4. Isn’t Ritual Bad?

Ritual has gotten a bad rap over the years, along with the word “religion”.  They have been accused of being a false spirituality, a fake which real spirituality replaces.  But the fact is, the very people who yell loudest against religion and ritual are deeply entrenched in these practices.

Religion is seeking the Divine.  Anyone who connects with God at some point pursues him*, if only to pray and to give the Spirit one’s intention.  Some who deny religion deny the Divine, but they still seek Truth with the same passion that others pursue God.  Religion is simply a part of us.

Ritual is a meaningful act that we repeat.  We sing the same songs that are important to us, we read the same stories to all of our children, we have the same worn arguments on Facebook.  And these acts make our lives meaningful, we know who we are because we have done them.  Everyone enacts ritual.

So what’s the big deal?  Because some people have claimed more for ritual and religion than they actually can do. 

Some claim that ritual is sufficient to connect to the Spirit.  That isn’t true.  Ritual is a door for our inner life to change, to become something different.   But if all we do is spin a prayer wheel without our inner life being transformed by the act, then the ritual is meaningless.  Empty actions do not change us.  But acts with intention make transformation possible.

Some have claimed that ritual purifies us.  This is not true.  We are purged from guilt or uncleanness by our transformation from evil to good.  But a ritual can lead us to being contrite or repentant, which will purify us.  Ritual is positive if it leads us to an inner transformation. If it just leads to complacency, then it is a negative force in our lives. 

A ritual is like a smile.  A smile communicates happiness.  However, an unhappy person can smile, which makes others think they are happy.  People can get angry at the smile, because it feels like a lie.  However, studies have shown that a smile can often create happiness.  The act often changes the inner position.  Yes, the inner life is shown in our bodies.  But our bodies can also help create the inner life.  It isn’t a one way street.

Even so, ritual can help create an inner life which is what draws the Spirit.  Ritual is nothing without a transformed inner life, but it is an essential tool for achieving it.  So the Spiritual Life is a life of ritual, or discipline, leading to a transformed inner life. 

*The Divine is neither male nor female, or, more likely, both male and female are drawn out of the wholeness that is the Spirit. I use the masculine pronoun for the Spirit as a convenience.  However, there is a really good discussion about how all of humanity is the feminine to the Spirit’s masculine by C.S. Lewis.  Still, I’m just trying to express something without getting tripped up over grammar.  If you feel more comfortable, replace my masculine pronouns with feminine ones.  I’m not using “it”.   For grammatical reasons I am not capitalizing pronouns referring to the Divine, even though I capitalize Spirit and other words I use to represent him.  When you have a Divine who became human, by some who recognize the Divine and others who don’t it gets tricky.  In reality, I just don’t want to have to remember to capitalize every “His” or “Himself” or “Herself.”  It just gets silly.  I’m pretty sure the Divine doesn’t mind that the text isn’t so filled with capital “h”s anyway.