With the closing ceremony of the Olympics complete, we’re now released from the 2010 games. We take the stories with us, but it’s time to move on. A closing ritual helps us go forward when something good is over. The games are declared closed, but the ceremony also points toward the next host city, and the gathering four years distant.
The pair of opening and closing ceremonies marks a container for the experience, elevating the events they frame. We need a moment at the beginning to say, “Let the games begin.” It helps us see the undertaking as part of something larger. We need closure at the end, a way to hold together the diverse events in a unified experience, making them part of us before we let them go.
Our lives hold many small rituals for beginnings and endings: lighting the Christmas tree, the last night of vacation, baseball’s opening pitch, a minister’s benediction, housewarmings, graduations, groundbreakings, memorials. We set those times apart because we know they’re important. At the same time, we are reminded they’re important because we set them apart.
Even our simple routines at the day’s opening and closing matter. These rituals reassure us as we gather strength in the morning. In the evening, looking back on our efforts for better or worse, they help us put the day to rest. Sunrise and sunset, though they rarely delineate our waking and sleeping, nonetheless offer a relevant ceremony. They form a vessel that contains our lives—a day—to lift up for a blessing, or healing, in grief or gratitude.
A day has meaning. It’s what a life is made of. So I’m considering ways to mark the day’s opening and closing with a small, sustainable, and meaningful ritual.
Does it work to make one up or does it need to evolve naturally? How does a ritual become meaningful?
I think ritual derives its meaning from the content it addresses. We make rituals out of things like grief, fear, relationships, the passage of time, etc. There is nothing more boring to me than empty rituals which long ago lost contact with the underlying content which created them. One of my favorite rituals when I was raising my children was the family evening meal. I enforced it rigorously. “You will be home in time to eat supper with us or else…” It was practical and functional in many ways, but it was also a ritual symbolic of our identity as a family. Even though my sons are now young adults, we still share an evening meal together often, and we enjoy what I think are strong relationships within the family. Doing the evening meal ritual for twenty five years is a part of that.
The “ritual” of eating fish on Friday practiced by many Roman Catholics is one that seems to be an empty ritual which has no scriptural or faith basis, and is far removed from the historical content of it which was to help French fishermen who were in a depression back in the middle ages. I have problems with infant baptism. It doesn’t square well with the New Testament record, and I never have been really clear about what we are saying and what the point is when we baptize an infant who isn’t really conscious of what’s happening. Why does the president of the United States throw out the first baseball on opening day, but not the first football or basketball? Why does the United States Marines dress blue uniform include a pair of white gloves? Why exactly, do we hang stockings on the fireplace at Christmas? There are a lot of empty rituals out there which seem to clutter our lives and waste time, and we do them without reflection.
My own personal “opening of the day” ritual is to go out on my back porch and smoke a cigarette. If I don’t do that, my whole day is a mess. Then I get the coffee and the newspaper. I do these things every single day, perhaps not the healthiest of rituals, but it’s what works for me.
I know what you mean about the ritual of family meals– during my children’s years at home that was important to me, too. It takes some work to keep that one going, but I think it was worthwhile. Children make the need for ritual and routine so clear. We all have it, but it’s magnified in them. Maybe in looking after their needs we’re caring for ourselves, too.
Meaning seems to accrue from repetition for them, too. I remember my daughter’s insistence when she was younger that particular Christmas decorations belonged where she remembered them being before. And in the same way, whether or not stockings seem inexplicable, they’re part of Christmas. It makes no sense to hold onto empty rituals that truly no longer serve, but making that judgment and breaking with the past is difficult. Especially when there are few enough things we agree to hold onto.
A good ritual is a comfort, a brief experience of relaxing into what we know is to be done. Like your morning routine. Or turning on All Things Considered and preparing dinner. I wouldn’t mind having more times of slipping into the routine and feeling that all is right with the world.
I greet each morning with the words, “I greet this day with joy for I am blessed.” Then I say a prayer to the effect of “God may a I be a part of what you have in mind for this day.” That’s my way of trying to get in a mindset of surrendering, so that I am not trying to tack God on to my agenda, but rather that I am trying to discern his movement and work within that flow. I saw a bumper sticker that once said, “If God is your co-pilot switch seats.” My prayer of surrender is and effort to switch seats.
I don’t have a clean closing on the day, but may come up with one now. I typically read my Bible, shift to reading something else until I am sleep and then fall asleep praying.
My experience has been that the meaningfulness of ritual is primarily a matter of the awareness and intention we bring to it. Words and motions without mindful intent are just words and actions. That said, I think there are times in our lives that all we bring to the table is an ability to go through the motions and that isn’t entirely a bad thing.
Thank you for today’s reading. I need to give better thought and care to how I end my day and I was missing this. Peace.
I think that trying to discern God’s movement and go with that flow is the best of approaches, no matter what the ritual may be that represents that intention. And as you point out, in those times when it’s hard to connect with our best intentions, a familiar ritual can help. Each supports the other.
I like to end the day looking back over what has happened, the challenges and how I responded, what touched me, what’s memorable– trying to see the movement of the spirit in the unfolding of the day. It’s basically the Ignatian practice of the daily examen. It’s a ritual of thought, or prayer, but not of action. That’s probably part of why washing my face and brushing my teeth feels so important, too.
Thanks for sharing your experience. Peace be with you, as well.
The idea of closing ritual makes me think about something that comes up in my Sunday job as an Episcopal choir director.
When you work in the church, you’re a professional ritualist or liturgist. The root sense of the word liturgy is ‘the work of the people’, and my rector’s definition of that is helpful and instructive: the work of the people is the work of the passages of human life, daily, from birth through death.
But all of the sacramental liturgies , from baptism to the anointing of the sick, are explicitly about inclusion and incorporation. The trouble with this is that the most difficult work that the people have to do is the work of letting go; of giving up what is not going to return in this world. Saying goodbye. The church offers no sacramental or liturgical help for this. The prayer book is even careful to point out that the funeral liturgy is an Easter liturgy and thus first and foremost about the incorporation of the departed soul into the greater and eternal whole.
But that is more God’s work than the people’s, it seems to me. The people, whose work sometimes is the work of letting go of what is never going to return, are given little ritual help or direction for what may be the most inescapable and difficult work of all.
The church, focused on inclusion and incorporation, does not know how to end things, and lacks any ritual vocabulary for doing so. (When circumstance forces it to, it often behaves badly) It is as if the institution believes it can only breathe in and never exhale, and, in this world earthly, that is not possible.
I think it’s true that among the most difficult things we do is letting go. Whether we must let go at the death of a loved one, a stage of life, an expectation, a dearly-held illusion, or any of the other endless possibilities, it’s hard to do.
It’s been my experience that the ritual of worship can help. A familiar and meaningful liturgy, at its best, can be a comfort during times of loss. It’s a way of participating in a community’s desire for God, and even being carried through the ritual expression of that desire when we don’t have faith on our own.
I haven’t thought before about whether worship liturgy contains a way to say goodbye. Perhaps it doesn’t explicitly do so. But by incorporating the psalms that ask for help and consolation, and scripture that assures us that God will comfort us in our loss, there are ways that worship can give voice to our needs.
I like the perspective that your rector offers as to the meaning of liturgy, its resonance with the passages of human life. I wonder if such an insightful leader would be willing to help design a ritual for endings, which could be used in an occasional special service to honor the difficult task of letting go. It seems to me like an interesting possibility to explore.