Liberating Rites

Understanding The Transformative Power Of Ritual

Tom F. Driver

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367010454
• eBook ISBN: 9780429711091
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book shows how necessary ritual is to human freedom and to social processes of liberation. It aims to reflect upon the deep human longing for ritual and to interpret it in the light of our physical, social, political, sexual, moral, aesthetic, and religious existence. .

PART I
Ritual Pathways

1
Introduction

. . . his servants came near and said to him, "My father, if the prophet had commanded you to do some great thing, would you not have done it? How much rather, then, when he says to you, 'Wash, and be clean?'" So he went down and dipped himself seven times in the Jordan, according to the word of the prophet of God; and his flesh was restored like the flesh of a little child, and he was clean.

—2 Kings 5:13-14

Human longing for ritual is deep, and in our culture often frustrated.

The head of a large bank in New York City, much emotion in his voice, told his dinner companions that he had stopped going to Mass because "they have taken the drama out of it." I did not agree with his objection to the liturgical reforms of Vatican II, but I sympathized with his complaint that the ritual life in the churches—his Catholic, mine Protestant—is impoverished.

A number of women I know have quit going to church because they are not welcome as ritual leaders. The Catholic ones cannot get ordained, and the Protestants have trouble finding posts as ministers. These women feel "ritually abused."¹ Although the rites are very meaningful to them, they are controlled in such a way as to make women victims. I know many gays and lesbians who feel the same way. Their anguish is great because in addition to all kinds of social ostracism, they experience a barrier thrown up against their right to do ritual, which awakens knowledge of how deep their longing for it goes.

A woman has died. Her sister attends the funeral out of duty, not expecting it will do much for her. Sure enough, the service is pro forma, something everybody does at times like this, so hold your breath and go through with it. The ceremony is not in the least transforming, and the sister knows she will have to deal with her grief some other way.

A young mother in the hospital has given birth to her first child. All went well, she is very happy, and feels the need to express her joy in some sort of observance. A hospital chaplain (male, as usual) comes in, smiles at her good news, and immediately loses interest. The woman asks for a brief prayer service but he dashes off, saying that he has to attend to those who are sick. Neither she nor her friends know any rituals of thanksgiving for the birth of a child, and now she weeps to realize it.

A couple's marriage ends in divorce. At its start there had been a big wedding, into which a lot of time, talent, money, and care had gone. Scores of friends and relatives came, dancing far into the night. Now there is nothing but lawyers, courts, and papers. The same church that helped them to ritualize their marriage with gusto now looks the other way. There is no ritual anybody can perform to do something about the couple's sense of failure and guilt, nor to initiate the children into their new, frightening situation. Frustration and anguish hang over everyone like a dismal cloud, and no shaman comes with a billow of witnesses to beat drums, sing loud songs, draw magic circles, and blow that cloud away.

Young men and young women reach the age of sexual "maturity" (as it is rather optimistically called) but do not live in a culture that provides them any ritual pathways for becoming sexually mature. So they become simply active. When their situation is complicated by poverty, racism, broken homes, or drugs, it can seem a trackless waste.

To lose ritual is to lose the way. It is a condition not only painful and pathetic but also dangerous. Some people it destroys. As for the whole society, sooner or later it will find rituals again, but they may be of an oppressive rather than a liberating kind. Rituals have much to do with our fate.

The purposes of this book are several: to reflect upon the deep human longing for ritual; to interpret it in the light of our physical, social, political, sexual, moral, aesthetic, and religious existence; and to urge a reform of our ritual life, especially in religion, so that our longing for ritual and our longing for freedom may come together. It is a tragedy they were ever split. With enough knowledge and discipline, we can do something about it.

The book's research and writing have been an attempt to understand why, after all, we human beings are forever doing rituals. A great number of people, perhaps the majority in Western society, either take rituals for granted, raising few questions about them, or else try to avoid them. If, however, one begins to ask questions about ritual life, a door is opened to an immense terrain both familiar and mysterious. We are such stuff as ritual performances are made of, and these, like our dreams, would, if we knew their source, tell us much about what we are.

Upon reflection, is it not odd that human beings, in all societies, everywhere and in all ages, have engaged in the making and performing of rituals? Why have they done this, when life is full of dangers and challenges that would seem to require more practical kinds of activity? Contrary to common-sense expectation, rituals are not, in most cases, the product of affluence and leisure. Indeed, they seem to be born out of necessity, like an invention of that stern mother; and the people who best know that life is difficult are the ones most likely to cleave to ritual and make it work for them.

