Seasons, Symbols, and Ceremony: Why We Need Ritual in Our Lives
Rev. Lilli Nye
January 7, 2007
It is January 7th, the depth of winter in New England, when the weak sun makes only a quick, low slash across sky. Yet, the quince bushes outside my front door are blooming. Out on the compost heap behind my house, some daffodil bulbs that I tossed out a year ago, thinking their lifespan was spent, are now springing up with bright green blades and swelling buds. I would be delighted by this—if it weren’t January 7th, if it weren’t so entirely wrong. My soul is still waiting for winter, so that afterward it can have spring.
But because the budding trees and the soggy ground are disoriented by the weird warmth, so am I disoriented. So entrained to the seasons are my body, mind, and imagination, so visceral is my expectation that the seasons will recur in regular succession, turning in their eternal wheel, that when that cycle begins to melt and morph into an unrecognizable blob, my own being feels strange and wobbly.
As I began to consider how to begin this exploration today of ritual, of seasons and symbols and ceremony, I felt I simply wanted to name my own sense of disorientation about this long stretch of unseasonable warmth, imagining that others might be feeling it as well. Perhaps we recognize the constant things most clearly when they lose their constancy.
I had wanted to take this moment to recognize and explore the subject of ritual, of seasons and symbols and ceremony, because we have just come through a whole series of cultural rituals that we call “the Holidays.” I wanted to name the fact that, whether or not we enjoy them, they are part of our collective sense of season and annual rhythm.
They give us the opportunity, a series of anniversaries, to celebrate what we love, to recognize what has changed, what has been lost or gained, and what is timeless. If we let them, they can help us to touch the transcendent and to enter the healing presence of the sacred.
Last week, quite a few folks took part in the New Year’s service that Nancy Wilber created. Many of us were drawn by the desire to engage in an intentional symbolic gesture that would help us make a transition from the old to the new. The very tactile process of focusing an intention by writing it on a piece of paper, then burning it, poof, the flame taking it into the ether, and of lighting candles, and of singing, and of standing in a circle—these actions simultaneously are fresh and also awaken ancient memory.
This memory goes back so far, we cannot know when it began, the time when our imaginations began inventing symbols that would connect us spiritually with the whole of life.
The essential urge to create a symbolic relationship with the world seems to be what distinguishes human beings as a species. You could say that the ability to make symbols is what is human about humanness, rather than what is animal about humanness, since we are a melding of both.
Spoken and written languages are symbolizing systems. Sounds or visual marks form words; words are symbols that refer to other things, and these symbols allow us to name and describe ourselves, our world, and the relationship between things, for practical purposes, but also for poetic and for spiritual purposes. The arts, also, are symbolizing expressions. Visual shapes, or dance motions, or music, or story, give form to invisible feelings or ideas and enable us to communicate ineffable things.
And so, too, ritual and ceremony have been with us from the very beginning of our existence. They are another, particular kind of language, a particular kind of art. Ritual and ceremony enable us describe or celebrate our place in the cosmos, help us to redefine our status in the stages and cycles of life. And when our soul is sick because some loss or trauma has created chaos within us, ceremony can help restore us to clarity and wholeness.
This need, this urge, is so very deep in us. More than 40,000 years ago, Cro-Magnon peoples already manifested the complete panoply of arts, language, and religion that we associate with human culture. But it goes back much further than that:
The oldest gravesites that have been found so far are those of our Stone Aged Neanderthal cousins, with their protruding brow ridges and stocky bones. Dating at least 80,000 years old, these gravesites show all the signs of well-formed spiritual belief and ceremonial practice.
The dead are adorned with body paint and ornaments. Particular flowers and herbs had been gathered and then strewn upon them; food, utensils, and objects of power were put in the grave them to help them in their journey or in the new life that awaited them. Most poignantly, the dead were carefully placed in their graves in fetal position, like a baby waiting to be born. They lie on their left sides, with their heads pointing north, their faces turned in the direction of the rising sun.
That was 80,000 years ago, but it goes back much further than that, this instinct for ritual, for ceremony. Even chimpanzees are known to go to particular spots to watch the sun rise or set in rapt attention, and have been documented exhibiting behavior that looks curiously ceremonial, such as making offerings of gratitude or friendship.
