The Rituals of Our Lives

by Rev. Joan Shiels

For HOPE Church November 18, 2007

The Reading

  Excerpted from 2 Chronicles 3:1 – 5:1 

(3) Solomon began to build the house of the Lord in Jerusalem on Mount Moriah, where the Lord had appeared to his father David…. ³These are Solomon’s measurements^* for building the house of God: the length, in cubits of the old standard, was sixty cubits, and the width twenty cubits... ⁹The weight of the nails was fifty shekels of gold… ¹¹The wings of the cherubim together extended twenty cubits: one wing of one, five cubits long, touched the wall of the house, and its other wing, five cubits long, touched the wing of the other cherub. ¹⁴And Solomon^* made the curtain of blue and purple and crimson fabrics and fine linen…¹⁷He set up the pillars in front of the temple, one on the right, the other on the left; the one on the right he called Jachin, and the one on the left, Boaz…(4) He made an altar of bronze, twenty cubits long, twenty cubits wide, and ten cubits high… ⁴It stood on twelve oxen, three facing north, three facing west, three facing south, and three facing east...(5)Thus all the work that Solomon did for the house of the Lord was finished.

The Message

I’m guessing you didn’t like today’s reading. Did it make you uncomfortable? Why? Because  there was only one?  Or because this is one of those dumb bible passages makes you say, “That’s why I don’t read the Bible. It’s full of so much meaningless stuff!”

Well, I made those choices on purpose. I ignored the ritual we have here at Hope of two short readings. And it is a ritual. There’s no rule, anywhere, that says we have to have two short readings, one Biblical and one secular. It’s just the way we do it here. It’s our ritual. And when someone ignores ritual, it makes us uncomfortable.

And that scripture has a great message in it.  It says, loud and clear, HOW YOU DO SOMETHING MATTERS. Solomon’s court couldn’t just put up any old building and call it a temple. There were rituals that had to be observed. How many cubits wide they built it and how many shekels of gold they spent on it, and how the altar was placed and where the cherubim statues stood ---the biblical instructions go on for thousand and thousand of words because IT ALL MATTERS.  Because if they didn’t do it right, it wouldn’t have any meaning.

Maybe we think we are not so picky about building our own temple  (though I suggest we are---any suggestion that these new windows look any different than the old ones was quickly and soundly squashed.) We are just like these Biblical people who lived three thousand years ago. They knew how things should be done, lots of things, almost everything. So they wrote it down. Some of the instructions that direct our lives are written down. But really, not much.  It’s in us. It’s in our rituals

Before I move away from that reading about the building of the temple, let me point out some of the ritual meanings that lie in it. The temple curtain was blue, red and purple. In Jewish tradition, blue represented the heavens, while red or crimson represented the earth. Purple, a combination of the two colors represents a meeting of the heavens and the earth. There were twelve oxen holding up the altar –standing for the twelve  tribes of Israel. The oxen stood facing the four directions, indicating sovreignty over the whole world. Little things matter. Rituals, then and now, are saturated with meaning.

And here we are, mid-November, preparing for the Thanksgiving ritual and then the headlong rush into Christmas. Christmas.  As soon as I say the word you know what you’re going to be doing. Playing the right music.  Buying the appropriate presents. Inviting the usual guests. Preparing the traditional foods.Putting up the proper decorations and performing the ritual gestures of good will. No time of year has more socially sanctioned social blueprints about the proper way to observe the holiday. Christmas is like a giant art project. We’re all given the same materials out of which we try to create the perfect Christmas.

And it isn’t just the holidays when rituals instruct us in how to proceed. In many ways, they dictate our whole lives. They are what makes us, us. They are what makes you, you.

There are several kinds of rituals, but I am going to lump them into four kinds: public, communal, private and secret. 

After holidays and sporting events, weddings, in many ways, are the Big Daddy of PUBLIC ritual celebrations. There must be showers and flowers. Family. Familiar words. Rings. The big white dress. Oh! The big white dress. And music. While there are some exceptions, in the majority of the weddings we witness, the music is Wagner going in and Mendelssohn going out.

The death of a loved one, especially if it is unexpected or violent, would leave us wandering around, lost in our emotions. Funerals and memorial services are rituals that provide closure. Being deprived of a funeral makes it very hard for family members to accept the death of their loved one and move on. In every war there are many soldiers reported Missing in Action --whose bodies were never recovered. Wives deprived of the funeral ritual found it much harder to go on than those who were able to bury their husbands.

Our COMMUNAL rituals help us understand that we are part of a particular group. The Packers green and gold, worn everywhere in Wisconsin, identifies a member of the clan. And believe me, ministers all over the state today are making sure their flock is released in time to see the game, lest they ignore the ritual observance of watching the game, especially when they are eight and one.

Communal rituals often build up and maintain personal and family beliefs. If a family says grace before dinner, it expresses their belief that God has something to do with the gathering.Graduation ceremonies recognize a family and societal belief that learning is a good thing and is worth celebrating.

One of the ways we use PRIVATE rituals is to heal. When Barbara is sick she gets out her grandmother’s teapot. She boils the water, wraps herself in a nice warm blanket and settles down, drinking a whole pot of tea from her grammy’s teapot. She swears it heals her. Most people have some private ritual they follow when they are sick. The action itself is often worthless –in any practical sense--but the comfort the ritual provides makes a difference.

Rituals of confession and repentance are as old as human kind. We fail. We do wrong. We know it.

