A Dearth of Ritual

Habits I have aplenty, some of them bordering on the obsessive. Do I need to weigh myself every morning if I record my weight only once a week? But rituals, very few. So what’s the difference?

For me, rituals have an undeniable emotional content. There’s an aspect of them that goes a bit beyond easy understanding and that is all the more powerful for taking a prescribed form. The feelings associated with a ritual are generally positive, while a habit is just something you do often. You might feel good as you floss your teeth, or bad as you chew your nails to the quick, but there’s nothing particularly ritualistic about either.

Of course you can make the habit unwavering. I floss my teeth in a very particular order that is, for me, an integral part of the habit. But the activity would be just as good for me if I flossed them in some other order (or no order at all, as long as I did them all). The order is part of my habit, but the habit is not a ritual just because it takes a prescribed form.

There’s another form of habitual ritual, or ritual habit, that is pure superstition. My father habitually played a particularly difficult game of solitaire over and over again. It almost never came out, but when it did, he absolutely persuaded himself that the day would be a good one. When I’m scaling the ingredients for my breads, if I get the correct result without having to add or subtract a bit of flour or water or whatever, I know the bake will be a good one even though I also know it makes no difference.

Hatch, match, dispatch

The important rituals are, of course, the ones that celebrate big transitions. Rituals are about belonging to subgroups within a group and are important as we pass from one subgroup to another, and those subgroups are wider than birth, marriage and death. Four of us, each holding on to one of an older man’s fingers as he presents us for confirmation of a university degree. Why? Because that is how it is done — by us.

For me, death is the ritual that dare not speak its name. I’ve been to a small number of funerals (and missed one I wish I had been at) and the thing they almost all have in common is that at least a few of the participants, the professionals, you might say, know exactly how the ritual proceeds while the rest of us are happy to follow their lead. I wrote at some length about this when they buried my father and I haven’t changed my mind about any of that.

Perhaps because of that idea that the ritual contains a series of steps, carried out in the right order and in the right way, I find it very disturbing when that is not how things play out. At the funeral of good friend here in Rome, for example, it seemed that nobody had much of an idea what was coming next, who would say what, nothing. As a result I found it very difficult to make my own peace with his being gone.

I used to sometimes think about my own funeral — the music, the readings, the format — but I don’t any more. It isn’t up to me to determine how other people should conduct their rituals, and I strongly believe that particular ritual is for them, not me. I just hope somebody knows what to do.