I find myself agreeing with Gabriel Horn, whose poetic reflection (reprinted below) on the ceremonial life of the First People we heard earlier. I, too, believe that this instinct is so essential to us that if we lose it, we are in danger of losing our humanity.
If we become entirely secularized, we may retain some forms of ritual or ceremony. But it is by including the sacred and transcendent dimension that we feel our connection to the mysterious whole. What happens to us when we fail to make or feel that connection? We begin to dry up. We begin to lose our bearings. We become overly focused on production or survival.
Let me take a moment to offer some definitions. I have used the words ceremony and ritual somewhat interchangeably, but there are some distinctions:
A ritual is reenacted repeatedly—daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, or simply often—and is characterized by a series of steps that are always repeated in the same sequence, with little or no variation. Whether truly religious, intentionally symbolic, or relatively mundane, rituals are like little ships. They take us psychologically or spiritually from one place to another.
Many of us have ritual-like routines that help us wake up in the morning. I was speaking with someone recently who described a very intentional ritual with which she would finish her workday. It included straightening up her office desk, making a list of the things she would need to address when she next returned, turning out the light, and pulling her office door closed until it locked, with a decisive click. This little ritual enabled her to transition out of her workday so she could reenter her personal life with more presence.
If we have children, we may have developed family rituals that help a child to settle down to sleep for the night. We know that rituals are deeply comforting, even necessary for children to be healthy. A chaotic life without any routines creates a disturbing feeling of unpredictability and insecurity. Perhaps this can give us some compassionate awareness of how unimaginably stressful life is for children and families dislocated by war or famine, by natural disaster, or simply by homelessness.
Children are so vulnerable. They are forming their foundational experience of the world—whether it is safe or unsafe, benign or violent, meaningful and ordered or chaotic and empty. To the extent that they are embraced by meaningful rituals, they are being given the interior tools to structure and make sense of life.
In our opening reading, by Antoine de Saint Exupéry, we heard about the passwords of meaning, given from generation to generation: “Let us build memories in our children lest they drag out joyless lives, lest they allow treasures to be lost because they have not been given the keys.”
I have come across a wonderful book called “The Book of New Family Traditions” by Unitarian Universalist Meg Cox. It is a treasure house of inspiration for creating family rituals and celebrations that can be gentle ways of teaching and healing, of bringing the daily, weekly, and yearly rounds to a richer level of meaning, or of assisting with challenging transitions.
But we all have the child within us, and we all have the ancient need for the structure and clarity that ritual creates.
Let us turn then to ceremony. How is ceremony different or similar? Ceremonies are larger ships for the more significant passages. Ceremonies also have a structure, have a form that gives shape, that gives a beginning and middle and end, but the structure is more open, more available to the inflow of the spontaneous. The nature of ceremony is that it opens us to transcendent values.
Stephen Farmer, who has written a great deal about sacred ceremony, and in particular about creating new ceremonies for the important passages of our lives, suggests that there are essentially three types of ceremony: those intended for healing, those for transitions, and those for celebration.
Healing ceremonies, while certainly including the body, speak more to the psychic, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of illness or of loss. The aboriginal peoples of the world, who practice shamanism, see illness as having a spiritual root. The individual’s soul has lost its right relation to the sacred whole, and this is what must be restored. Physical recovery may still not take place, but spiritual healing may bring peace just as well.
When an individual, or family, or whole community has experienced a severe shock or trauma, healing ceremonies can re-establish a sense of being connected in the deep and sacred powers of life. We all know how, after September 11, 2001, we needed to meet one another in community to heal through ceremonies of prayer, remembrance, and restoration.
Transition ceremonies help us mark those times in life when we choose to, or must, change status, even identity. The ship of ceremony takes us from one shore to another, from one state of being to another state of being.
Saint Exupéry says: “Let us not neglect the ceremonies of our passage: when we wed, when we die, when we are blessed with child, when we depart and when we return, when we plant, and when we harvest.”
Transition ceremonies have since ancient times marked the coming of age in adolescence, when a child becomes an adult and begins to be instructed in the ways of the adult community. We, in fact, have a coming-of-age group here at Theodore Parker Church, in which the junior youth are being helped to discover and name the beliefs and values they are claiming for themselves religiously and morally.
Transition ceremonies can help someone let go of something cherished, or to embrace any new stage or condition of life.
