The commonplace and daily aspects of life attract me most. And the anecdotal essay is my style of reporting what I notice.
Rituals
If you and I had sat on a park bench for an afternoon a couple of years ago, catching up, talking of this and that, and you had asked me the “what-are-you-thinking-about-and-writing-about-these-days?” kind of question, I would have answered, “Rituals.” And I would have added, “If that surprises you, it surprises me as well.”
Why rituals? It’s a formal topic, most likely addressed by theologians and anthropologists. My interests are not usually so academic.
So why rituals?
My thinking was set in motion by those who, knowing I was a parish minister for many years, have asked me for advice about ceremonies and celebrations. They wanted words to use at graduations, funerals, and the welcoming of children. They inquired about grace at family meals, the reaffirmation of wedding vows, and ways to heal wounds suffered in personal conflict. People requested help with the rituals of solitude, such as meditation, prayer, and contemplation.
I’m supposed to know about such things. But the truth is that while I’ve performed and participated in such rituals for many years, I’ve never given the subject the careful thought it deserves.
While seeking ways of responding to those requests, I began seeing much of my life and the life around me as ritualized. I realized that the important rituals were not stored in books and service manuals, but were being lived daily by all of us.
If the topic of rituals were a building, its appearance would be imposingly serious, like the antique administration building of a small college. If you went into the main entrance and on into the foyer, the intimidating formality would continue. If you asked at the main desk for information about the college, you’d receive the official brochures and handbooks which are idealized maps of the activities of an institution. That’s one way to look at information and learning.
If, instead, you went around back, entered through the kitchen door of the cafeteria in the basement, talked with the cooks and janitors, and then went on into the lunchroom to sit down and chat with the staff and students, you might feel more at ease, and would likely get a friendlier view of the college.
I prefer this informal, backstage view of life.
It is there I have looked for the raw materials out of which rituals are made.
Following my nose and intuition, I’ve found myself in unexpected places, thinking unanticipated thoughts. It’s always gratifying to see something familiar in a new light, and to realize that what I am looking for is close by. It’s like finding my “lost” glasses perched on the end of my nose. So has it been with this search for an understanding of rituals. Right there in front of my face all along.
If you and I ate lunch together regularly over a period of time, I’d tell you what I know now about rituals, expecting you would add what you know. And my guess is that you’d be as surprised as I was by how much you know about rituals, and by how much ritual behavior goes on in your life.
Last Sunday afternoon, I went through my drawer ritual. Restless, with time on my hands, and too many things to do on my mind, I paced around the house trying unsuccessfully to get my energy focused. I turned almost unconsciously to the drawers, or, as I’ve come to think of them, “the somewhere drawers,” as in, “it’s in here somewhere.”
Because the space in our houseboat is limited, my wife and I share a small room that serves as a kind of focus for personal life. The room is carefully and clearly divided between us by a long wooden table, and on our respective sides, we each have a clothes closet and a chest of drawers.
This common room also serves as the family loading dock, where we leave the baggage we carry back and forth from work — briefcases, books, umbrellas, mail, and coats. In my half, there is an old Japanese tansu chest which I bought because it has many drawers of many sizes and I thought it would keep my possessions and clothes organized. This, and the table beside it, form an L-shaped corner that is my basic life workstation. I dress and undress here, and equip and unequip myself for each day.
Here’s what belongs in the series of small drawers at the top of the chest: wallet, keys, spare eyeglasses and sunglasses, gloves, watch, ring, pen and pencil, address book, notepad, small camera, checkbook, Swiss Army knife, small tape recorder, small tape measure, handkerchiefs, penlight, and small pocket comb. All useful objects. There are several small wicker baskets distributed among the drawers to keep things efficiently ordered and handy.
“We take it. Deal with it… Cleansing and revival are called for. And the question now is how to die this death and come to life again.”
Impressed?
Don’t be.