When John F. Kennedy was shot one Friday in Dallas, Texas, in 1963, the churches in the land were full the next Sunday. Preachers are tempted to give this a theological explanation, saying that the people, in their grief and fear, felt a need of God; but it may be closer the mark to suppose that the gut-level need was for ritual. Aside from the pictures of the President's motorcade under attack by gunfire, and later the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald point blank, the most memorable images from that traumatic time are of the funeral cortege in procession through the streets of Washington, D.C. "The weight of this sad time we must obey," someone says at the end of King Lear, "Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say." At such times the impulse toward ritual is not so much to speak as to act: act what we feel, not what we ought to do.

Yet that is an odd thing for me to say. For in many peoples' minds— people somewhat out of touch with ritual life, I think—a ritual is indeed what one is obligated to do, not what one feels like doing. Perhaps it is both, depending on the circumstance and the angle of vision. Here is one of many ambiguities we shall come upon while pondering the use and abuse of ritual.

If the main purpose of this book is to inquire broadly into the place of ritual in human life, a second purpose is to consider rituals as part of religious life and to suggest a way of thinking about them that may foster their revitalization. To speak of ritual is not necessarily to speak of religion. Conversely, religion is not always thought of as ritual but perhaps as faith or theological opinion or the leading of an ethical life.

It has been truly argued, for example in a splendid book by David Kertzer on Ritual, Politics, and Power, that political life depends upon ritual every bit as much as does religion.² There are also rituals—such as birthday parties with their cakes, candles, cards, gifts, and songs—so much a part of social life that, as one author has noted, they do not require any formal instruction.³

Our study of rituals in religious life will place them in a context as wide as the whole of human existence. That is, we shall show that the making of rituals has not come from religion as such but from the evolution of the human species, an evolution that has both biological and cultural aspects. This being so, it is difficult, perhaps impossible, and certainly unwise for human beings to attempt to engage in social and political life, or establish intimate relations, or educate the young, or have a religious life, or to make and enjoy artistic things without also making and performing rituals. Rituals belong to us, and we to them, as surely as do our language and culture. The human choice is not whether to ritualize but when, how, where, and why.

The close association between religion and ritual is one of those often taken-for-granted subjects that needs to be asked about. I intend to ask in connection with my own religious tradition, which is Christian. I am hoping that the non-Christian reader, or the alienated Christian, will find my reflections upon ritual in general to be of interest in their own right. The person who, either from inside or outside, is concerned about the moral and spiritual health of Christianity is invited to follow my steps from the general to the particular, to entertain a vision of what Christian ritual could be if people were persuaded to play it, like very good music, in a new key. Even better: like variations upon a theme.

During the first part of my life, "ritual" seemed a dreary subject. That this has recently changed, that it has turned around at the very time when my social and religious ideas have become not more conservative but more radical, is for me a source of amazement; yet I sense that many others are making similar discoveries. Wishing I had made them when I was young, I realize today that I grew up in a milieu that did not encourage such thought, being too Protestant, too middle-class American, too much involved with having the right ideas, and too little interested in, even wary of, the things we learn through performance.

My religious heritage, which was that of Methodism in the American South, kept its distance from the word "ritual." We had "worship services," or "church services," or just plain "church," but not "rituals." Whatever they were called, as a child, I found them every bit as boring as they were obligatory for the members of my dedicated family. In our language "church service" referred to something God-given and true, while "ritual" was viewed with suspicion as some kind of esoteric activity practiced by people of "other faiths"—that is (in the order of their remoteness from our horizon) by Anglicans, Roman Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and all manner of pagans. I might now be ashamed to recall this Bible-belt attitude were it not for the fact that it carried within itself a hostility toward ritual that has been widespread in the culture, having roots not only in Protestant iconoclasm but also in the antireligious rationalism of the Enlightenment.

Except on rare occasions, church worship services proved no less tiresome to me as an adult than when I was a restless child. Nevertheless—or perhaps, as I sometimes think, because of this—I accepted a "call to the ministry." In that role I could stave off boredom by taking part in the leadership. After a time, however, even this ego boost stalled out in an atmosphere of increasingly pompous repetitiveness. I realized I would have to get out or look into the matter more deeply. But I resisted this looking for a long time.

At its most elemental level, this book is a response to what I shall call "ritual boredom." That is, a condition in which people have become fundamentally weary of the rituals available to them for giving their lives shape and meaning. I have mentioned its occurrence in church, but it is more widespread even than that. Political ritual in America is so vacuous that it has ceased to inspire most of the electorate to vote. Television is usually blamed for this, but it may be that TV is more the scapegoat than the culprit. Cameras may be used in all sorts of ways on all sorts of subjects. It seems likely that the kind of sound-bite political broadcasting we are used to is an ill-conceived attempt to fill a vacuum created by society's massive ritual boredom.