Finally, celebration ceremonies commemorate recurrent anniversaries. They include seasonal festivals, birthdays, wedding anniversaries, days in which a beloved person passed away. I have two friends who annually celebrate the day that they adopted their two children, a sibling pair. This is one of many rituals that provide the children with a very tangible sign of the love and unfailing commitment their parents have for them, signs which are all the more necessary for little ones who have come from hard and uncertain beginnings.
Indeed, for all of us, the world is so incomprehensible, so vast, so full of uncertainty, and living with clarity and intention is so very difficult. Thus we need rituals to assist us in creating order and meaningful structure in life. We need ceremony to assist us in marking change and in lifting life to higher levels of beauty and meaning.
I’d like to close with a passage by Joanne Field, from her book, “On Not Being Able to Paint.” Although she is referring to painting as a way to give shape to life, I think the passage speaks powerfully to the arts of ritual and ceremony.
I wanted to learn how to create…a true reciprocal relationship between my dreams and what was outside; in fact, to learn how to endow the objects of the external world with a spiritual life…Both the gods and the demons were being brought down to earth, their power ready to be harnessed to real problems of living, madness was becoming more domesticated and tamed to do real work in a real world…So one came to know more clearly, what one loved and would want to cherish in living, and what one hated and would seek to eliminate…And by this one’s life developed a clearer pattern and coherence and shape and was less a blind drifting with the tides of circumstance.
Perhaps this reflection will help us to claim more intentionally the many rituals and celebrations that already grace our lives. And may we be empowered to engage this creative gift we have within ourselves to bring greater intentionality and meaning to our days.
May it be so.
The reading is drawn from The Book of Ceremonies: The Native Way of Honoring and Living the Sacred, by Gabriel Horn.
In the beginning, it flowed through the primordial bloodstream of humankind. And long ago, whether through ceremony or through simply gazing at the night sky, the First People became consciously aware of their place in the Wheel of Life. They recognized their connection to the vast subconscious and to various dimensions of time and space and spirit and mystery, through the power of their conscious awareness, and through the urgings of their Original Instruction.
Long ago, they sat together in a circle, passing sacred objects from hand to hand, or they stood alone and turned their thoughts toward the rising sun. They traced the movement of the sun [and moon] across the sky, setting into motion the harmonic flow or movement within the ceremonial circles they had formed, and within their own lives as well.
Long ago, they knew the circles they created with others … and everything else in ceremony represents something, and draws special power for specific purposes.
Long ago, they became aware that every song expresses certain feelings, and entreats certain elements to come in to the world, and every prayer is a seed planted in the Mystery. Each one addresses some aspect of our needs and urgings, and prepares the world in a mysterious way, as if it were a garden, for its fulfillment.
Long ago, they knew every color has a meaning; every feather, every bone, every beaded or quilled design had a unique power and significance.
They knew their instruments were special, each one made out of a desire to re-create the music of nature, each with a vibration and a sound that was unique to itself and that drew attention to and from those troublesome or benevolent spirits and incorporeal beings that inhabited their world.
Long ago, all of these elements of ceremony intertwined and became one with their intentions and purpose. Each one commanded their respect and appreciation. And so their seeds of prayer gestated, were born, and were made ready for fruition within the sacred awareness of Ceremony.
Times have changed. Yet certain elements of the human condition have not. No matter how civilized we humans have become, certain needs still flow through our primordial blood. Now many are seeking to satisfy their need for ceremony once again. Can we reconcile our sacred relationship to all things with the way we have chosen to live?
… I don’t believe humankind can ever completely surrender our ways of honoring and acknowledging [the Sacred].
If we did … we would no longer live with a conscious reverence and respect for our relationship to the greater web of life outside ourselves. We would no longer allow the magic in the Mystery to stir our imaginations and creativity. We would no longer feel our connectedness or our sense of wonder for life.
If we surrender our ways of honoring and acknowledging the sacred, how would we come closer to the understandings that enable us to grow? How would we help ourselves to heal and become whole after being hurt or broken?
Something sacred and mysterious connects us all, human and non-human, corporeal and non-corporeal beings alike, and in moments of recognition …. When that sacred union, that sense of ineffable oneness is pronounced and appreciated and realized, it is natural … to offer something in gratitude. May [our ceremonies] be such an offering.