There are two stories about ritual from my own experience that I would like to share with you. The first has to do with my preaching as a final year student at theological school in Somerset, deep in rural England in a little medieval church in a tiny village. It was the service of evensong and a friend told me I would probably have a congregation of about six people, if I were lucky! I arrived an hour before service, walked into the empty church and saw what looked like the frame of a rusted bicycle right in the middle of the sanctuary! I was puzzled, but assumed that whatever it was would be cleared by the verger. The Vicar's Warden arrived and greeted me. We exchanged pleasantries. Then he said, "Do you have a prayer for the plough?" The plough? The light dawned. The rusted bicycle was an ancient plough! The day itself was Rogation Sunday from the Latin verb rogare, meaning "to ask". Rogation Sunday was the day in April when the congregation prayed God for the sowing of seed and a bountiful harvest. I scrambled for an appropriate prayer from the old 1662 Prayer Book and found one that seemed to satisfy everybody. "English pagans", I muttered to myself, but there were 60 people in the congregation, not six!
This Rogation Sunday was far more important to these farmers than Christmas and Easter combined! Since their direct ancestors had made it arable land in pre-Christian times, they had made a ritual out of the blessing of the plough. It was their hope and their survival. It wasn't for them a "meaningless" ritual, but rather a central part of the meaning of their lives. For all I knew as I prayed the blessing, they were silently thinking pagan thoughts! This story witnesses to the deep-seatedness of certain rituals and it speaks of their staying power. To me, the blessing was superstitious, but harmless to them. It was the central act of the passing year. A ritual like that for me, as a half-pagan Scot, is the moment of the passing of the old year into the new. It is not a matter of frivolity, but of profound introspection. Rituals are either self-authenticating or they are nonsense. They either carry or do not carry real meaning, but I do not believe that a real discussion about religious truth ends with a discussion of ritual.
The impact of the modern rational and technological world has left the old religious world of ritual in fragments. True, liturgical churches carry on with their settled symbols and ceremonies, but make less and less impact on the modern mind. We tend to see rituals as vestiges of an outmoded religion devoid of any real meaning they may have had. The Protestant Reformation grasped this - and rid worship of all unnecessary symbols and ceremonies of ritualistic implication - meaning really the ways in which the gods were appeared in primitive thought. This brings me to my second story about ritual before I conclude with some final thoughts on the business of ritual and its role, or non-role, in our own minds. At John Hopkins, I taught a three-week course on "Liberal Protestantism and Unitarianism". For the next three week, a young Roman Catholic Priest gave lectures on Roman Catholicism. For the following three weeks, a Rabbi spoke of Judaism. Then on the tenth week, we had a panel of all three clergy. I had looked forward to this. It was a wonderful group of people, mostly mainline Christians and cultural Jews, older people, very thoughtful folks whom, I was sure, would have profound questions to ask.
The only question from the class was "What is the role of ritual in your own religion?" The Rabbi leapt in enthusiastically. He said, "Our people are coming back to Judaism because we are stressing our Jewish rituals again. The days when the Jewish Reformed Service looked like a Protestant church on a Sunday morning are gone. We have returned to our heritage!" At first, the Roman Catholic Priest was non-plussed by the question. Then, he talked about the seven sacraments and how they were the necessary rituals for the different events of life - baptism, marriage, death, penance, the mass, ordination, and the last rites. My heart sank. Here was a golden opportunity to discuss religion as the quest for meaning; the opportunity to distinguish sense from nonsense in religion; the opportunity to get into some real religious philosophy and a bit of creative controversy! How does my given religion try to justify its truth claims in the face of the modern world where the majority of good people are humanistic, agnostic or outright atheist? How does a given religion deal with the challenges of science, psychology, and social justice? I mean the seminar was not meant to be a catechism of the obvious and the ancient, but of some kind of graduate enquiry; some discussion, purely of basic issues of belief and disbelief in a highly uncertain world; a recognition that most of the Western World have moved into a post-Christian world - a world in which many people even affirm the death of God.
For my own part, I apologized for being the death-head at this feast of cult and sacrament! I pointed out that I had belonged to two traditions, the Presbyterian and the Unitarian, which had absolutely no place for ritual as Jews and Catholics understood it. The gaunt churches of old Scotland and New England, including the Unitarians (the heirs of the old Puritans and their buildings), were very simple and austere. In no sense could ritual add to worship, but could only be a superstitious or sentimental impediment to the real quest for truth - not ritualistic, quasi-magic appeasement of divinity. We had dignified ceremonies, not ritual. I think this distinction remains valid if we think of what ritual means in our congregation or any other, of whatever tradition. The Protestant Reformation grasped the potential for religious hypocrisy and self-deception where rituals are involved. The God of Isaiah says to his people in The Book of the Prophet Isaiah (14-18):
"New moons and Sabbaths and assemblies, sacred seasons and ceremonies, I cannot endure. I cannot tolerate your new moons and your festivals; they have become a burden to me and I can put up with them no longer. When you lift your hands outspread in prayer, I will hide my eyes from you. Though you offer countless prayers, I will not listen. Put away the evil of your deeds, away out of my sight. Cease to do evil and learn to do right, pursue justice and champion the oppressed; give the orphan his rights, please the widow's cause."
I'd be a hypocrite to deny that simple ritual - as simple as possible - is sometimes appropriate. I was moved by the simple guard around the grave of the Unknown Warrior at Arlington by the Marines. The Pledge of Allegiance is appropriate. I was moved by the great ritual procession of the U.S. Military across the bridge at Arlington to bury the Unknown Warrior from the Vietnam War. These things in the modern age are poignant fragments. The problem is that the Humpty- Dumpty of the older sense of ritual has fallen from the wall and has had a great fall and for modern men and women it can't be put together again. I don't want to be drawn to Judaism or Catholicism because I need their ritual - back to the Torah or the Tomb of the unknown Jesus. I'll cherish certain rituals and persons in my life if they have meaning and so will you, as individuals, but always remembering that one person's cherished ritual maybe another person's nonsense.
The whole point of valid ritual is that it has deeply felt meaning. It's the sense of meaning that creates appropriate ritual, rarely the other way around. I'm mildly appalled when fellow-UUs talk of the need for us to develop new rituals. Now, I think Uuism has a role in creating community in a fragmented world. I think spontaneous, simple ceremonies are sometimes appropriate. For me, the problem with rituals is that once established they're so difficult to get rid of! To me, religion in its deepest sense is not the cultivation of ritual, or even of community, but the continuing concern that we satisfy our need for moral and intellectual truth and of course, the service of our neighbor. What is at stake is the intellectual, emotional integrity of our religious and/or humanistic beliefs. "Nothing," says Emerson, "is at last sacred, but the integrity of your own mind." The stakes for intellectual honesty and social justice could not be higher.