I've been thinking about ritual, off and on, for nearly five years. Because it's such a big topic, I don't always have a very coherent angle of approach: sometimes I think about it from a personal perspective, like when I wonder how having a really solid cultural support system would have changed things after NS was born. Sometimes I think about it from a theoretical point of view—even learned scholars aren't able to really define what a ritual is, which means it's really juicy for academic thought (and, despite this juiciness, the field of ritual studies is a young one, only really formulating itself since the 1970s). Sometimes I think about how we can improve our rituals—what questions do we think we're answering when we come together in community to celebrate a coming of age, or eat brunch together once a month, or kneel and eat a cracker?—and if we can change them, how would we know if we're stepping forward or backwards? Sometimes I feel like my neurons are firing a billion times a second, and the frizz is fun; sometimes, I wonder if I've totally stepped off the path of reasonable thought and am trundling off to accidentally form a cult.
Some background: after Noah was born, I was sad. I was sad because his birth had shaken me deeply on a number of levels. It was painful, first and foremost—the worst pain I'd ever felt, and for a long, long time. I felt abandoned by my midwives, whose roles I'd thought would be more supportive; instead, I laboured for days with just my husband, having been instructed not to call them until the contractions became more regular (which they never did). The goals I had set for myself—a "natural birth," in the beautiful birth centre downtown—did not come to pass; at the end of it, I had a c-section from a doctor whose name I didn't know, shaking so badly from the anesthetic, and feeling like I had failed. The grief from this pain/failure combo was enormous. Plus: I now also had a baby. It was a tectonic shift in lifestyle, relationships, appearance, ability to sleep, comfort, routine, work, and basically every other aspect of my life. Everything had changed. I didn't know how to talk about it.
As a culture, we're not great with change. We're especially bad at "change with a side of upset feelings:" death, breakups, friendships that drift apart, the post-retirement phase where things are "really exciting" but there's also a deep loss of identity. I've historically had breakdowns when things change on a Big Level: I had them after I graduated high school and university, and I had one after Noah's birth, too. And I started thinking about the ways in which we see each other and ourselves through this big changes, and realized that, if it's not a party, we don't really want to do it.
Ritual is a box for feelings. You can put your feelings into the box, if you want; you can also use ritual to box yourself off from your feelings, although this second option has diminishing returns. When people (both individuals and communities) create rituals, they're typically pointing to something and saying "hey, this is important."
For example: for months, my Tuesday morning routine was to go to the YMCA, buy a day pass, drop Noah off at the kindergym, and then do some power yoga. Nothing about this was sacred—he would emerge sticky and crabby; I was just rolling around on the floor—but I grieved the loss of our weekly YMCA outings deeply when COVID began. After reflecting on it, I realized that this weekly ritual pointed to: time to take care of my body; time apart; time spent in the company of other adults, without my child; time to slow down. The sacredness of that YMCA time was not attached to a church or a deity, but to the needs that it met, needs that felt ignored in much of my life.
And we can do this pointing with almost anything. Why is Christmas important? Why do I crave my evening cup of tea? Why does Friday takeout dinner feel untouchable? These are little boxed-off pieces of time, and ones that we've filled up with stories: the feelings we want to feel, the values we uphold, the need to predict and make patterns in our lives. And you don't have to put your feelings into the box; sometimes showing up will enable the feeling, or it will simply signal to others in the box with you, "hey, I'm here."
Because rituals aren't just a feeling; they're not ideology. They're action, which means they work very differently from just my little thinky-thoughts. They can be embodied values, but participating in them doesn't require my brain and body to match. I show up at Christmas, and the values I hold around my family and our traditions are a little more entrenched; I stand and kneel in church, and while my questions and doubts remain, I am there in the moment.An outsider would be hard-pressed to tell the difference.
All of us have many micro-cultures, overlapping all day long: our personal histories, the media we consume, the way we structure families, our careers, our ethnic and national contexts, the ideas we love and the ones that repulse us. We have different norms, depending on who we're with—I behave differently with my childhood bestie than I do with my mother-in-law. And we have the versions of ourselves that we want to be, the versions that we've left behind, and the versions that we are, right now. Rituals that work well in one context don't translate across the board. What is normal in church is a big old raised eyebrow in a classroom; what works in the family home may be unintelligible to those outside it. Ritual is a way of creating a shared context; we've lost a lot of those, in modern life.
This is all to say that ritual is complicated. It's a cultural technology that can be controlled, weaponized, wrested away, and suppressed. It's a vessel for the sacred that can also be deeply secular. It's an invitation to be together, and a deeply personal way of understanding our world.
And this is also to say that ritual is something I want to do with my life, and I'm not sure what that means. Broad strokes might include grad school, designing resources, writing that doesn't include the phrase "thinky-thoughts," maybe a ritual space, a cultural conversation about what ritual is and why we need it. In between those strokes is pure terror: what if I fuck it up, do it badly, cause harm? What if I'm not smart enough or dedicated enough? I think this is really important, and I want to do right by it. I want to create something for myself, the sad person I was after Noah was born, that is a way of holding myself up across time and space. I want there to be less sad people, or at least, better sadness: feelings that are recognized and held, remarked upon and not ignored. I think ritual is a good place to do that.