Over time, in the daily scramble of coming and going, anything small and loose gets dumped higgledy-piggledy into the drawers. All the odds and ends out of pockets and briefcase, and all the bits and pieces that seem to turn up on the table, and all those loose parts that are handed to me by my wife with the comment, “Here, this is yours, put it somewhere” — in the “somewhere” drawers, of course. Inevitably, there comes the crisis when what I put somewhere is nowhere to be found.
Last Sunday I carefully emptied out all the drawers and laid out the pieces as if they had been found in an archaeological dig. A small-scale museum display of a life. In addition to most of the items listed above, which are supposed to be there, I found these: loose change, matches (both unused and used), Kleenex (ditto), nails, screws, nuts and bolts and washers, miscellaneous mechanical parts of unknown purpose, pipe cleaners, a computer disk, one of my wife’s lipsticks, various notes scribbled on scraps of paper, two unmailed letters, three opened rolls of Rolaids, four Chapsticks (mostly used up), five assorted small batteries, six odd buttons, loose pipe tobacco, one sock, one cuff link, two pencil stubs, refill cartridges for fountain pens and ballpoint pens (used and unused), bicycle wrench, a clothespin, a deck of cards, an unsmoked cigar, a partially smoked cigar, a nail file and toenail clippers, gum wrappers but no gum, used and unused Band-Aids, the corpses of a fly, a moth, and two tiny beetley bugs, and a lot of dust and tiny trash.
I kid you not.
But then, you aren’t surprised, are you?
Industriously, I washed out the drawers with soap and water, relined them with brown kraft paper (carefully fitted), and ruthlessly triaged the former contents. Much of it went in the trash can.
(A sack of the possibly useful items got dumped into the even bigger drawer in the kitchen. This is called putting things “somewhere else.” Someday, someday I’ll sort that one out.)
Carefully, thoughtfully, I replaced the proper contents in their proper little wicker baskets, in their proper drawers, and slid the drawers home into their slots in the chest.
There.
The drawer ritual is complete.
My drawers are clean, neat, and worthy of respect.
And on some level, for at least a little while, so is my life.
The ritual of the drawer is deeply satisfying.
Such an accomplishment!
How can something so mundane seem so important?
It has ritual value — as a metaphor of larger designs.
I wonder how many times in my life I have done this?
Often enough to know I will go through this cycle again sometime next year.
Often enough to know this ritual for what it is: not tidying drawers, but a symbolic manipulation of the paradoxical nature of my life in general. Order and purpose giving way to disorder and confusion giving way to getting organized again. On a secret level, the ritual of revival.
Even undressing, taking a shower, and washing my hair and trimming my beard and filing my nails, and then getting into clean, fresh clothes will suffice sometimes. Same deal. Getting my act together. Revival. Whatever it takes, whatever works to lever the wheels back onto the tracks.
This week I am moving my office and studio from an industrial warehouse where I have been for 30 years to a building in a suburban neighborhood. The difference between the drawer ritual and this move is only a matter of scale. The files and records, the photographs and treasures, the bones and stones and altars — I can’t bear to give you the full list — it would fill a book on its own. As it says on the sign in the window of the rug merchant down the street, “Everything must go.” In the trash, to the Goodwill, or in the moving van. Everything must go. A new era, a clear deck. Until next time.
And I recall other forms this drawer ritual has taken — moving from one job to another, one town to another, one house to another. Moving out of one marriage into another. Moving out of one image of myself into another. Always discarding, repacking, always moving on, and at the same time taking some of the accumulated patterns and possessions of a lifetime with me.
What provokes this restless ritual of revision and revival? A need for meaningful structure, purpose, order in life? Yes. Boredom, confusion, anxiety? Yes, those, too.
And sometimes sorrow, failure, and fear set us in motion:
“You’re fired.”
“I want a divorce.”
“You have cancer.”
“You’re an alcoholic.”
“She’s dead.”
“It’s over.”
‘Sometimes sorrow, failure, and fear set us in motion: “You’re fired.” “I want a divorce.” “You have cancer.” “It’s over.”’
We take it. Deal with it. Get on with it. Cleansing and revival are called for.