And we want to make it right. The church offers sacraments: confession and penance ---to come right again with God and our fellow human beings. But these old rituals became tired and overdone and meaningless, even to those who buy into the theology.

So we turned to other ways to accomplish the same thing.  Anybody who has been in a 12-step group

knows what I’m talking about. It doesn’t matter who you are, what your religion or race might be, or your economic status. If you can get to the meeting, stand up and say your name, and say “I’m an alcoholic” then you’ve made the first step back from the dark. After that you learn to exchange self destructive behavior for sacred habits. It’s simple really. Say you’re sorry where it matters and then do better. These are rituals that we humans seem to need, no matter how we perform them. Confession and repentance are ancient, and universal, rituals.

And each of us experiences SECRET rituals. Something happens, or we do something, that causes us to say to ourselves, with certainty, as have millions and millions of people before us,“I’m a man, now,” or “Now I’m a real woman.” Most of these rituals have to do with our bodies and sex. Often they have to do with machines, especially cars, and they involve some display of inner growth or courage. These rituals and rites of passage often take place where words cannot go ---in a solitary, secret inner kingdom where just knowing is enough.

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Rituals guide us through change. They mark our growth. They heal and bind together what has been broken. They define us and complete us and invest our lives with meaning. They are powerful. But like all powerful things –money, religion, nuclear energy –these ritual observances can be harmful as well as nourishing. 

Rituals can become dictators. Has anyone ever wanted to say NO to the invitation to the big family gathering? Has anyone ever wanted to Mexico instead of having all the kids and grandkids for Christmas? Have you ever served anything BUT turkey on Thanksgiving? I have served tofu to my vegetarian daughterbut –I tell you honestly—it felt very weird. Ritual can be a tyrant. It can make you stay up late, baking four kinds of Christmas cookies, when you’re already exhausted by holiday preparations.

Rituals are ruthless dictators of groups, governments and institutions. Nothing kills a new idea faster than the pronouncement, “We’ve never done it that way.”

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Most of our rituals are inherited. They come through our families, our religions, our nationalities, our cultures. They are so deeply embedded it is as if they are part of our DNA. But we have the opportunity to kill, control and create rituals as well. Sometimes  it’s good for us to reexamine our old rituals and discard them, creating new more, more personal, more meaningful ones.

The best rituals combine both the old and the new.  To make my point, I’m going to end with a storywritten in 1982 by a woman named Nancy Gavin. [The White Envelope   by Nancy Gavin, appeared in Woman’s Day magazine in 1982.]

It's just a small white envelope stuck among the branches of our Christmas tree. No name, no identification, no inscription. It has peeked through the branches of our tree for the past 10 years or so.
It all began because my husband Mike hated Christmas -- oh, not the true meaning of Christmas, but the commercial aspects of it -- the overspending, the frantic running around at the last minute to get a tie for Uncle Harry and the perfume for Grandma -- the gifts given in desperation because you couldn't think of anything else.

Knowing he felt this way, I decided one year to bypass the usual shirts, sweaters, ties, and so forth. I reached for something special just for Mike. The inspiration came in an unusual way.

Our son Kevin, who was 12 that year, was wrestling at the junior level at the school he attended. Shortly before Christmas, there was a non-league match against a team sponsored by an inner-city church.

These youngsters, dressed in sneakers so ragged that shoestrings seemed to be the only thing holding them together, presented a sharp contrast to our boys in their spiffy blue and gold uniforms and sparkling new wrestling shoes. As the match began, I was alarmed to see that the other team was wrestling without headgear, a kind of light helmet designed to protect a wrestler's ears. It was a luxury the ragtag team obviously could not afford.

Well, we ended up walloping them. We took every weight class. Mike, seated beside me, shook his head sadly, "I wish just one of them could have won," he said. "They have a lot of potential, but losing like this could take the heart right out of them." Mike loved kids -- all kids -- and he knew them, having coached little league football, baseball, and lacrosse.

That's when the idea for his present came. That afternoon, I went to a local sporting goods store and bought an assortment of wrestling headgear and shoes and sent them anonymously to the inner-city church. On Christmas Eve, I placed the envelope on the tree, the note inside telling Mike what I had done and that this was his gift from me. His smile was the brightest thing about Christmas that year and in succeeding years.

For each Christmas, I followed the tradition -- one year sending a group of mentally handicapped youngsters to a hockey game, another year a check to a pair of elderly brothers whose home had burned to the ground the week before Christmas, and on and on.

The envelope became the highlight of our Christmas. It was always the last thing opened on Christmas morning, and our children, ignoring their new toys, would stand with wide-eyed anticipation as their dad lifted the envelope from the tree to reveal its contents.

As the children grew, the toys gave way to more practical presents, but the envelope never lost its allure. The story doesn't end there. You see, we lost Mike last year due to cancer. When Christmas rolled around, I was still so wrapped in grief that I barely got the tree up. But Christmas Eve found me placing an envelope on the tree, and in the morning it was joined by three more.

Each of our children, unbeknownst to the others, had placed an envelope on the tree for their dad. The tradition has grown and someday will expand even further with our grandchildren standing around the tree with wide-eyed anticipation watching as their fathers take down the envelope.

Mike's spirit, like the Christmas spirit, will always be with us. This ritual reminds us of who he was, and who we are.

Closing Words

Jesus of Nazareth gave us one great commandment: Love One Another.  May all of your holiday rituals –like this one—contain love and care for the earth and all of its people.

Peace Be With You.