capacity for ritualization provides us with a very potent tool for creating and manipulating the tempos of our lives. Rituals offer the comfort of rhythmic regularity AND the flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances, enabling us to keep time and stay in sync with the pace of life. Our recent solstice and equinox ritual observances are a good example. With ritual we can both keep time and keep up with time.
Another unexpected power of ritual this book’s author terms agency reversal. He notes that in an ecstatic ritual performance, the power of the rhythmic action reverses the experience of who’s doing the action. Dancers may begin their performance feeling that they are dancing, but there may come a point of reversal where the dance starts performing the dancer. The ritual takes over. Athletes term this as the experience of flow.
Especially intense ritual can produce the total rehearsal we know as trance, where the performer is carried away. All ritual conveys some degree of agency reversal where the ritual becomes more important than the routine performance.
As a socializing mechanism, agency reversal can create a powerful bonding experience among performers. Athletes, musical performance, dramatists and artists are familiar with such experiences. In meaningful rituals agency reversal provides the closest that humans come to a sense of contact with a transcendent agent.
There is one thing over which we have remarkable control: how we shape our time. Orchestrating our rituals is a human power. We need to be mindful of this ritual making for the patterns set by our stories and rituals will powerfully shape our progeny’s sense of who they are and the memories of their life journey.
Something done once is just an act. Done twice, it is a repetition of an act. Beyond that lies the endless expanse of ritual. “This is what we do together.” “We always do that.” We used to eat here every week.” “This is who we are.” In the age of the internet, ritual gatherings can be accomplished through video calls making ritual gatherings easier, but taking the time for ritual is the choice that we have to make.
Individual rituals carry miraculous powers in themselves. They can provide a surprising sense of peace and comfort in the face of sorrow, loneliness, or stress. Consider the power of an evening cup of tea enjoyed in a favorite teacup. Quickly “a cup of tea” becomes “MY cup of tea” as you take a simple act to heart.
Ritualization is a potent means of connecting with spirit, a conscious stabilizing agent and a simple salve for a stressful time if only we are mindful of how we use its powers.