On Ritual
On Ritual
Kyiv. The sub-zero night of 10th December 2013. Ivan Sydor races to his superior, asks if he should ring the bells. The last time the bells of St Michael’s Gold-Domed Monastery were rung in alarm was 1240, the Mongol horde laying siege to the city. 800 years on, the danger comes from within: the security force, the Berkut, pulverising the Maidan protestors.
Unknown to Ivan Sydor, the Berkut and the protestors, my father had died that morning. Now, as Kyiv faces the Putin horde, I consider the ritual around his death, dying; the homecoming from the undertakers in good navy suit and tie, shoes and socks (he suffered with cold feet), lying in state in the sitting room, the younger grandchildren hiding dolls and dinkies in his coffin. In Sundays Well, where he served at Mass, joined the Confraternity and the choir, kept Quarantore, played Buttons in the Panto, shouldered his siblings, the dead bell tolled as their children and his grandson shouldered him through carols, mourners, incense. Illness had confined him to the care of strangers, his life mediated by machinery, lab numbers, shift changes, sneaky ice-cream, morse-code bleeps, the staggering complexity of the human swallow. But the rituals around his death and burial - the lighting of candles, the reciting of prayers for the dying, the singing of songs, closing of eyes, blessing with water, offering of symbols, ringing of bells, burning of incense, presenting his soul to God the Most High - not only rescued him from physical decline, the invisibility of the elderly, certified death, but illuminated and reflected the ritual practice of his life: love of God, nature, music, life; belief in humanity; kindness to community; devotion to family.
In modern society, ritual has become largely devalued. Traditions, responses are decried as being ‘merely ritualistic’, the form being paramount and therefore, we imagine, deprived of value, meaning. In terms of religion, Ireland’s historical Catholicism features in the reduction. While married mothers had to be Churched after giving birth, girls put away lest they become unmarried mothers through the tantric miracle of ‘getting themselves pregnant, were ritually herded through the streets in the white veils, silver medals, blue cloaks of the Children of Mary. It is, perhaps, this residual memory has left so many so antsy about the Angelus Bell on RTE. As someone who values ritual, I would like the bell on the national broadcaster to remain, whether the sound come from the Plum Village, a ‘clog’ hung in an ancient tree in Ardglass, bronze struck in the white candlelight, evergreen and incense of a temple, or a besieged, gold-domed monastery in Kyiv. The provenance is immaterial; the punctuation in the day, the call to attention, awareness, intention is the intrinsic value.
Ritual goes beyond the religious or liturgical, being found in all areas of life, public, private, state, social, cultural. Here, the rites of passage of First Communion and Confirmation were important signifiers of achievement and belonging within the rituals of Christianity. In recent years they have taken on a more social aspect, many parents anxious children should ‘make’ them along with their classmates as a milestone in their childhood as opposed to out of religious conviction. Certainly, the fall-off in religious churchgoing leaves us without the public opportunity to come together in ritual, and ‘attend’ in every sense of the word, to shared symbols, images, rubrics, ceremony, intention. But that same fall-off in religious practice has not reduced our interest in a spiritual life or the sacred, the pursuit and practice of private ritual in our lives and homes.
In winter, at the end of the office day, I put away the laptop on a particular shelf, wash my hands with warm water and beautiful soap, turn on a favourite gold lamp. Then, I light a candle on the coffee table, another in the lantern outside along with some incense. A good habit, you might say? Perhaps. Except habit, by its nature, tends to be automatic. By contrast, whether it’s reading from the Psalms or saying the rosary or having a G&T or pouring a glass of wine or running a bath or making a cup of tea, doing so at a specific time, with specific action, awareness, purpose and intention, makes it a ritual, connects us to What Else is there, the continuum of humanity, existence. In that ritual we confirm our presence, take our place.
Before Christmas, I heard the English writer Madeleine Bunting talk about ritual. Her arguments made immediate sense: how it comforts, reassures, asserts our belonging, helps us feel more at home in ourselves, our lives, the world. I have written previously here about the abandonment of the Holy Days (holidays), my regret that we don’t follow the French and Italians in keeping them as punctuation in the run-on lines of our increasingly-stuffed, samey, consumer existence. Italian news media and weather forecasters lack any self-consciousness in referring to the days of the Immacolata in December, just as they do with the Days of the Blackbird at the end of January. Today the hard-core, political-cum-market commands are Produce! Buy! Consume! but even a cursory look at life – and our own lives within it - shows what we are devouring is ourselves, Earth, each other. If there is the need, the search for more, for Other, for deeper, higher, then ritual, be it religious, spiritual or personal, can help us find, achieve, express it.
These nights, like many, I light a ritual candle for Ukraine, remembering how in 1240, the people of Kyiv rang the bells, left votives seeking protection from invasion. In 2022, their courage rises like incense above the steel-chromium shells, Byzantine icons.