Comments on “What ritual feels like when it works”

I’d like to add or make more explicit something that is perhaps covered under the community building aspects you describe for ritual, that I heard from Jill Purce. She said (something like) the community comes together and provides witness for a change that takes place in the participants, in order to acknowledge and support them in their new status. For example, the guests at a wedding see the bride and groom transform through the ritual from single people to a married couple, and are then as the couple’s community of friends and family relate to them in their new state. Which is not to say there aren’t all sorts of exceptions to that example… So similarly some sort of transformative spiritual flavored ritual has the participants witnessing each other doing the work or having the experience of going through the ritual process and then supporting each other as a community as individuals that have transformed themselves by that process.

Hi David.
My 10 year old daughter was asked by a Christian friend , “What her family believed in?”, and my daughter replied ,”We don’t believe in anything”.
When my wife told me this story, I had to laugh. My wife and I are non-religious and that’s the way we’ve raised our daughter.
When I was my daughter’s age, my family lived in an urban environment that can only be described as bleak. I was raised Catholic and I remember the Catholic rituals as an escape from the drabness of my urban environment. These Catholic rituals were magical for me.
The church, itself, was like a palace compared to the buildings which surrounded it. The colorful silk and satin clothes the priest wore, the gold chalice and other instruments, organ music, singing, and incense combined to produce a “richness”, which everyday city life lacked.
Rituals have the power of raising the mundane to the level of the sacred. I have no regrets about bringing up my daughter in a secular way, but ritual can be a beautiful thing to an impressionable child. Unfortunately the ritual I’m speaking of came with dogma and closed-mindedness.

What ritual did Buddha perform? Any idea about it.

To me the rituals are like a utensil where we put things to eat. Without a utensil one cannot take food.
The music distracts one’s mind from the message of the discourse that is being delivered or the scripture that is being read to the audience.
I think one should concentrate on the message rather than the outer form of the presentation. The ritual should be simple and convenient.

Hey David,

I liked the podcasts but as they have no comment section (I think) I came here instead. It seems to me as if the question of relevance is an important issue here. Relevance at personal, group, soteriological, and cultural levels. Orienting our sense of what needs to be done along such lines, while not necessarily the most effective, at least helped me to understand better how the discussion could be framed.

I actually have a lot of questions rather than anything substantially thought through to add but I know that’s fine with you. I wonder about your comment that when a ritual works ‘it’s intensely meaningful’, what makes it so? Obviously a multilayered question but I ask simply to question on what level a ritual needs to be meaningful, or in terms of innovation of ritual how such meaning can be generated, i.e. at the personal, group, soteriological, and cultural levels, and whether such a broad level of meaning can realistically be attained in today’s world (which I think is a biased term btw, though perhaps is simply utilised as shorthand. I mean our world is a relatively small pocket of post-modern technological post-enlightenment such and such, so we’re a minority, I sometimes feel that the term gets used as if that world view should be assumed to be predominant when in fact it is highly specific and relatively small. But perhaps this points to the problem that relevance in ritual needs to be directed both towards the highly specific in terms of culture and the more global domain of human psychology, and I personally assume there is one).

For example, perhaps some group buddhist rituals in our society fulfill the first three categories, the individuals benefit, the group dynamic is satisfied, and as a practice a meaningful impact arises in relation to some stated goal. Culturally however perhaps the meaning of the ritual is ‘in house’ and fails to connect to more general social mores and/or attitudes and lifestyles? Should it do that, should a modern ritual somehow cross the border of the group into society at large not merely as an after effect but as a part of the flavour and/or content of the ritual? Perhaps it would have to to generate interest (and is that the point, simply to generate interest in order to fulfill the first three aims?). In terms of the specificity and atomisation of our society, how could the cross border effect be attained when the more general is eschewed in favour of the microscopic subcultures? Ironic that the general trend is a rejection of generalities, what does that say about society and human psychology, do people want cross border ritual at all? Would they rather it be in house? Is there in this general dismissal an implication that the postmodern is less iconoclastic and more conformist than is sometimes assumed? Accordingly, are these questions (and rituals) rightfully posed towards individuals consciously embarking upon their postmodern lives, or more towards the general social psychology acted out at a more group-think level? Probably both, but how!?

A further point here is how the difficultly (if it is indeed a problem) of cross border meaning was significantly diminished within those societies which birthed buddhism and buddhist cultures. I mean, for many of these places the question of personal and cultural was highly blurred in that their rituals automatically assumed cultural significance because they lived in buddhist cultures, at least that’s my assumption. Do we need to address this issue, and if so how do we do it? Another issue in relation to this point is to what end might we address the cultural level of meaning. What are our aims? Do we seek simply to speak to our contemporary culture/s? To affirm them? Do we seek to rehabilitate the trend towards atomisation and/or isolationsim? As a skillful response towards this culture what end does the technology of buddhist ritual set as its aim, i.e. should all four of the categories I mentioned be stated aims (obviously we may well need different categories)? Should, for example, the general psychology of individuals be addressed through cultural specificity, which while fulfilling buddhist soteriological aims, makes no substantive judgment on that culture nor seeks to address cultural content beyond that which arises out of the soteriological goals? Or is that too broad or too complex? Is this too long? Am I losing the thread? Enough questions already?!

O.k., bye for now (that’s not a threat btw)