Ritual as Performance

We believe we pick our battles, but in a deeper sense our battles pick us. This was, at least, my case when, as a child, I got enchanted by the incense and the chanting and the organ in my little parish church. Ritual became instantly for me the source of meaning, unparalleled by anything else.

This has personal and psychological implications, which we will now put aside. The fact is that I became a “ritualist” in a world that was on its way toward the demise of rituals, as philosopher Byung-Chul Han explains so well (see yesterday’s DM). In my life I met other people interested in ritual, not because there are many of them, but because I was looking for my tribe.

Before encountering Matthew Fox and his Cosmic Mass, I made the acquaintance of traditional Roman Catholics — there is a galaxy of them, including those recently excommunicated by Pope Leo XIV — and I met Anglo-Catholic ritualism, which is present in the Episcopal Church as well as in other Anglican churches worldwide.

I ended up considering myself an Anglo-Catholic ritualist, and serving an Anglo-Catholic parish, even though there are no formal ways of belonging to what is today more a ritual persuasion and a habit than anything, surely not a Church in itself.

Freud saw in ritual nothing other than obsessive repetitions with no meaning, a kind of religious routine which, at its best, keeps away the anguish implied by living authentically. As a ritualist, I see instead in ritual what Byung-Chul Han points out: a repetition which is never the same, but through the recognition of symbols makes time habitable (see yesterday’s DM).

However, Freud had a point when he bundled up religion in his notion of “obsessive neurosis.” I met people who look almost like a caricature of his diagnosis, people who seem to fear that God will strike them down if they miss a word or place a piece of cloth on the altar in the wrong direction.

Sigmund Freud and Byung-Chul Han: how can they be right at the same time?

In my experience, there is a fine yet strong line between the spiritual ritualist and the obsessive ritualist. The line is fine because we both derive meaning from the ritual, but the line is strong because the first group is completely aware that rituals are human constructions, while the second group seems to think that they are divinely ordained.

For somebody like me, the historical stratification of gestures and symbols in liturgy — with every generation adding or taking a little piece according to their deepest spirituality — is a magnificent portal to the experience of the presence of God. For the other group, I suspect that the need to be right takes precedence over anything else and clouds such a presence, putting instead their ego at the center of the ritual action.

Mind you, they don’t do it on purpose or consciously. It is simply hard for them to be caught in the dynamism of the ritual action itself. They do not understand (yet) what it means to be guided by the ritual and to give oneself over to the ritual, choosing instead to control the ritual itself and its correct performance.

Those who know me might object that I am too quite fond of correct performance. Yes, but as an auxiliary aspect to the ritual experience. I honor the shape of the liturgy, its traditional form handed down for centuries, and in so doing I believe also to be honoring my ancestors in the faith. In the end, however, the whole point is letting go. Unless liturgy and ritual are part and parcel of a mystical life, I don’t know what they mean or why we should even bother with them.

There was in my parish an ongoing debate about ritual being a performance or not. I always said yes and no. Liturgies are physical arrangements, series of movements in space, including the showing of symbols. But they are such things as means to help the soul drop in God.

Here again, Byung-Chul Han is extremely helpful:

Rites are incarnation processes, bodily setups. The orders and values in force within a community are physically experienced and thus strengthened. They are inscribed onto the body; they are enfleshed, that is, interiorized through the body. Thus rites create incarnate knowing and memory, incarnate identity, incarnate bonds. The ritual community is a Körpershaft [bodily organization]… digitalization weakens the community bonds.

Ritual is a performance because it is bodily and not mental or verbal in the main. Ritual is a performance because through it the community builds and rebuilds itself through the right kind of repetition. Digitalization — which in some ways allows resistance networks to exist and be effective — has a big downside inasmuch as online rituals are poor surrogates of the real experience.

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Syung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Ritual: A Topology of the Present. (Quotations are from the first chapter. GG says that his translation may differ from the published one.)

Banner Image: A dancer spreads wings in a Cosmic Mass. Photograph from Matthew Fox’s archive.

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Queries for Contemplation

Are you a ritualist? In what ways? Have you ever considered the role of the body in ritual? How?

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Related Readings by Matthew Fox

Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality

One River, Many Wells: Wisdom Springing from Global Faiths

WHEE! We, wee All the Way Home: A Guide to Sensual Prophetic Spirituality 

Confessions: The Making of a Post-Denominational Priest 

Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul and Society

Creativity: Where the Divine and Human Meet

Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth

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