the timboucher experience

I just read a very boring and out of date article called Ritual and Power, which is about the importance of ritual in religion. I say its outdated because it spends most of it’s time rehashing ideas and research of men who lived almost hundred years ago. I seem to come up against this problem all the time. All those super old-timey guys were studying religion from an anthropological basis. Then towards the 40’s and 50’s, there was a small boom in studying religion from a psychological basis. And then it got stuck in this twisted mire of cultural theory: structuralism, post-structuralism, post-modernism, deconstructionism, and a bunch of other boring shit. Faced with that kind of religious scholarship, I can really see why fundamentalist approaches to religion have had an enormous upswing. At least fundamentalists are trying to reapply this stuff to people’s lives.

I guess New Agers are trying to do that too, with their huge amount of self-help books. But I don’t really like either of these approaches. They both feel wrong to me, to my life. And that’s why I’m crafting my own. I spend a lot of time intentionally reading things that I dislike, think are stupid, or otherwise have no connection with. I do it mostly for negative inspiration. As an example of what not to do, and how not to do it. But also to understand how these other people were thinking and feeling their way through these problems.

Right now, I’m doing research into the area of how religious story-systems are connected to ritual, and how they are both connected to belief. How do you take a “mere” story and turn it into something you believe in, and which you take specific actions to celebrate it? One thing I did like in that Ritual and Power article is he talks about how so-called primitive religions did not have what we would think of as beliefs. They had myths; they had stories. The important thing was not whether you literally “believed” in these stories. It was if you performed the rituals correctly.

He talks a bit too about how belief systems were not really a part of religion until much later on. But I don’t feel like he ever really delivers a convincing argument as to why, or why ritual was itself so important. So let me try to interpret these elements on my own.

First, I like what he’s saying about how people start out with stories. Old-fashioned scholars like this often would denigrate myths and stories as primitive or superstitious. I think that’s total crap, because stories are how we live our lives. They are how we understand and communicate what we are doing, and how everything and everyone fits together.

Second, I think stories are much more flexible and powerful at communicating value systems to people than are lists of beliefs of Commandments. In a story, you get to look at a bunch of characters placed into a variety of complex situations where they must make difficult decisions and perform difficult tasks. The meaning is not a fixed set of bullet points. The meaning is flexible and can be interpreted a new way by each person who encounters it and applies it at some point in their lives. I think one of the reasons that people seized on this WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?) phenomenon is because it helped bring the focus of Christianity back to the complex and living story of Jesus, rather than on a list of moral precepts to be memorized and recited (although plenty of that seems to exist as well).

Rituals, I think, are man’s attempt to physically enter into the stories which make up his life. When you just listen to a story told by someone, it has a certain effect on you. When you imagine yourself personally encountering the events told to you in a story, it affects you even more deeply (which is what identification and projection are all about). And when you actually try to physically act out a story, you’ll acquire the deepest possible understanding of it. You place yourself in some other shoes, and feel what it’s like to be flooded by physical sensations and emotions. Doing that builds your mind and heart, and expands your viewpoint and personality. Ritual interaction with stories gives you mystical insight into that story. This is why kids spend so much of their time playing pretend, and acting out scenarios and stories. And the loss of this ability to play pretend and act out stories through ritual is part of what ruins many adults.

Stories don’t want to be pinned down. Their purpose is to be complicated and fluid and adaptable - just like people. If you want to really understand a story, you get right up in the middle of it and feel what it’s like to be one of the characters. That’s what ritual is for. Beliefs are a way to freeze the meaning in myths and stories. When you abstract a set of fixed values and beliefs from a story, you effectively kill it – if only for a moment. No longer can it snake around you and fill you up with conflicting ideas and emotions. It’s now just a list of events which supports remote intellectualized understanding.

Not to say there’s no value in abstracting information from stories, because there most certainly is. I just think that the danger is that when you rigorously try to fix a story to one particular meaning, you run the risk of losing a multitude of other meanings and shades of meanings – perhaps ones which are even better, more important and more personally useful than the ones which you are going by. Maybe ritual then, in modern religions, is an attempt to counter that deadening or concretization of meaning in relation to religious stories. Ritual, when done correctly, lets us let loose our hold on intellectualized principles, and really roll up our sleeves and see what it feels like to be inside this story, and what there is to be learned by playing pretend.

• Ritual without belief
• Reducing things with words
• What Would Jesus Do?
• Semantic & Symbolic Codes
• Religion over politics