A Life of Ritual and Reason

Rev. Douglas Taylor

12-17-23

Sermon video: https://youtu.be/XuSzm2soTxU

Many Unitarian Universalists are not exactly “religious” in the way so many religious people use the term. We tend toward a rational and scientific outlook. At one point, a few generations back our rational and iconoclastic tendencies grew a bit extreme. As we went smashing through old dogma and repressive traditions, we challenged anything that had the whiff of ritual or ceremony. We would not be saddled with empty symbolism and meaningless sacrament. We would not be told what to do or what to believe, thank you very much. More recent generations have a more tempered perspective about ritual and other embodied spiritual practices.

Over the past few decades, we’ve been lighting chalices in worship, doing check-ins at meetings, and lighting candles during our time of Joys and Sorrows. I remember attending an installation service for an elder colleague almost 25 years ago. He had begun his ministry back in the 70’s. The good reverend was being installed as the new minister in a nearby church. The service was underway and it was suddenly clear that the person who was going to light the chalice was not in the room – likely stuck in traffic instead. The lead minister looked around the room, shrugged and said, “let’s skip that part.” And they did.

I remember at the time feeling unsettled by the dismissal of the chalice lighting. I like rituals and appreciate their value. I was unsettled by the dismissal of the chalice lighting not because I thought it was sacrilege or irreverent, but because if we are going to have a symbol present and a ritual planned around that symbol, then we should follow through with it. And if it is unimportant and meaningless, something we can just skip over, then why bother including it in the first place?

Here’s what I think shifted in Unitarian Universalism: it wasn’t so much that in the past we didn’t want rituals and religious ceremonies, and now we do. It was a refusal of empty rituals and meaningless ceremonies. We didn’t want to be going through the motions just because that’s the way it had always been done. The rituals ought to mean something. And they ought to mean something of value to us. Today, the act of lighting the chalice is seen as a meaningful and important part of our weekly gathering.

Many Unitarian Universalists have found our faith after having left a previous religious tradition. The departure is typically around a disconnect with values and belief. When we talk about rituals and ceremony as UUs now, it is important to notice that for many people, those traditional rituals and ceremonies, while comforting, were done in the service of those values and beliefs that no longer fit. And by association, those rituals and ceremonies no longer fit or offer comfort.

In the reading this morning, from Jennifer Michael Hecht’s new book The Wonder Paradox, we heard the author frame our question for non-religious people, for folks who refused the supernatural, asking – what about those useful comforting aspects of religion? Must we refuse those as well? Can non-religious people have some meaningful rituals in our lives and still have our integrity of belief or non-belief?

We Unitarian Universalists ask a similar question with a nuance. We have among us atheists and seekers who hold a non-supernatural outlook, but that is not all we have. We have pagans and people who practice an earth-centered spirituality who see the supernatural saturating our natural world – or if ‘supernatural’ is not an accurate term, at least something more than what science calls natural … saturating our natural world. And some of the theists among us will frame their belief as fully natural and others do not. So, we ask questions similar to Hecht in her book, but with certain nuances of pluralism.

Hecht’s book carries a delightful subtitle: The Wonder Paradox: Embracing the Weirdness of Existence and the Poetry of Our Lives. Life is weird, poetry helps. Her answers are in poetry. Many Unitarian Universalists have long agreed with this sort of answer. Poetry can carry quite profound layers of meaning in some cases, and it can bring quite poignant comfort in some cases as well. Poetry can challenge us or get us thinking or soothe our spirits or help us feel a deep connection.

And, delightfully, Hecht urges us to use poetry in a ritualistic manner. She calls us to develop a ritual pattern for using the poetry, to use poetry in the way religion uses prayers, scripture, and liturgical readings. She suggests that poetry is a form of meaning making and path for comfort amidst the vagaries and weirdness of life.

Did a friend invite you to their wedding? Have you read (p176) Guam Daosheng’s poem, “You and I Song”? Did someone in your life just have a baby? There is a great poem (p192) by Rumi that says “You were born with wings.” Did you just bump into Earth Day on the calendar? Try reading (p155-7) Joy Harjo’s “When the world as we knew it ended.” Are you worried about the fraying of the social contract in our society? Check out (p269-70) Maya Angelou’s excellent poem, “Still I Rise.” Did you just have a brush with mortality and begin pondering the meaning of it all? Go read (p 316) “A Mother in a Refugee Camp” by Chinua Achebe again. Hecht’s book is really a guidebook for crafting your own anthology and practice, a liturgy both intimate and authentic because you have made it yourself.

