The Virtue of Ritual

a sermon preached by Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V at First Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois, October 18, 2009

after a reading from Muriel Barberry’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog concerning the Tea Ceremony

Welcome to church today.  It’s good to see all of you here, even as I’m reminded of those who can’t be with us because of illness or travel or because it was a good day to stay in bed.

But for those of you who have struggled and gotten here this morning, I have a question:  what are you doing here?  What are we doing together?  Why do we come back to this place week after week after week? 

Obviously this is a rhetorical question and I didn’t expect you’d answer me all at once.  But it is a mystery, isn’t it, that so many of us would take the time out of our busy schedules to come and sit together for an hour or so each week.  It’s baffling, really, what’s happening as we do what we do over and over and over again.

One word that comes to mind to describe what we do together is the word ritual.  Some people might understand ritual to mean something that requires candles and incense and robes and special language being spoken to invoke some higher power or other.  Others might understand ritual to be anything you do repetitively like eating the same kind of toast the same way for breakfast every morning or brushing your teeth the same way every night.  I want to define ritual for us this morning as something in between those two extremes:  on the one hand, ritual doesn’t have to mean a huge production with candles and incense and priests.  Neither is it something you do over and over again without thinking.  I think the key is intentionality:  ritual is something we do over and over again, intentionally, thinking about it, paying attention to it as we go, imbuing it with meaning and allowing that meaning to act on us and change us even as we change the way we do the ritual, either slightly or more radically, in the moment or over time.

 

I think one can get a sense of this best, perhaps, by looking at someone else’s ritual activity.  In Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog, from which we took our reading this morning, the main character speaks in glowing terms about sharing a cup of tea with one of her neighbors.  It’s just tea, you think, but you heard her, gushing about the “splendid gift of this unexpected morning as if it were some precious nectar…”  My goodness, it’s apparent it’s not only tea – it’s a transcendent moment in the lives of the participants.  What could be going on?

In The Book of Tea, written by the Japanese scholar and international arts educator Kakuzo Okakura around the turn of the 19^th-into-the-20^th century, we find Kakuzo poetically describing the tea ceremony as it was practiced in Japan after being imported from China.

First, about the building that the tea ceremony takes place within, Kakuzo says,

“The tea-room (the Sukiya) does not pretend to be other than a mere cottage, most often only a straw hut.  The… term Sukiya may signify the Abode of Fancy or the Abode of Vacancy or the Abode of the Unsymmetrical. 

The tea room is an Abode of Fancy inasmuch as it is an ephemeral structure built to house a poetic impulse.”  [It is not an edifice built for the ages or one that you expect will provide shelter over the long haul.  It’s only for the momentary ceremony.]

“It is an Abode of Vacancy inasmuch as it is devoid of ornamentation except for what may be placed in it to satisfy some aesthetic need of the moment.”  [There’s nothing there as extraneous decoration other than an object for you to focus on momentarily.]

“It is an Abode of the Unsymmetrical inasmuch as it is consecrated to the worship of the Imperfect, purposefully leaving something unfinished for the play of the imagination to complete.”  [There’s always something just off – perfectly clean except for the drop of water on the table, perfectly arranged except for the slight angle of the teapot sitting on the stove.  Perfectly symmetrical except for that one small challenge to the orderliness of the room – like a pulpit slightly out of place...]

So that’s about the building, only a straw hut really, where this oh-so-poetic tea ritual takes place.  Kakuzo goes on to talk about the beginning of the ceremony itself.  He says,

“…the guest will silently approach the sanctuary, and, if a samurai, will leave his sword on the rack beneath the eaves, the tea-room being preeminently (a) house of peace.  Then the guest will bend low and creep into the room through a small door not more than three feet in height.  This proceeding will be incumbent on all guests - high and low alike - and is intended to inculcate humility.  The order of precedence having been mutually agreed upon previously, the guests one by one will enter noiselessly and take their seats, first paying homage to a picture or flower arrangement in the alcove.  The host will not enter the room until all the guests have seated themselves and quiet reigns with nothing to break the silence save the note of the boiling water in the iron kettle.  The kettle sings well, for pieces of iron are so arranged in the bottom as to produce a peculiar melody in which one may hear the echoes of a (waterfall) muffled by clouds, of a distant sea breaking among rocks, a rainstorm sweeping through a bamboo forest, or of the (murmur) of pines on some faraway hill.”

Kakuzo’s quite the poet, but you get the picture:  in a straw hut, a host making tea, a guest there to drink it.  But it’s not just tea.  It’s something more:  you’re in a special building, with special decorations, and you act in special ways toward the others there and you consider each of the details of that space and that activity carefully as you experience the special space and special time together.

It’s only people drinking tea, but more:  they’re paying attention to what they’re doing, and they’re paying attention to each other, and they’re letting what they’re doing together change them – either slightly or radically, in the moment or over time.

 

It used to be when scholars studied these things, that they paid most of their attention to three areas where ritual was thought to be effective:  the metaphysical, the psychological, and the institutional. 

At the metaphysical level, participating in ritual might put us in touch with something larger than ourselves.  Ritual may allow participants to sense a connection with the universe that is not readily available under more normal circumstances…

At the psychological level, ritual might change the way we’re feeling at any given moment.  Participating in ritual may raise our awareness of our interior makeup and processes or may lift us into ecstatic experience.  Conversely, it may give us a rest from the chaos and swirl of the everyday and put us at peace for a few moments.

