Religious Ritual Touches the Foundations of the Real and the Sacred

Definition of religious ritual: repetitive actions which refer to the essential structures of the universe and paradigmatic modes of being

Rituals are:

• commemorative -- re-presencing a paradigmatic event of the past; they function in sacred time to enact sacred stories (i.e., communal myths)
• conservative -- maintaining and reinforcing communal traditions, beliefs, and values; "socializing" personal experience so it "belongs" in the community and is extended in one's life as right actions and appropriate responses; both reflecting and ordering a culture's "world"
• dramatic -- robust symbols and dynamic actions which draw participants into the "salvation event" where one can experience the Holy and have transcendent values affirmed

Ritual has transformative power

• re: the individual, the group, the ecosystem, the cosmos
• It transcends routine social structures, providing a temporary experience of intense social unity.
• Hence, it can renew the community, heal and make whole again.
• Ritual fashions a meaningful world in which to live and provides a context for religious conviction.

Ritual has transcendent power

• It makes present a reality which is beyond the mundane or routine.
• Belief/conviction emerges out of ritual.

While ritual can reinforce cultural values (thereby sustaining family systems and state structures), it also can challenge or undercut them by creating an alternative worldview (thereby fueling social change, or even social revolution).

Four Purposes of Religious Ritual:

1. Adoration
2. Penance/Purification
3. Petition
4. Thanksgiving

Worship is:

• a response to the appearance of the Sacred
• a means of maintaining group identity and cohesiveness, and
• a means by which the understanding of the sacred is transmitted to members of a religious community.

Communal Worship has two basic thrusts:

• union with the transcendent object of worship and
• bonding of the community.

Four Basic Types of Rituals

1. Calendar/commemorative rituals remember an event in the past and make it present again
   1. the Mass
   2. Lent, Easter, other liturgical seasons
   3. Sabbath/Sunday, Feast days
   4. Daily hours of prayer
   5. Thanksgiving, New Year's Day, MLK day
      
      
2. Crisis rituals are done at time of important decision, to help person choose the right path
   1. Cursillo
   2. Retreats
   3. Confession/Reconciliation
   4. Prayer in time of special need (e.g., Novena to St. Jude)
   5. Vision quest of Navajo
      
      
3. Rites of passage enact shift from one social location to another (i.e., Status Elevation or Status Reversal)
   1. Baptism/Bris/Naming of Child
   2. Initiation/conversion rites
   3. Puberty Rites
   4. Marriages
   5. Funerals
      
      
4. Sacrifice/communion rituals create or intensify unity of participants with divine
   1. Holy Communion
   2. Passover
   3. Thanksgiving
   4. SuperBowl Party?

    

Ritual serves the psychological function of providing the context for religious conviction because:

• without the conviction or belief there would be no reason for ritual. Ritual is the expression of a community idea. It is the physical and temporal enactment of something that may [be] beyond explanation in the physical world. Rituals allow a group to be unified; it reinforces the group identity. The more drama in the ritual the better the construction of reality and the reality of the belief that is [expressed] in the ritual. The physical act of participating in ritual helps trigger kinesthetic memory and makes it all the more real.
• Ritual enables us to put into action (by virtue of the ritual itself) what we believe. For example, in getting baptized, a person reconciles her actions with her beliefs. A ritual is a means of conveying what that person believes.