Last week I spoke of the importance of community. Many people – of whatever theological stripes – recognize the power and importance of religious community. Today, we talk about ritual. And I take my lead from Hecht this morning. I want to open us up to the conversation of ritual in a manner that is fitting, that serves.

Think about our time of Joys and Sorrows. The obvious ritual pieces are the lighting of candles and the reciting of the phrase “You are in our hearts” as a response to each sharing. If you are newer to our congregation, I would like you to know that this ritual has been crafted over several years in conversation. There were times when the Joys and Sorrows time was problematic. People shared on topics that were inappropriate. People would go on and on too long with their sharing. It felt like the time needed a slightly better definition to help it be the rich and potent ritual we knew it could be.

We started tinkering with it. We adjusted the opening instructions several times, trying to find the balance between light-hearted and stern, descriptive and prescriptive. We tried not lighting candles but dropping stones into water instead. We tried having everyone write their Joys and Sorrows in a book that I would read from instead of letting everyone come up individually. We tried adding a responsive phrase after each person spoke, and we went through a handful of different phrases – Hecht would recognize our use of poetry to help experience the ritual.

We arrived at our current model a few years ago. And when the pandemic hit, the whole show was turned upside down again. During the shut down we had no candles, no individual sharing, and no responsive phrase. And one person read out all the offerings at the end of the service following the postlude – which was a pragmatic solution allowing everyone plenty of time to write their Joy or Sorrow into the chat. We still had the sharing, and it was still meaningful. But most of the ritual was drained from it while we were in lockdown.

I think that experience clarified for many people – for me at least – the value of the ritual as we experience it now. We know there is a reason behind it, it’s not an empty or meaningless ritual.

Rituals are meant to be doorways into an experience. But they are not meant to be the experience, just the entrance into it. Rituals open us into deeper realities. Those realities exist with or without the rituals. Unfortunately, the rituals can also exist with or without a connection to the deeper realities. Thus, they can become meaningless or empty rituals. But when the connection is true, rituals serve as a doorway to meaningful spaces.

Rituals are something we enact. We have bodies. A significant part of what is happening in a ritual is that we are not merely thinking about it and about what it means; we are also enacting it. Our bodies are participating. Anyone who has done sports or dance, martial arts or yoga or weightlifting will recognize what I mean when I say: our bodies have a form of knowing, a wisdom – maybe it is more accurate to say our bodies have a connection to our brains that is different than what we often call ‘thinking.’ Our bodies carry memory and wisdom.

Showing up, going through the steps, lighting the candles, ringing the bells, bowing down, saying the words, closing our eyes and sitting in silence – the action we take with our bodies opens us, serves as the entrance point, is the doorway into the spaces of meaning and value. The rituals must be embodied.

Hecht’s advice to the non-religious yearning for comfort and meaning is not simply to go find a good poem. She tells people to read the poem out loud, find a particular place to read the poem, read it again on the anniversary. In other words: enact it, embody it.

In many ways, what Hecht is suggesting for an individual is similar to what we are doing as a community together in this congregation. Our community’s rituals are enacted in our bodies. It’s not enough to only share our Joys and Sorrows with each other. When we do it in the worship service together, we need to embody the work as well. So we light candles and respond with a small slip of poetry for each other.

We light our chalice and each week we say different words, but the words are important. They are a small poem of words we say that mean something – ritual and reason. We extinguish it each week reciting the same poem every week. We have our covenant and doxology words; we sing Spirit of Life together most weeks. I know people have memorized some of these and it can turn into a reciting. It is good to stop every now and then to really consider the words. Do you mean them? Are they still connected to values you actually hold? Is there integrity in the rituals and ceremonies for you? Ritual and reason! The doorways ought to take you somewhere of value, somewhere meaningful.

May the words of our mouths, the meditations of our hearts and minds, lead us deeper in the mysteries and realities that uphold life – that we may live in our integrity and thrive together in life abundant.

In a world without end,

May it be so.