Advent, Week 1: Rituals
Recovering the Church Calendarby Paul Grant
Advent is the Church’s month of preparation for Christmas – one of the three primary Christian holidays. In the spirit of preparation, urbana.org is running a series this year on the theme of the coming Christmas. This week Paul Grant discusses ritual, and the Church calendar, in worship.
Other essays:
Week 1: Ritual in Worship
Week 2: Gift Giving
Week 3: Home for Christmas?
Week 4: Immanuel - God is with Us.
Advent is a Latin word meaning “coming”, or “arrival”. Christians use the word to mark the four weeks preceding Christmas. Advent is a season of preparation. A lot of ritual goes into this month. Some of it is spiritual, some of it is traditional, and some of it is entirely profane, but ritualistic nonetheless.
Ritual basically means customary formal rites. A ritual is something we do, rather than think about. A ritual is something we do periodically, and as close as possibly to a formal recipe. To our disenchanted ears, “ritual” sounds mystical or cultic, like a séance. But ritual is broader than that. Consider the handshake. It is possibly the most widespread formal act remaining in our society. A handshake is a means of greeting and agreement. It is a ritual that demonstrates mutual recognition. It is nothing scary or magical, but it is still a ritual.
The church calendar is a traditional recipe for worship, contextualized to the various seasons of the year – the human events of work and rest, the historical religious events marking Jesus’ passion, the coming of the Holy Spirit, et cetera. It is a liturgy through time, meant to help us remain on target in our spiritual lives. The church calendar is becoming increasingly informal in North American evangelical Christianity. For a variety of reasons, including Protestants’ historical animosity to Catholic mysticism, and a more general individualism in our society, we no longer observe much of the church calendar, to our loss.
High churches such at the Anglican Church, the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Lutheran Church and others – churches retaining liturgy in worship – are more likely than evangelical churches to also retain calendar rituals. But we all need rituals, even if we can list abstract reasons, like "freedom in Christ", why we don’t follow said rituals.
Leaving the Christian world altogether for a few moments, we would gain from a reading of Confucius on rituals. Confucius was a Chinese philosopher, and a contemporary of the Jewish prophet Isaiah’s and the Buddha’s. Confucius lived in a world remarkably similar to ours, where the rule of law was waning in a society fractured on political and economic lines. He never really amounted to much as a career bureaucrat, but he generated a small collection of disciples who gathered to hear his teachings on civil life.
A few thousand miles away at the same time, Siddhartha the Buddha was addressing the same problem – the arbitrary violence of the ruling elites and the meaninglessness of material society – but arrived at deathly conclusions. While the Buddha talked about discovering the illusionary nature of the world, and offered to his disciples the drastic hope of being extinguished from existence, Confucius had much more modest goals, appropriate for a bureaucrat. He was neither a spiritual thinker, nor a realist. And while a lot of his collected wisdom can be quite tiresome to read, amidst all his fulminating about government corruption and the impertinence of today’s youth, he had some important observations on the role rituals play in human life.
Rituals are not to be performed for their own purpose, Confucius said, but to facilitate meaningfulness in human activity. We don’t shake hands for the purpose of having a ritual; we shake hands for the purpose of extending a message of mutuality. Similarly, a ritual becomes useless when the mechanics of the ritual occupy all our thought. We’re not supposed to focus so much on the location of our fingers in the handshake, or on the amount of pressure applied in the squeeze, that we cannot give and receive the main message of the handshake – the message of mutual recognition. A ritual is a formality designed to help us turn off the white noise of distraction, so that we can better focus on the object of the ritual.
In our contemporary world, the pendulum has swung so far to the direction of disenchantment that it’s actually beginning to return a little. We’ve so individuated, deconstructed, and flat-out rejected all forms, rules, and traditions, that our lives feel flat to us. So we’ve started re-introducing ritual into our churches.
Starting in the 1970s, there has been a stream of evangelicals converting to Orthodoxy and Catholicism. These people take the bible seriously, and often quarrel with doctrines of their new churches, but they like the historical rooted-ness and rituals of these denominations. A campus minister in Illinois reports that the springtime Ash Wednesday service, which involves smudging ashes onto participants’ foreheads, which smudge they then wear for the rest of the day, is becoming hugely popular among the students at her large state school.
Many evangelicals who don’t import rituals from outside their four walls invent their own out of thin air. My church for example, looking to explore the ancient spiritual discipline of communal fasting, has put together a calendar-based, detailed month of various fasts for spiritual honing. The church has been doing that for a long time in preparation for Easter. It’s called lent. But my church didn’t join in with the church universal, opting instead to create an arbitrarily new ritual. We do it in October, so we call it Octoberfast, a reference to the ubiquitous beer festivals across our state. Nothing about our fast refers to Lent, though. We’ve seen the spiritual need for ritual, but we are not stewards of church tradition. We evangelicals are still too individuated for tradition, so we have to invent our own rituals.
Back to Advent: No one pretends Jesus was born on December 25th. Nobody knows the exact date of his birth. That historical unknown goes with the territory of unwed mothers, occupied peoples and soon-to-be refugees. It was originally an arbitrarily selected date. So there is no magic in December 25 or in the advent season preceding it. But for over a thousand years, Christians have marked Jesus’ birth by honing our spirits on the message of God’s incarnation in human flesh-and-blood.
Advent is thus as much for us as it is for God. Though it is a season for worship, advent is also a human-made opportunity to direct our minds and spirits on the advent of our savior.
Unless otherwise noted, all materials on the urbana.org web site are Copyright InterVarsity Christian Fellowship / USA. All rights reserved.
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