Many of us grew up in religious traditions that used ritual to affirm a connection to God. And now our postmodern sensibilities tell us that rituals are a useless vestige of more superstitious times. It is not surprising that the secular Buddhism movement promotes practice without robes and rituals.
Might rituals have other benefits beyond evoking unseen spirits? There are diverse opinions about rituals among psychologists. I take it B.F. Skinner had a low opinion of rituals, whereas Carl Jung appears to have thought ritual could help us get in touch with the subconscious mind.
I've heard it said that the purpose of a ritual or ceremony is to make visible what is invisible. A wedding makes visible a bond of commitment between two people. Funerals help us adjust to the death of a loved one. Rite-of-passage observances such as quinceanera or high school graduation make visible that a child is growing toward adulthood.
Sometimes when there are no traditional rituals people will create new ones. In the U.S., there's a relatively new practice of building a makeshift roadside shrine where someone has died in a car crash. Our too-frequent mass deaths -- such as last year's shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut -- inspire people to bring flowers, cards, toys, and other mementos to the scene of the deaths. This is grief made visible.
Joseph Campbell wrote that rituals "link the individual to transindividual purposes and forces. . . . ritualized procedures depersonalize the protagonists, drop or lift them out of themselves, so that their conduct now is not their own but of the species, the society . . . or the profession [Myths to Live By]."
A ritual, then, is a kind of communion, but not necessarily with a god. They are really more about displaying our connections to each other, or affirming our place in a group or society. And we humans appear to have a deep need to engage in rituals. However, it may be that much of the resistance to ritual is resistance to being depersonalized, to merging one's identity with a group.
But another way of looking at "depersonalized" is "breaking out of the ego shell."Â Gil Fronsdal wrote that rituals "can have an important role for other purposes. Not least of these is preparing the ground for the deep letting go which is what is required for liberation."
At best, a ritual is a deeply felt, shared experience. When engaged in wholeheartedly, a ritual can forge bonds and help build communities. They can reinforce commitment and prepare the ground of practice.
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