The Sacred vs. the Profane Perspective on Ritual and Symbol

Don: All communities (including, of course, religious ones) have rituals rooted in formalism, tradition, invariance, rule-governance, sacredness, and repetitive performance. To the outsider, a ritual may appear to be illogical, unnecessary, odd, or downright bizarre. But to the believer, the ritual is necessary, meaningful, and evidence of belonging to the community that practices it. For religious communities especially, ritual is full of meaning, has multiple purposes, and is an essential expression of the human heart.

Ritual has educational value. The youngster, the novice, the uninitiated are led through ritual in order to grow into an experience of belonging. Ritual is a traditional and repetitive learned behavior that leads to socialization. It is often associated with a rite of passage—a life transition event such as birth, marriage, death, coming of age, baptism, first communion, etc.

Ritual brings comfort and familiarity, especially in times of distress. Ritual takes over when the wit ends, often in the form of a ritual song or chant (the Hail Mary, for example), prayer (the Lord’s, usually), action, or other expression. Even people who may long ago have left the community that taught them rituals will often revert to those same rituals when at their wit’s end. It’s essentially automatic.

Rituals can define who we are. Sabbath rituals, for example, tend to define us as Seventh Day Adventists.

Rituals set boundaries on behavior. They limit what we do, what we wear, how we eat (kosher, halal, etc.), how we are treated when ill (the Jehovah’s Witnesses ban blood transfusions, for example) and so on. In so doing, rituals also effectively set limits to our intercourse with people outside our own community. To eat kosher not only limits what one may eat but also limits where and with whom one may eat.

A community is strengthened and preserved by ritual. Marriage occurs only within the community bounds of some tribes in order to protect and preserve its rituals.

Beyond defining who we are, rituals also validate our belonging. Our willingness to engage in ritual, even ritual that strikes us as illogical, proclaims and establishes our right to belong.

Today, “ritual-heavy” faith communities are among the fastest growing worldwide. Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, and Seventh Day Adventists are the most restrictive denominations in terms of their membership behavior and place the most demands for abstinence on their members, and yet they are the fastest-growing denominations in north America.

Nevertheless, to the world as whole, ritual today seems to hold little value. This seems especially true of mystery-driven religious ritual. A considerable body of social science research literature exists on the topic. Scientific American just this week published an article entitled “The Value of Ritual” pointing out the “delusion” of ritual. It cited marriage as an example: There was a time when most people would not have dreamed of living together without first going through the ritual of marriage and its religious and legal vows. But today, the ritual is no guarantor of a lasting marriage.

Some, nonetheless, argue that it is of value. The German Lutheran preacher and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who died in the Holocaust, used to say in his wedding homily that love cannot necessarily sustain a marriage, but a marriage can sustain love. He meant that in compelling bride and groom to say they love one another, the ritual of marriage will tend to lead them to do so even though they might not mean it at the ceremony. So too with the ritual of prayer: If we only prayed when we felt like it, there would be precious few prayers. To perform the rituals of marriage and prayer, even if only halfheartedly, is to kindle the fire that sustains relationships and love with one another (through marriage) and with God (through prayer).

Ritual is close to the languages of life and faith. It is needed in order to strengthen faith, just as it is needed to strengthen the relationships of life. It is how we initially communicate with God, just as a baby learns to communicate with its parents through the repetition of words and phrases. The disciples’ request to Jesus to teach them to pray was a request for ritual. But as we grow and mature we tend gradually to leave ritual behind us and engage in self-expression and spontaneous communication instead.

Paul used symbolic language in our relationship with God in assuring us that our symbolic and ritualistic worship was of no great consequence to God:

For all who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God [a symbolic statement].  For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, “Abba! Father!” The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God,… For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now. And not only this, but also we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body. For in hope we have been saved, but hope that is seen is not hope; for who hopes for what he already sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, with perseverance we wait eagerly for it.