And the question now is how to die this death and come to life again.
One of the most remarkable developments in our culture in the last 20 years is the understanding of the need for community in the process of recovery from these disasters. This is a revival in itself. Support groups, friends, family — other people.
Alcoholics Anonymous and its famed 12-step program stands out.
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. Beyond that come the stages of renewal — centered on exchanging demonic behavior for sacred habits. It’s simple, really — we need each other. And we have an amazing capacity to assist one another in these rites of passage from death to life again.
Confession and repentance are old rituals.
Every year the Jews celebrate the Day of Atonement, when they confront their failures and transgressions and sins — and get squared away with God and their families, friends, and neighbors.
Catholics pursue the same end in the confessional with a priest.
Protestant prayers often begin with “I confess to Almighty God…”
In the secular world, we turn to counselors, psychiatrists, and to organized groups of people who have our failings or griefs and our hopes and intentions.
This is the ritual of reconciliation.
It involves the ritual of recognition of damage done to ourselves and others, the ritual of reunion with the better parts of ourselves, the ritual of reaffirmation of the power of human beings to help one another.
On a daily scale, from an early age we learn a fundamental value of human community: to apologize — to say simply “I’m sorry.” And thereby we learn not only to keep our bonds with others intact, but to keep our self-image from the fragmentation caused by anger. A Buddhist would call this the ritual of right action.
I remember being at a summer conference — during an evening lecture.
It was raining buckets outside and about 50 of us were doing serious business inside, talking about the war in Vietnam — agonizing over our impotence in the face of the horrors of that war.
Suddenly, a very wet, muddy young man burst into the rear of the hall.
“Help me, help me,” he cried. He was driving too fast, had missed a turn, spun off the road in the dark, and was himself thrown out onto the road because he was not wearing his seat belt. His pick-up truck was hanging on the edge of a ravine. With his wife and child still in it, so scared they couldn’t move. “Help me, help me.”
As one body, we rose and poured out of the hall, running into the rainy night behind the terrified young man. As one, we grabbed onto the small truck and pulled it back from the edge, and as one, we lifted the truck back onto the road and spun it around onto the shoulder for safety.
The mother and child were in shock, but otherwise uninjured. Tenderly, they were carried back to the conference grounds to someone’s room — dried off, wrapped in blankets, comforted. A doctor among us examined them. Warm tea was brewed. Mechanics in the group made sure the truck was in safe working order.
The young man admitted how foolish he had been, how sorry he was to have risked his life and the life of his family, and how deeply he felt our compassion. Within a couple of hours, the young man and his family were on the road again. He will never forget. Nor will those who helped.
This response to crisis — with strangers, or friends, or family — is part of our nature. Every day, every week, every year since time began, whatever the size or nature of the crisis, this has been true of the human community. It is a fact that must be laid alongside all we know of the horror of man’s inhumanity to man. Few of us do not have a story to tell — of what we gave or what was given to us in response to “Help me, help me.” We are capable of being agents of one another’s revival. None of us can go all the way alone.
Even in the midst of the unbearable agonies of prisons and concentration camps there are those who choose to help — to give to others bread, shoes, comfort — whatever.
These acts of compassion are the shining, diamond-tough confirmations of human dignity. This is keeping our affairs in order at the highest level. This is communion in its highest form. The ritual of the keeping of the living flame, held daily in the unfinished cathedral of the human spirit.
We need to be honest and admit that when this Legacy hit the schedule, we had zero idea about the state in which the country/world would find itself when the middle of May rolled around. If ever there were a time to focus on small kindnesses we can accomplishing in our own little circles, now might be a good time to pick up the habit. Otherwise, you might turn on the news, and, well, that’s never good. … Heck, there’s even a foundation. … Of course there’s a foundation, and we really want nothing to do with examining how many people in that foundation follow their own advice. Maybe they’re all saints. Who knows? …
We do know that even little things can matter in the darkest of times. … We did notice that not one of these lists included “buy lunch for the Penthouse Free Site Team,” though. How sad.