At the institutional level, participating in ritual may say something about who we are and something about who we are not.  What we do and how we act ritually may define us as a community:  we’re the ones who do this ritual this way;  those other people over there do not.

What is it we in this church do the same as a lot of other people?  When we gather for worship, we say special words, we sing special songs, we use a special format or an order for our worship that’s very much the same as people have been using for two thousand years in churches and longer in other gatherings. 

What do we do that’s different?  Well, look around.  We have less ornamentation in our worship space than some other churches.  We use different words in our hymns than you might find in many churches around.  We use different language than you might hear in other church communities, or when we use the same language others use, we often mean it differently than they do.

I was reminded this week during a UU&You! orientation class about how powerful the Tenebrae service we do here is for some people.  We celebrate Tenebrae on the Thursday evening of what Christians know as Holy Week.  It comes just on the cusp of spring in the week between Palm Sunday and Easter. This Tenebrae is not fun and upbeat – it’s a service that pays attention to the shadows and darkness of life:  the lights are low and the mood is somber as we read from the stories of Jesus’ crucifixion and death.  And then we celebrate Christian Communion at an open table where everyone is welcome, with the usual bread and wine but in the Socinian tradition of silence during the sharing of the food and the drink. From the outside, it may look like plain ol’ Christian Communion, but from the inside  - well, you’d have to ask the people who’ve participated.  Some have told me it doesn’t feel like plain ol’ anything;  it’s completely special and metaphysical and psychological.  And institutionally, it defines us as people who are not only willing to try new things – which requires a courage of a certain kind -  but we are also people who are willing to try old things in new ways – which requires the courage to examine and critique the ways we live now and then to move beyond our hidebound assumptions about the way life must always and forever be.

And speaking of Communion, there is one other ritual we practice together that I think helps define us as a welcoming, sharing, giving community, and that is the ritual of Potluck.  Perhaps you’ve never thought about Christian Communion and First Unitarian Potluck as in any way, shape or form similar.  But both use food as a central element, both are about the sharing of our gifts with our neighbors, both  - in this church, at least - are about defining the neighbor as broadly as possible and bringing the ‘other’ into the circle of care and concern and love.

If you’ve thought of Potluck as just a meal, then maybe you’ve missed something.  I think the ritual of Potluck has a social power that goes far beyond the metaphysical, the psychological, and the institutional.  Everybody is welcome, whether they brought something or not.  Everybody is included regardless of their status in society or culture.  All hierarchy flattens out.  Potluck, in its deepest sense, has the power to obliterate the boundaries inherent in distinctions around age and class and economic status and education level and sexual orientation.  In other words, Potluck, as does any ritual, holds the possibility and the power to embody structures and to enact events that are simply too difficult to perfect in our imperfect everyday world.

Tenebrae and Potluck are examples of public rituals we perform when we’re together here in this special place.  But I suspect there are private rituals that many of us involve ourselves in that are meaningful to us as individuals and help us to cope with stress and add meaning to our lives.  An example from my own life is my yoga practice. I try to do a particular set of yoga exercises every morning.  Some mornings, admittedly, I can’t make myself sit down and do them, so it then becomes an exercise in self-forgiveness.  But I’ve done pretty well these last couple of years and I think I’ve learned a few things by attending to this practice that, to me, is both physical and spiritual.

There are certainly metaphysical benefits to my personal ritual:  I feel more connected to the space around me and to the universe when my practice is going well.  My prayer life feels stronger.  And I often receive epiphanies about things I’ve been wrestling with when I am going through my usual yoga motions. 

There are psychological benefits as well:  I believe I’m calmer and better able to handle stress when I practice regularly.

But it is not easy to keep it up, this regular yoga practice, regardless of the benefits.  I feel intensely the resistance to starting and the reluctance to engage.  I know all the excuses for not getting down to it.  But, in my practice, I have found:  when the physical movements have become nearly unconscious and ingrained in my muscle memory, there is a mental space that – sometimes and with hard work – opens up and invites the free flow of joys and concerns and ideas and prayers and connections that are so hard to pay attention to in the busyness of life.

 

I hope that’s what church is like:  that once the practice becomes ingrained, there may be a space that – sometimes and with hard work - opens up and invites the free flow of joys and concerns and ideas and prayers and connections that are so hard to pay attention to in the busyness of life.  If that doesn’t happen for you every Sunday, then I hope it happens from time to time.  But I’m not sure.  I never am.  And I have a hard time explaining what it is that happens with people who are affected, deeply affected, by what we do together.

But if I can’t, maybe you can explain what it is that happens when we do what we do together.  Perhaps, for you, it seems all about the words, or about the quiet in between the words.  Perhaps, for you, it’s about the sitting alone, or about the sitting together with people you know, or people you don’t know.  Perhaps it’s in the movements we go through or in the stillness we experience together.  Perhaps in the movements or in the stillness you feel a connection to something larger than yourself.  Perhaps in the words or in the silence you hear a spirit breathing among us.  Perhaps not.

Regardless, I pray that you join us on our journey, and that you continue to experience in this special place a time set apart from the roiling chaos of the everyday, and that what we do together holds open the promise for you that transformation is possible – either slightly or radically, whether in the moment or over time.

So may it be.