In the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words; and He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.
And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose. (Romans 8:14-16, 22-28)

In other words, we need ritual to help us relate to God, but God does not need it in order to relate to us. If we get rituals wrong, God still reaches out to us and adopts us into his family. I think we would do well to bear this in mind as we teach rituals to our children and other initiates. Children are family members by right of birth; they do not become so through ritual. We are adopted by God, and he will intercede for us regardless of our rituals. Spirit replaces ritual with relationship. As Paul said:

If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things? (Romans 8:31-32)

Ritual matters to us. We judge people by their adherence to our ritual. But God substitutes adoption for ritualistic inclusion, belief for belonging.

David: Prehistoric peoples who at some point likely had neither rituals nor religions were surely not therefore precluded from a relationship with God. Ritual might help in that relationship, but we know too that our differences and divisions over ritual can cause a great deal of trouble between religions. I suspect that much atheism is a recoil from all the harm that has been and continues to be caused by religious ritual differences.

It’s clear that ritual doesn’t matter to God, and in my view it ought not to matter to us either. At least, we should treat it much more circumspectly and not just blindly swallow it, because the harm it causes greatly exceeds any good it does.

Reinhard: In the Adventist community we try to meet our spiritual needs by following ritual. It identifies us as members in good standing. It’s a matter internal to the group, but it is through the group that we worship and develop our relationship with God. It seems to me that symbols (the crucifix, for example) are for external consumption—they identify us to outsiders.

Donald: Belonging is an important concept. A study of university student retention rates revealed a sense of belonging is a far stronger retention factor than course offerings and content. I think symbols define churches and church patterns. They define who we are. If there is a relationship between symbols and a sense of belonging, then the symbols are vital to the church organization. God may not care about rituals, but he did establish patterns—day and night following one another, for example.

Jay: The problem is that ritual, at least as we tend to practice it, imposes limits and boundaries, as opposed to removing them. I have a hard time understanding how restrictive beliefs and practices help strengthen our relationship with a God who is himself unbounded and limitless, omniscient and omnipotent. Our rituals restrict the number of God’s people. Evangelism may counter that, but only to a limited extent. Christ placed no limits on who count as God’s children. If ritual really is the only way many of us can relate to God, how can we practice and profess our ritual in a way that does not by definition infringe on the rights of others to be members of God’s family too?

Donald: In many ways, symbols tell us where other people’s minds are. My mother is troubled by my staying home to join this class by Skype, instead of going to church and showing others how committed I am to the patterns of our church. Those are the things by which we measure our commitment. There was a time when we had in-gatherings and a person’s commitment was measured by how much they had made.

Janelin: Oftentimes, the comfort of ritual and belonging encourages restriction and inhibits expansion.

Jay: Discomfort accompanies any effort to introduce something novel into our community. It disrupts our self definition. We use ritual not only to show our commitment to the community but also to show how much we identify with our fellow members of it. We use words such as “commitment” but the underlying  question is: Are you like me? People of the same faith community but with different perspectives on a given ritual tend to cause a great deal of unrest. Instead of strengthening our relationship with God, ritual then becomes an obstacle to it.

Kiran: Ritual prayer humbly acknowledges our inability to pray on our own. But through the spirit, God makes ritual prayer meaningful. The ritual itself, whether Catholic, Pentecostal, or whatever, doesn’t matter. It’s the connection to God that matters. But it is a bit confusing that Jesus took away some old rituals yet instituted a few new ones (feet washing, for example). What makes some rituals bad and others good? If any ritual helps one connect to God, isn’t it good? Or is it a question of whether a ritual is inclusive or exclusive?

Chris: We’re trying to find a scientific measure or criterion for a good ritual. To me, it’s a subjective thing: What does a ritual do for me? Does it bring me closer to God? To my fellow man? To both? Are we trying to analyze and define something we can’t?

Michael: I’m not sure I can think of an inclusive ritual. A prayer spoken through ritual seems to me to be exclusive. We either pray according to Moslem ritual, or Christian ritual, or Jewish ritual etc. But ritual prayer seen as a symbol for connecting to God seems to me inclusive. Anyone can open their heart to God.

