Punctum Saliens

In thinking about my recent post on ritual, it occurred to me that my problem with ritual is that I’m intellectualizing it too much. I am trying to force onto the ritual a meaning which, when absent, leaves me empty. Instead, perhaps, I should be just experiencing the ritual experience — as I said in my post: Just for the hell of it.

Intellectual knowledge and experiential knowledge are two very different beasts. Carl Jung, when talking about using amplification in dream analysis (the process of pulling in collective symbols — mythology, religious, &c.) says that it cannot be done by head-knowledge but only by someone with long experience.

When I was a child, I had all the head knowledge about Christianity. I was the best at Bible drills, could memorize scripture, had all the right answers. But, I had no experience — my personal Christian life was in shambles. My intellectual knowledge allowed me to fool everyone but there was nothing really there.

In The Eight Upanishads it says:

Of these, the lower [knowledge] comprises the Rig Veda, Yajur Veda, Sama Veda, Atharva Veda, the science of pronunciation, &c., the code of rituals, grammar, etymology, metre, and astrology. Then there is the higher [knowledge] by which is realized the Immutable.

(What a great word to describe God: The Immutable.)

With the Bible as with the Upanishads, the real, higher meaning is not learnt from reading, studying the texts, memorizing, &c. The real meaning is learnt by practice, by experiencing God and not by reading about God. The intellectual part is all too simple and all too public and allows us to deceive others all too easily.

I’m not big on ritual. I like the idea of ritual but my idea has always been based on the ritual meaning something. A bit vague, I realize, but …

Growing up, once a month or so we would “celebrate” the Lord’s Supper, a.k.a. take communion. We would drink our grape juice and eat our cracker niblets while sitting in our pew. (Yes, the good ol’ Protestant version of the Eucharist sans kneeling, walking, Latin, &c.) This could have been ritual — should have been a ritual what with the “do this in remembrance of me” and all — but it wasn’t because I was always stuck on the part that came before. I was stuck on the “do not partake unworthily” which, to me, meant “have no unconfessed sin in your life” so I spent the whole time sitting there confessing every sin I could think of. So, this mother (or father) of all rituals was not really a ritual; it was a time to focus on saving my ass from the unpardonable sin (I was a bit naive back then).

We always prayed before most meals but that, too, was a chore to say the “right” words and never “came from the heart.” It was just something we did that embarrassed me when we were out in public. I remember our assistant pastor would do the “long” Sunday morning prayer and mention all the prayer requests: the sick, the missionaries, &c. I would often time his prayers and always giggled to myself when he used the word “unction,” which he did quite frequently. So prayer was never a ritual for me.

Lately, I’ve tried other rituals: journaling in the morning, keeping a paper checkbook, writing my poems and blog posts on paper instead of on the computer. But none of them lasted very long. It was always “easier” to go back to the old habits.

I think my problem has been that I’ve always expected the ritual to mean something and none of these things did. They were meaningless things that I tried to do just for the sake of doing them. But, now I’m starting to think that that’s exactly what a ritual is — a meaningless thing we do just for the hell of it (more or less).

Ram Dass, in The Only Dance There Is, says the ritual, itself, is an offering. The act is an offering. It has nothing to do with my getting something out of it just like an offering is not about receiving but about giving. The ritual is something we give to God. But, he continues, once we realize that I, as the one performing the ritual, and the offering itself and the one to whom the offering is made are all part if “it all,” that it’s like

“[I am] pouring energy into energy for a matter of energy in honoring energy. So big deal, so nothing’s happened. Certainly knocks a hole in orality to start to see the universe that way. What are we doing? Nothing. How could you ever do anything, it’s all here?”

So, I think I need to rethink ritual and try a few new ones on for size — with a new attitude about them.

How about you? What rituals do you regularly do and why?