Human Situations In Need Of Ritualization

Ritual responds to the human need to negotiate times of change, to reaffirm the world of meaning in tragic and meaningless situations, and to mark transitions in life's journey. Yet some of our rituals do not seem to reach far enough; and there are still other situations for which there is no ritual at all. This article looks at shortcomings in ritual and offers some suggestions about how ritual might better support situations of pastoral care.

The story is familiar. John and Mary have long awaited the birth of their first child, only to have the delivery end in stillbirth. Distraught, they summon the chaplain and request the stillborn child be baptized. In this case and a hundred more like it, people engaged in pastoral ministry are confronted with a dilemma. How can we honor the deep need people feel for ways to ritualize what they are experiencing, when the only ritual at hand is theologically inappropriate or pastorally inadequate or when there is no ritual at all? Continuing efforts to find appropriate rituals for difficult cases, such as stillbirth and divorce, reflect the urgency of this pastoral question today. There are other areas of pastoral need for ritual as well, such as puberty or coming-of-age, leave-taking, grieving, and significant transitions in self-understanding. The recent series on Alternative Futures for Worship not only reconsiders traditional sacraments, but also includes a set of alternative rituals as a point of departure for discussion (Bernard J. Lee, ed., Alternative Futures for Worship [Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1987]). This pastoral need for ritual is being felt at a time when rethinking old ritual ways has opened the possibility of a fresh approach to the need for revised or new rituals. The fields of liturgy and pastoral care share a revival of interest in ritual and its role in the society around us. There is, it would seem, a widespread interest in the return to ritual. This article has two purposes: to offer some preliminary reflections on that return to ritual and what it implies, and then to suggest several questions for the continuing discussion of situations in need of ritual. Return to Ritual Beginning in the late sixties, long-standing traditions were questioned in some segments of our culture. Received rituals that had embodied and sustained the central values of the culture and our individual and collective sense of identity within it were set aside. It happened in the society at large, but it also happened in the Roman Catholic church. It was an uncertain time as the church left behind long-standing ritual forms and practices and adopted revised liturgical rites. In the society and in the church, there were those who insisted that ritual is contrary to the freedom of the individual because it tends to standardize experience. Others believed they had outgrown the need for ritual. But even as ritual ways of the culture were being significantly altered or even discarded, the need for ritual continued to reassert itself. The human potential movement soon learned to create its own set of rituals; protest movements quickly ritualized their songs, chants, and marches; liberation movements developed greeting rituals and other rituals that fostered collective commitment; and those outside the church found ways to celebrate significant moments in human life with revised religious rituals. While it was a time of great upheaval and change, the change was more apparent than real. Traditional rituals were discarded, only to be replaced by what Hine has called "?self-generated rituals.?" We are, then, at something of a watershed. Even though traditional rituals have been abandoned or significantly altered, the human need to ritualize has survived and is finding new ways of expressing itself. As old ritual undergrowth is cleared away, new ways of ritualizing are being shaped for life in a changing world and church. What is even more significant is that we have rediscovered a wider human need for ritual in all aspects of life. And that discovery has opened up new opportunities. The recognition of the pastoral need to help people ritualize significant moments like stillbirth or leaving home comes at time of new-found freedom from old ritual forms. The disciplines of pastoral care and liturgy have also gained new insights and resources from psychology and anthropology for revitalizing ritual. Not too many decades ago the reigning attitude in psychological and psychoanalytic circles, following the lead of Freud, was that ritual is either a form of pathological compulsion or a repressive mechanism used to avoid the growth-inducing ambiguities and tensions of life. Credit for reversing this negative assessment of ritual belongs primarily to Erik Erikson. He developed a theory of ritualization that regards ritual behavior as a normal, normative part of healthy human growth and development. For Erikson, ritualization is "?an agreed-upon interplay between at least two people who repeat it at meaningful intervals and in recurring contexts,?" an interplay which had "?adaptive value for both participants.?" Various aspects of the capacity to ritualize are acquired step-by-step, from infancy into adulthood; and ritualization is itself key to coming to full psychosocial development as a mature individual capable of bonding and generativity. This revived appreciation of ritual did not stop with Erikson. Interest in the social aspects of individual dysfunctions in general and of pathologies such as schizophrenia in particular, led to a study of systemic, ritualized patterns of verbal and non-verbal communication in families and other groups. More recently, the emerging literature in family systems theory has focused more broadly on the role ritualization plays in the life of human systems, not only for its diagnostic or therapeutic purposes, but also for the positive contribution ritualization makes to the healthy functioning of the group. These developments in the social sciences are reflected in the field of pastoral care. There is an increasing recognition of the human need for ritualization in the process of