Ritual–Language–Action
2002 Reston, Virginia
2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002
Convener 2002
Tom Splain, S.J. (teaches cultural anthropology in the social science department at the Gregorian University in Rome)
Seminar Participants 2002
Cliff Guthrie, David Hogue, Troy Messenger, Gerard Pottebaum, Tom Splain, Catherine Vincie, Kimberly Willis
Seminar Report 2002
Reinventing rites of passage: Our starting points were Ronald Grimes’ book Deeply into the Bones and Catherine Bell’s keynote at the Societas Liturgica meeting at Santa Clara in July 2001.
In Deeply into the Bones Grimes is looking for both the traditional and invented rites that facilitate life passages in contemporary cultures. For Grimes the foundation for rites of passage is the person’s own story. But there is no clear pattern for all people. Yet, if we can learn a ritual attitude, the ensuing rituals, invented though they may be, can facilitate life passages—those important moments in our personal narrative.
In her keynote “Ritual Tension: Tribal and Catholic,” Catherine Bell began with a discussion of the paradox between Victor Turner’s seeming “simultaneous egalitarianism and implicit hierarchial subordination.” His famous and puzzling article in Worship fails to take into consideration the theological arguments and popular aspiration which were present at the time. Rites of passage are traditionally “tribal.” They belong to a cohesive community. But where are the cohesive communities today? Rituals are world renouncing or world maintaining. But where are our world renouncing rites of passage today? The wedding is no longer a rite of passage in the sense that it has liminality. It is a response to the question, “Whose marriage is it anyway?” The tensions today are between individual identity and family maintenance. The latter is symbolized by the expenditure of money. Our seminar discussion of the points raised in these two writings pivoted around the ritual of children, the ritual of women, and the tension between public and private.
Children: The growing child goes through many moments: first solo on a bicycle, first cigarette, first sexual encounter. Rituals help us integrate what is happening. The napkin over the head and the question, “Where’s Eileen?”—hide and seek in general—are rituals for being with and being separated from. The child needs this to feel safe in the process of his or her growing awareness. But when we take them to church we can introduce them to fear, rules, and exclusion. As we become denominationalized, we lose our original image of God. Parental interjects become ecclesial interjects. We don’t need to teach children to ritualize. They instinctively ritualize but don’t understand their own process. We don’t understand the child’s symbol system and so we let the toy manufacturers take over.
Women: The three traditional stages in a rite of passage do not happen in women’s rituals. Women have been reinventing ritual for the last forty years but the dynamics are different: women do not go apart; there is no peer bonding or endurance tests; women are always actors and players in an ongoing process of mutual support as they move through different moments of their lives; women focus on Turner’s feeling pole and don’t get caught in the tension between the semantic pole and the feeling pole.
Public Meaning–Personal Meaning: Dr. Linda Sun Crowder gave a slide presentation of her study of Chinese funeral rites in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Chinatown was originally settled by Cantonese speakers who had to adapt to their new life in America. Their evolving rituals sought a balance between formal ritual and private grief, between being Chinese, American, and urban. It is an ongoing process of negotiating identity. It includes a reinventing of the past, the reflection of a cosmology, and an agenda of bringing tourists into Chinatown.
People did things in response to September 11. They ritualized without being told what to do. There is a tension between public and private but there is also a felt need to talk about our rituals. Many were alone when they watched the towers fall. They grieved alone but had a felt need to ritualize after. It is too raw now. We have power over our own space and time but we also have a need for a place to come together to feel together what we were feeling alone. At Union Theological Seminary people come together regularly but the rituals each time are different. The things that don’t engage are the things that don’t respect the assembly for where they are. This is reminiscent of Ed Foley’s strategy in preparing couples for marriage; he seeks to discover their stories and bring those stories and appropriate biblical stories together in the ritual.