Let’s All Do Our Part in Re-spiritualizing American Rituals

Photo by Rahel Daniel on Unsplash

As part of our new normal, holding greater reverence to the art of ritual in our day-to-day lives.

We live in a pretty chaotic world. Right now, it’s feeling even more chaotic. With life continuing to exist up-side-down with the pandemic and the stay at home orders and as we get ready to head into the presidential election season, our institutions feel like they are falling apart and we have all been feeling individually out of sorts as life continues to crumble, be transformed and emerge into the something new that has not yet gotten traction.

If we zoom out further, for many of us pre-covid (and a number of people during) life in this modern world has put a lot of pressure on us to run around all the time, work hard, play hard, own lots of stuff, travel and see everything we can, own nice houses and make lots of money. This is intense to make this all happen and this pressure takes a toll on our health, wellbeing and mentally can be discouraging to feel like one is not hitting all the marks.

That is why stepping out of the energetic frequency of work and pressure is so very important. This is where the art and act of ritual comes into play. In America, we have plenty of rituals such as birthday parties, graduations, baby showers, weddings, etc… that all have the potential to take us out of the ordinary and into a meaningful and significant experience within our lives.

However, we have reached a point in our society where we have lowered the frequency of our rituals to match our modern world energetic resonance and thus have hallowed out and dropped their value as authentic life experiences.

What do I mean by all of this? Rituals at the origin of the word (from the Latin word ritus) are meant to take us through some kind of ‘ceremony or custom’. Another root of the word means ‘to fit together.’ They have been practiced for centuries for such experiences as coming of age transitions (think quinceanera or bar or bat mitzvah) to rituals that mark the beginning of a year, blessings of new spirts coming into the world and spirits passing into the afterlife. Essentially rituals happen at major life transitions from beginning of life, initiation into another phase of life, marriages, and to mark the end of life or for a death. These are opportunities to honor the particular rites of passage through acts of witness, ceremony, sacred invocation, gift exchange and celebration.

When rituals are performed in a powerful way, they take us into a trance like state, they take us out of the ordinary and into a timeless state of being and they inspire and enrich our lives at that moment and can even leave all that are fortunate to join a powerful echo for some time afterwards.

Rituals at their heart allow us to fit life together again or tie us together after a transition has taken place in a deep meaningful way. As a human race, we have long practiced both religious and civic rituals. These special practices that bring groups of people together, take us out of our mundane and logical life and connect us with the heartfelt and divine.

The problem is that previously mentioned our modern world has evolved and placed utmost importance on getting faster, accomplishing more stuff, accumulating more things and seeing and doing as much as possible, that we have to some degree streamlined our rituals and materialized them; instead of truly honoring their meaning and significance.

Within rituals themselves, we have more so focused on the acts of gift giving and celebration and less on the qualities of witness, ceremony and sacred invocation.

Take for example a wedding. Lots of weddings I have attended in the last number of years are stunningly beautiful and ornate in their different ways with pristine floral arrangements, careful attention to the attire and decorations and things such as the music list and types of food/drink list. Yet it feels like people are trying to outdo their friends, make for bigger and more fun parties or for a prettier occasion. The same can be said of something like a baby shower. I have actually considered shying away from some of the baby showers I have been invited to the last few years over not wanting to attend an event that has the potential to be meaningful, but feels surface level and inauthentic. I’m referring to the mundane games like guessing the kind of candy bar in the “dirty diaper” to lots of cute food and drinks, presents and small talk without the chance for meaningful talk about the being that is about to come into the world and the changes that will take place from this new life on its way. I understand there are many people out there who celebrate birthdays, weddings, baby showers and other common rituals with a higher degree of spirituality and reverence for the transition that is being marked and so I do not in any way want to offend.

However, I believe many of us have more development to explore within this terrain and with the shift that has come about from the pandemic and what feels like an opportunity to realign our values and practices on an individual, collective and societal level. I feel this brings the opportunity for all of us to revisit the ways in which we carry out ritual.

This can involve designing the ritual from the start with consciousness and care or as a participant, inviting an inquiry as the event is happening for how to evoke greater meaning and depth. I know this is not always easy and I too have certainly fallen short at times! That said, I personally am in the midst of this inquiry with launching Moon Circles and giving lots of thought to how to carry our each session in a special and authentic manner. I have also been diligently planning with Liz Smith a Grief Ceremony that will be happening soon to honor the grief many have been experiencing from the coronavirus pandemic and our stay at home orders. I am on this path as much as everyone else with the challenge of bringing spirit to certain special marked occasions in our modern world that constantly pressures us to carry out things faster and with more flare.

Despite the modern world we live in that can pressure us in different ways, I invite you all to consider all the different rituals you have in our life — from birthdays, fellow employees coming or leaving your workplace, to weddings, etc… — and inquire how you can steward them in a way that honors the sacred passage unfolding and give careful attention to creating a soulful celebration.

Instead of buying that one more cool gift for your friend for their next birthday party or planning your next baby shower with the same itinerary that others have used, take the opportunity to get present to what your celebrating, the uniqueness of that individual or group and consider how you might deepen the experience and honor the sacredness of the special passage that is being marked.

You may even want to enlist the help of someone like myself or a different ritual leader that can help you design your experience in a way that connects to spirit in a deeper way as part of the experience. It is really up to all of us in this new frontier that is emerging, to hold reverence to the art of ritual in our day to day lives and take the extra effort to carry them out in a meaningful and significant way. These rituals in our lives are rites of passage that have the potential to be truly amazing, powerful and extraordinary for all of us.