conversion as people mature in faith within the community of believers. Liturgical interest in ritualization has also revived during the past two decades. The Second Vatican Council renewal set Roman Catholic liturgy free from the absolute hold of received ritual forms and called for more attention to the human, communicative dimensions of the rites. Liturgists turned to anthropology for their first dialogue partners on the role of ritual in human life and discovered the work on rites of passage pioneered by Arnold van Gennep and developed more recently by Victor Turner (van Gennep [1960]; Turner [1969; 1972]). The triple pattern of separation-transition-reincorporation identified by anthropologists gave liturgists a new way to look at the sequence of every celebration. Moreover, liturgists have discovered in this pattern a paradigm which places liturgy in a larger context. Rites of passage lead from daily life into a time of transition, or liminality, and back into daily life. In a broader sense, when life is understood as process or journey, rituals serve to mark significant moments of transition. In the same way, liturgical celebration is not an isolated event; it is related to life outside the liturgy. Like all rituals, liturgy marks and facilitates the significant transitions of individuals and community, making their lives a continuing journey of faith and conversion. This liturgical interest in ritual process became much more pastoral and concrete after the promulgation of the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA) in 1973. The restored catechumenate has provided a phased ritual process which closely parallels typical rites of passage. The RCIA describes the initiatory process as an inner spiritual journey of faith and conversion marked outwardly by periodic ritual celebrations (Roman Ritual [1988], 4–6). Pastoral implementation of the rite has spawned a growing body of literature on the journey of faith and conversion to unfold within the ritual process of the RCIA. Furthermore, the RCIA has helped theologians to see that sacraments are not isolated events, but part of a larger ritual process. Taking the RCIA as a paradigm, liturgists are now exploring process models for other sacraments as well. As a result of these new insights into ritualization from anthropology and the social sciences, liturgy and pastoral care now have new resources to offer pastors in dilemmas like the one presented by the request of John and Mary to baptize their stillborn child. Faced with people who need to express their human experiences of growth and transition spiritually in situations where there are no traditional rituals, pastors now have a new opportunity and an awesome freedom to draw on the resources of tradition and the human sciences to meet those pastoral needs in a new way. There are, however, complex questions that accompany this new freedom. I intend to explore briefly three such questions concerning human situations in need of ritualization. What is a ritual? How can we identify situations in need of ritualization? And what strategies and resources do we need in order to respond pastorally to those situations? What is a Ritual? Discussion about situations in need of ritualization usually focuses on specific cases, rather than on prior questions about ritualization. We assume that we already know from experience what ritual is and how it functions in our lives. The aim of the discussion is then to identify the potential need for ritualization and to determine what kinds of ritual are on hand to meet those needs. I would like to reverse that procedure and start with our assumptions about ritual. What is ritual? Though definitions vary widely, several themes are common enough to describe ritual for our purposes. Ritual is a patterned series of symbolic actions, which members of a group use repeatedly, especially in critical, significant moments of life, to express and enact the story out of which they live, the hopes that give them purpose, and the shared beliefs, values, and sense of meaning that shape their world and their lives in it. Because its words and actions are highly symbolic, ritual speaks more to the heart than to the head. Ritual is born for communication; it is made to be shared. With slight alterations, religious ritual fits this same description. Religious ritual is used by a particular community of faith. The community believes that it performs the ritual in response to God's call or because it believes that the ritual, at least the words and actions which form its core, has been given to it by God. Those gathered for the ritual believe that God is actively present with them through the ritual as they tell and enact their story, affirm their hope for the future, and commit themselves to the shared values and meaning which are to mark their life in the world. Why do we ritualize? There are at least three functions that rituals perform. First, ritual serves to invest a situation with meaning or create and maintain a world of meaning for us. We need ritual both when the ambiguities and paradoxes we experience in life seem to render our world meaningless, when its meaning is so apparent that it cannot be left unsaid, and also when its meaning is so overwhelming that it cannot be said in ordinary speech. A second function of ritual is to help individuals and groups negotiate times of transition. We need ritual to provide us with a sense of identity, particularly in significant moments of change. A third function is to bond a group together by the repeated sharing of a common story, meaning, identity, and purpose. We need ritual to survive and flourish as a community. Religious ritual functions in a similar fashion. It affirms that life is truly invested with the meaning ascribed to it by the community's faith. It sustains participants in their identity as believers, helping them to see life transitions as moments of transformation in a journey of faith. And finally, ritual gathers people in God's presence, making of them a people called to be God's own. An interplay between continuity and change runs throughout this understanding of how rituals function. Rituals help individuals