The causes of this boredom seem to me twofold: Either the rituals, in their form, content, and manner of performance, have lost touch with the actualities of people's lives and are thus simply arcane; or else the people have lost the ability to apprehend their very need of ritual, do not see what rituals are good for, and thus do not find them even potentially valuable. Often these two causes are present together. The second I call "ritual misapprehension." Its widespread occurrence in industrialized societies is one of the reasons that time-honored rituals often cease to change and fail to stay in touch with what people experience in the "real" world.

There are, then, two endemic ritual maladies that need address. First, many of the rituals that are available to people in our society are indeed dull and boring. We need either to find substitutes for them or learn how to revivify their form, content, and performance values. Second, many people do not understand what rituals do and why they are a necessary part of human life. This "ritual misapprehension" needs, as far as possible, to be corrected.

The tasks are more easily named than performed. Attempting to find a cure for the ritual impoverishment of our society, which extends into many churches, synagogues, and temples, we must avoid superficiality. Ritual impoverishment has many causes, and these reach into the cultural, political, moral, esthetic, and theological dimensions of our common life. To take a critical look at our relation to ritual is to call into question our existence in the world.

While the creation and performance of rituals belongs to what is best in human life, I have found it necessary also to keep in mind the power of rituals to do harm. At the present time, when many individuals and groups are finding rituals essential to renewed life, other people engage in ritualized acts of violence, including murder. Ritualized abuse can occur not only in Satanic cults but also, under certain circumstances, in church, synagogue, or temple.⁴ Since people need ritual so much, it can, like sexual desire, be used as a weapon against them. Trusting a man she finds attractive, many a woman has found herself abused and perhaps raped by him; and those who long for ritual can find this longing used by people in power to keep them down (on their knees).

Rituals are like works of art in that no correlation exists between their power and their morality, and yet a society can scarcely exist, let alone be good, without fostering their growth. We might say a similar thing about religion, too, indeed any of the cultural activities of human beings: That they are necessary to our goodness does not mean that their every particular instance is good. As the devil can quote scripture or wear the mask of a saint, so there is nothing to stop wrongdoers from enacting quite marvelous rituals. Mahatma Gandhi was a consummate ritualist but so was Hitler's minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels.

Not forgetting, instead insisting upon, the power of rituals to do harm, my principal moral aim in this book is to show that rituals' power to do good is indispensable. And of the various kinds of good that may be ascribed to them, the one that interests me most is the one that seems the least sung. I am thinking of their liberating power.

Until recently, most educated thought in the Western world, whether liberal or radical, has been under sway of the Enlightenment's opinion that rituals belong to stages of human development destined for obsolescence by the triumph of reason. The liberal theological world has partaken of the same Enlightenment bias, while Protestantism inherited a Puritan suspicion of rituals as pagan, idolatrous, and popish. The chief result of such attitudes has been to leave interest in rituals in conservative hands. Mostly unchallenged is the assumption that rituals, by their very nature, either perpetuate the status quo or, worse, serve reactionary causes.

This particular form of ritual misapprehension seems now to be changing. One sign of the change is the rediscovery of ritual by the religious wing of the women's movement. Confronted with massive patriarchal resistance in the churches, women who struggle for the right to fulfill their call to religious leadership have found the performance of long-suppressed rituals (from the old Wicca traditions) and the making of newly improvised rituals to be invaluable for maintaining their solidarity, courage, and imaginative resource. As one group has written: "Ritual is the license we give one another and God to don bright colors and move in circles and claim this moment as a kairos. Only where there is death does ritual cease. Without it we literally die."⁵

Similarly, the Civil Rights Movement discovered in the 1950s and 1960s that much of its power came from the ritual traditions of the black church, which it could call upon and adapt when the time came to march in the streets. As Taylor Branch has shown in Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63, this is not merely a matter of whipping up the crowds but of tapping into deep moral roots and effecting, in a certain measure, a re-formation of the human spirit.

Rituals belonging to popular religion have had a prominent role during the last thirty or so years when the poor in Latin America, Asia, and Africa have risen up against economic, political, and military oppression. Where people are in movement, whether in a liberative or a reactionary direction, ritual is likely to be their strong ally. It...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• part I: Ritual Pathways
• part II: Modalities of Performance
• part III: Ritual's Social Gifts
• CONCLUSION
• APPENDIXES
• Notes
• References
• Index