David: Jesus seemed to spend a lot of time debunking the whole notion of ritual. Did he really intend to start new ones, or were they (the foot washing, etc.) intended not as ritual but merely as symbols? Did “Wash feet in remembrance of me” mean literally “wash people’s feet” or did it mean “Remember my washing of feet as a symbol and a reminder to act humbly”? I would rather believe the latter, and I think Michael is right: As a symbol, doing those things in remembrance of Jesus are symbolic and inclusive, but doing them as ritual makes Christianity exclusive.

All the mainstream religions worship the same God of love and mercy and so forth. What a different world it would be, if only we would recognize that we worship and belong to the same God, and if we would stop identifying ourselves (largely through through ritual) as Christian or Moslem or Jewish or Catholic or Protestant or Sunni or Shia etc.

When ritual and the need for identity and belonging makes us focus on our parochial religions and sects, we place ourselves at the center of a very small universe, and shove God aside to play a minor role on the periphery. Parochial belonging and identity might serve, as Donald suggests, to increase student retention rates, but then, other universities must suffer a corresponding decrease! (But who cares about them?!) Would it not be better if we all simply identified ourselves as children of God, as spiritual brothers and sisters?

Don: Is it possible that what is evil is not the ritual or the symbol, but rather endowing it with a sense of superiority or rightness or exclusiveness? Maybe there is value in ritual at some stage of a human being’s development, but perhaps it becomes toxic when taken to extremes of exclusiveness and disallows the validity of the rituals of other faiths.

David: That is exactly what happens. Our rituals drive us to exclusivity and a sense of superiority. Ritual invariably and inevitably corrupts human nature by introducing and promoting identity and exclusivity. It divides us into Shia and Sunni, black and white, men and women, all of whom claim superiority, and we will fight tooth and nail to preserve and promote our superiority or to wrest it from those who already have it. And we can’t just legislate it away: Equal opportunity laws are no substitute for color blindness.

Donald: It seems that symbols can be quite destructive, if we are not careful.

Anonymous: Maybe the benefit of having a ritual is to perpetuate the message down through the generations. Perhaps the rituals of the Sabbath and breaking the bread and drinking the wine are different somehow. If God meant for these rituals to continue, in order to preserve the messages that God is the Creator and humbled himself and died for us on the cross, I can see clear value in that. People do tend to forget! Perhaps other rituals, such as marriage, for instance, are not as significant. I don’t know.

Chris: Remembrance is good because it does not involve judgment. So perhaps a ritual of remembrance is different from ritual designed for other purposes, such as to preserve something. Remembrance does not imply preservation, but preservation implies remembrance.

Anonymous: Before Christ, the Jews identified themselves through the Sabbath as exclusive and different from the Gentiles. But there was nothing to stop Gentiles from keeping the Sabbath also! For the Jews, the Sabbath was holy and had therefore to be preserved.

Reinhard: There are many rituals in the Old Testament. They include animal sacrifice rituals. Christ was sacrificed in order to save us. The benefit of ritual—attending church, reading the Bible, following the Commandments—may not be to connect with God but to give God something to consider (that is, our being members of a religious denomination).

Donald: Developing a relationship is much more challenging than simply following a ritual.

Jay: The great argument of the early church centered on whether rituals (circumcision, for instance) were for building a relationship with God or for identification with the church. This is the trap we are incapable of avoiding. We are more desperate to belong to our community than to belong to God, so we use ritual and symbols—acts of worship—to preserve our group identity.

Kiran: Church is a bit like marriage. There are times when we may get a bit fed up with the relationship. It’s sort-of cyclical—it comes and goes, it waxes and wanes.

David: Identity is important as a means of connecting with God provided we identify with God and not with the artifacts—the groups, rituals, and symbols—we build around God and thus effectively wall him off. We can identify with God by living as Jesus lived—or as close to it as we can manage (which would also be the ultimate act of remembrance) and by accepting him as the universal God of goodness, grace, and love.

Don: Next week: More on the ritual of prayer.

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