and groups negotiate moments of transitions. The outcome we most commonly expect from ritual is that of continuity. Rituals reaffirm the meaning of life, maintain individual and group identity in the midst of change, and keep the community stable and cohesive. But there can be another outcome as well. Discontinuity, rather than continuity, with the past may be the outcome when an individual or a group undergoes more radical change and adaptation to new situations. There are, then, two major theoretical orientations toward the function and purpose of ritualizing, one seeing ritual as "?a mechanism of continuity, a way of countering change?" and the other regarding ritual as "?affording change via adaptation or integration.?" This opens into a final, more troublesome question about ritual. Both of these theoretical orientations assume that ritual remains constant, untouched by the changing situations it helps us to negotiate. But what if ritual itself is caught up in change? Ronald Grimes has recently noted that rituals do change, contrary to our popular assumption. In addition to the well-established, mature forms in which we normally experience our rituals, they also have their nascent and senile stages. Nascent ritual, in particular, often escapes our notice. To allow for the growth and development of ritual, Grimes rightly suggests that we speak of ritualization, rather than of ritual. This question is particularly pertinent in our day, when time-honored rituals and ritual ways have been discarded and new rituals generated in their staid. What is the function of such changing ritual? Should we shape our ritualizing to promote stability and continuity in an era of transition or to foster individual and group adaptation against the conservative pull of tradition? How can we identify and nurture nascent rituals? And for the purposes of our discussion, should we then reverse the sequence we are following and attend first to particular situations of need, since they may in fact call for a kind of ritualization that does not yet exist? These questions deserve a larger discussion than we can afford here. At a minimum, however, we ought to heed Grimes' recommendation and attend to the need for ritualization, leaving open the possibility for nascent ritual and the particular forms it might take. Situations Needing Ritualization How can we identify the situations in which people are in need of a way to ritualize what they are experiencing? What clues are there? What criteria can we use? I believe there are a least four criteria that might help us identify such situations. First, there will probably be a need of ritualization in moments of significant transition. In negotiating such moments, people are wrestling with issues of continuity and change. Two cases help to illustrate this. (1) Though Dan and Julie, soon to be married, are both college graduates, they seem to be so young to their parents. Julie is the baby of the family, the last to leave home. Dan is also the youngest child; his four brothers and sisters are unmarried, though his oldest sister was married and is now divorced. Dan and Julie have asked that their wedding ceremony include a parental blessing, a customary ritual in his family. Both Dan and Julie have struggled with their changing relationships to their families of origin. Ordinarily the various blessings of the wedding ceremony focus on the couple's joining together to form a new family unit; the ritual is a public seal of the private process of marital bonding that has taken place and will continue. At the same time, however, another process has been silently unfolding for Dan and Julie in relation to their families of origin. They have become aware that their preparations for marriage have intensified for them the process of leaving home in a new and final way. Because they wanted to ritualize both processes, Dan and Julie asked that the liturgical rite which blesses a critical moment in the coming-together process include a parental blessing of this significant moment in the leaving-home process. We need to recognize in our wedding rituals that getting married is often an experience of discontinuity, as well as continuity. (2) Bill and Ann, the parents of three pre-adolescent children, have gone through a long and bitter separation now ending in civil divorce. Despite their attempts to shield them, the children are taking the break-up of the family badly. Separately, both parents have asked the pastor if anything can be done to bring about some measure of healing. In this case, the transition to be ritualized for Bill and Ann was one of radical change—the departure from their married state. They needed a symbolic statement to acknowledge the separation; they also needed to ritualize the reality of forgiveness in the midst of separation and grief. The hoped-for outcome for their children, in contrast, was one of continuity in the midst of the terror of separation and the dread of abandonment. The children needed the assurance of a continued parental relationship. Although a single ritual of healing may not satisfy both needs in such situations, it is important that we continue to explore ways of symbolizing continuity and discontinuity in the same ritual. Second, ritualization will be required when there is a significant need to express or discern the meaning of our lives. This is only natural, since the rituals we perform and the stories we often tell as part of our rituals, codify life's meaning for us. The need may manifest itself in either two situations. In the first instance, we need a ritual expression when our life is filled with a sense of meaning and purpose, as in the following case. In response to a call in the parish bulletin, Greg and Karen, a young couple, volunteered to help staff a newly formed youth ministry. Fresh from a series of training weekends and an optional course in adolescent psychology at a local college, they have just taken up their ministry without any fanfare. But it seems strange to them to begin this ministry without some public celebration of their new undertaking. For Greg and Karen, the absence of ritual acknowledgment seemed to diminish the