Caring Liturgies: The Pastoral Power of Christian Ritual

Introduction

1 What can I do? My wife just had a miscarriage—it was to have been our first baby. She is disconsolate and we both feel so alone. I love her so much, and I would do anything to comfort her! Isn’t there something I could do to help her? Doesn’t the church have some kind of ritual to help me love her and comfort her in this terrible time? Pastor, something has changed in me. I’m turning my life over—I’m going to give it to God in the church. I’m not sure what kind of ministry I’m called to, but whatever it is, that’s what I’m going to do. Could we celebrate this in some way? I want my family of faith to know this, to witness my commitment, to pray for me. I just don’t understand it. The preacher says that Christianity is “a way of life” of loving all people, of justice and mercy, of reconciliation. We’re to love the Lord with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. But when the folks in this church try to do that for real, we get little spiritual support. For instance, we do a bang-up job on weddings, but when the honeymoon is over, these new couples are left to fend for themselves, with the congregation doing nothing more to nurture and sustain them through their continuing milestones and struggles. The one thing churches ought to know how to do is celebrate what God is doing in our midst. Can’t we do better than this? Worship as Ritual Understanding and Claiming Ethical Christian Ritual Introduction Caring Liturgies 2 What Is “Ritual”? Christians care deeply about their worship, but many would be dismayed to hear that worship is an instance of the broadly human practice called “ritual,” because the word ritual has mixed connotations, some of which are infelicitous. For some, it implies meaningless, incomprehensible, or rote action: “empty” ritual. In psychology, it is associated with certain pathologically patterned behaviors, such as Lady MacBeth washing her hands repeatedly. It also functions as a technical liturgical term referring specifically to the words said (and not the actions done) when Christians gather for Sunday Mass. Anthropologists study an indigenous culture’s rituals in order to understand their beliefs, values, and kinship relations. In 1972, however, anthropologist Ronald Grimes invited religious scholars to rethink what the study of ritual could reveal not only about other cultures’ religions but also about our own. Grimes opened up a new way to study Christian and Jewish worship by approaching it the way anthropologists have approached primitive cultures’ worship: in its enactment, seeking to learn what it might reveal about beliefs, values, and relationships. Grimes’ seminal work in the then-new field called “ritual studies” led Jews and Christians to view worship more humbly, as practices that are part of the broader human category of ritual.1 Grimes was interested not only in common rituals of various religions , but was aware of the numinous aspect of certain behaviors that may not be officially sanctioned by an authorized religious or denominational group. For example, “liturgy” implies a worship service with a repeated structure. Then what does one call a rite that may be done only once? If “worship” implies what Christians do together on Sundays, then what does one call a devotional gathering, perhaps in a home, perhaps on a Tuesday? What about rites that may not be public worship but, rather, private and confidential? Further, would there be ways to study Christian or Jewish worship with some ideological distance, just as one would study worship in, say, an indigenous Samoan setting? For this to happen, it became necessary to give up earlier prejudicial thinking that Christian worship is its own category, and instead, to study worship as an instance of something all human cultures do: ritual. This book draws upon ritual studies, along with liturgical theology , to offer principles for the making of rites that could respond to the needs expressed in the opening anecdotes: rites of transition and healing that may be one-time events particular to a person, a congregation, or a Worship as Ritual 3 situation. To provide the ritual basis for these principles, I begin with a synopsis of some insights from ritual studies, to show not only how ritual works in general, but also why it is...