significance of their ministry. Ritual can lift up the meaning, we already experience in life events and place a public seal on it. The case of John and Mary given above points to another need—the need to ritualize in times of ambiguity, when life seems meaningless. Parents like John and Mary, who have experienced the death of an infant, clearly understand meaningless suffering and instinctively look to ritual to help them live through the experience and search for its meaning. Third, there will be a need for ritualization in situations which call for personal commitment and group support. Rituals provide members of a group going through major transitions a safe place to face both the risks and the new possibilities inherent in such moments. Commitment is most easily made in the context of mutual support. Greg and Karen, the young couple entering youth ministry, needed the support of their parish community to sustain their commitment. Furthermore, as experience with the RCIA has shown, a reversal of roles often occurs and those making the commitment can become a source of challenge and support to the rest of the community to recommit themselves. In the early years of their marriage, absorbed by career demands and the cares of raising two young children, Laura and Tom had drifted away from the church. The serious insistence with which their oldest child requested first Eucharist caught them unprepared to face their own religious commitment. They asked the pastor if their daughter could receive first Communion during a home Eucharist, before the public celebration for her class in church. The commitment of their child was a challenge to Laura and Tom, and they needed to draw strength for their own recommitment from her first Communion. Though first Eucharist is the completion of initiation into the community of faith, the pastor recognized that Laura and Tom also needed a way to ritualize the return to active membership to which their daughter had called them. Fourth, when a significant experience unfolds over a period of time, there will be a need to mark the important thresholds ritually. As study of the rites of passage suggests, we need rituals to name a journey as we enter into it, to nurture and sustain the journey as it unfolds, and to seal and mark the journey at its completion. For Dan and Julie, their wedding ceremony had to mark important thresholds in the simultaneous processes of leaving father and mother and cleaving to a spouse. Greg and Karen also needed to mark their entry into a youth ministry in their parish. These criteria have been stated rather generically, since both human and religious rituals can be of help when people have a need to ritualize their experience. A liturgical variation on these criteria is apropos, however. There will be a need for liturgical ritualizing in situations where the religious meaning and commitment of one's life need to be discerned or expressed. In those moments, the meaning of our life journey needs to be revealed in God's Word and enacted in a saving deed. Finally, we should note the apparent inadequacy of existing liturgical rituals to address certain aspects of the experience fully in the cases of the stillborn child, the bride and groom, and the first communicant. To identity situations needing ritualization is only a first step. What strategies and resources do we have to meet these needs? In exploring this question, I will distinguish between situations for which there are established rituals and situations for which no rituals exist. Strategies and Resources Where there are existing rituals, the first strategy might be to attend more carefully to the pastoral care opportunities present in each ritual situation. Established rituals of the church are often significant family events as well as rites of passage for an individual in his or her faith journey. As people prepare for a sacrament and celebrate it, there are many occasions to elicit the human story to be marked in the sacrament. Thus, the baptismal naming of a child can also be a moment of story-telling and a symbolic act of the family traditions that helps the parents become aware of hidden hopes they have for the child. Good pastoral care can be attentive to the mid-life transitions that are often taking place in the parents of those receiving first sacraments or confirmation. Enabling people to tell their story during rites of pastoral care of the sick, wakes, and funerals is a way of bringing closure to a particular life and creating a cherishable memory for those who survive (Anderson and Foley [1988]). Ritualizing the experience of leaving one's family of origin adds a significant dimension to the celebration of marriage. Thus, in the case cited above, Dan and Julie each shared a private moment of blessing and farewell with their parents during the rehearsal; and there was a joint parental blessing of the new couple during the wedding. Pastoral sensitivity to such opportunities surrounding the ritual cannot help but have an impact on the ritual itself. Eliciting the stories and needs of people as we work with them to prepare the liturgy will inevitably shape the homily, the choice of texts, and the decisions for pastoral adaptation available in most rites. Flowing from that, a second strategy is to see the liturgy itself as a public act of pastoral care. A wooden celebration of a sacrament "?according to the book?" can be an uncaring celebration, with only scant attention to the people who have come to celebrate God's presence in their lives. Liturgical renewal has stressed often enough the elements that are critical in preparing a liturgy in which the people experience care for them in their particular needs. Those elements are attention to the assembly and its active participation, concern that the rite and its symbols are hospitable and fully human, and a prayerful awareness of the presence of God suffusing the assembly and its rituals with holiness. Liturgy celebrated in this spirit ritualizes the need people feel for the presence and companionship of God in the midst of the pain and ambiguity of their lives. Together, these first two strategies offer pastors a way to use traditional liturgical rites to address human needs, which a more "?theological?" approach to administering sacraments only as a "?means of grace?" can fail to satisfy. A final strategy may be to take a cue from the RCIA and explore the possibilities of expanding an existing sacramental ritual into a phased ritual process spread over time to accompany the human journey of people. There are already proposals along those lines for a Lenten process of reconciliation (Hart [1987]; Keifer [1980]), for a more integrated process of caring for the sick and dying (Anderson and Foley [1988]), and for a phased ritual process for marriage (Stevenson [1987], 190–194). Situations for which there are no existing rituals, such as stillbirth and divorce, present more difficult pastoral choices. The first and most difficult decision, for both individual pastoral ministers and for a church or congregation as a whole, is whether or not to allow and encourage the emergence of nascent ritual in situations for which there have been no liturgical rituals. In wrestling with that decision, it is not helpful to make our ritual choices absolute, e.g., private or public, religious or human, liturgical or non-liturgical. We would do better to envision a continuum of possibilities between these extremes. Situations like miscarriage and rape, for which rituals have been suggested, seem far too personal for a fully public ritual; but a ritual expressing the care and support of a small group in a private setting may be appropriate. Other situations, like divorce, may not be apt for a fully sacramental liturgy. A public liturgical ritual on a par with marriage could appear to negate the meaning a church community sees in the sacrament of marriage; but must a divorce ritual be a "?marriage in reverse??" Can we not find room in our pastoral repertoire for liturgical rituals which are both human and religious, which can be more or less public, according to the circumstances, but which stop short of the fully public celebrations we call sacraments? A sacramental theology which holds that the sacramental is larger and more basic than the seven sacraments offers a theological starting point; and the rich tradition of the "?sacramentals?" provides a paradigm for filling out the continuum. A range of celebrations would allow greater pastoral flexibility in addressing the needs of people. If a church or an individual pastor does decide to foster new forms of ritualization, what rituals are they to use in the meantime? Waiting for nascent rituals to develop would force people to put their immediate needs on hold. What other resources might we have at hand? A short-term strategy would be to look to our ritual tradition itself for rituals that could be recovered or adapted. For example, it would be possible to ritualize marriage in stages by recovering betrothal ceremonies and other forms of blessing found in earlier tradition or by using the ritual blessings for engaged and married couples often found in a church's occasional services or ritual books, such as the Roman Catholic Book of Blessings. These books often contain a wide array of blessings, which can be used or adapted for a variety of circumstances. Experience with rituals for the catechumens in the RCIA suggests that we might easily adapt ritual gestures, such as signing of the senses, blessing, and anointing to other situations. Finally, if part of a long-term strategy is to encourage new ritual forms to address situations in need of ritualization, we can still look to tradition for a number of ritual patterns to help us give nascent rituals a familiar shape and feel. Ritual tradition has much to teach us about the components of effective ritual, such as symbols, gestures, movements, and patterns of ritual language. Rituals typically begin by summoning the gathered people into God's presence; they unfold in both word and gesture; and they end with a blessing and sending. The words of liturgy are spoken and sung, with interspersed silence. There is a constant dialogue; every address, reading, and prayer dialogue, both ritualized and informal, evokes a response. Ritual prayer expresses the community's memory and hope, in a recital of God's past deeds and application for God's future help. Rituals use communicative action, gesture, posture, and movement. The core actions are drawn from among our most common everyday actions, like touching, bathing, feeding, and lighting a lamp. And finally, like the staged pattern of rites of passage, rituals show an affinity for the great moments of transition in life and easily expand into a ritual process to mark the journey. We do not have to invent the ritual pattern anew each time we face a new situation of pastoral need. Conclusion John and Mary, who requested that their stillborn child be baptized, expressed a need to ritualize a tragic moment in their life. The pastoral dilemma in responding to their request is this: to baptize the dead child as a way of ministering to the parents or to withhold the baptism as a way of preserving the integrity and public meaning of the ritual itself. There are honest reasons for both choices. But are these the only choices? In a time of return to fresh ways of ritualizing the important moments of human need, resourceful pastors are discovering that baptism need not be the only ritual choice in the situation of a stillbirth. Other rituals can be devised from existing ritual resources to help the parents affirm their relationship to the dead child and to enable the process of separation and grieving to take place. Thus, for example, we might fashion a ritual by borrowing the naming ritual from the rite of infant baptism, a gesture of commendation and farewell from the funeral rite, and, from either ritual, prayers placing the child in God's care, such as the prayer in the revised Order of Christian Funerals for those who mourn a stillborn child (Roman Ritual [1989], no. 339). The solution is not neat, but it may be the only pastoral choice available, while we wait for churches and those experienced and gifted in pastoral care and liturgy to nurture the growth of nascent rituals more suited to such human situations.