Ritual–Language–Action
2003 Indianapolis, Indiana
2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002
Convener 2003
Tom Splain, S.J. (teaches cultural anthropology in the social science department at the Gregorian University in Rome)
Seminar Participants 2003
Seminar members: Mary Francis Fleischaker; David Hogu; LeRoy Kennel; Gerard Pottebaum; Tom Splain; Kimberly Anne Willis
Visitor: Claudio Carvalhaes
Seminar Report 2003
Narrative and ritual
Our presentations and discussion explored the place of narrative in our lives. We proceeded by exploring the structure of the brain, the spirituality of the child, and the place of story in our adult lives.
The physical foundations
Physically, we are hormonal, biochemical, and structured. We cannot reduce one process to another nor can we distinguish the hardware from the software. The brain is built on the body and the brain interprets the body. Mind is a function of brain. Narrative is a fundamental function of mind, a way of interpreting.
Scientists have distinguished different functions for different parts of the brain. For example, the frontal lobes do planning, recognition happens in the parietal lobe, and long-term memory resides in the temporal lobe. Yet the brain remains amazingly flexible. Inter-cranial communication is rapid and complex. Other parts of the brain can pick up and participate in many functions. The frontal lobe is developing into our 20s. Empathy is here. Researchers are exploring the ways in which the brain continues to transform itself in response to new input throughout our lives.
Within us an emotional stimulus travels several paths. It travels quickly through the sensory thalamus to the amygdala and on to the hypothalamus. A second path can take the same stimulus to the sensory cortex, the transitional cortex, and then back to the anygdala and the hypothalamus. The first path gives us an immediate emotional response: we are afraid before we know the object of our fear.
Memories are stored throughout the brain. It takes three years to effectively move from the short-term to the long-term memory. Re-membering is never the same. The mind does not remember everything. It reconstructs each time. For better or for worse, repetition increases conviction. The mass becomes embedded in us. We are becoming part of the story. The more we participate, the less we are deliberately conscious.
With story all parts of the brain come into play. The brain creates stories as explanation. Learning cause and effect begins as a narrative. Science and religion both try to explain. Emotion and reason are not separated. If we lose emotion, we become stupid. In meditation the input shuts down and the sense of connection increases.
Children, ritual, and myth
Children have experiences of transformation, transcendence, acceptance, and rejection. They face living with all the ambiguities of human experience. Childhood games express the emerging awareness of being intimately connected with another, of “being with” or “not being with” God. This experience unfolds out of the primal experience of becoming flesh in the mother’s womb. While children have such experiences, they do not have the language with which to express, explore, or share those experiences with others. Through fantasy and play children create and try on their perceptions of reality. Here they find harmony between the world within and the world around them. Fantasy and play can be seen as the origin of myth-making and ritual-making. The responsibility of child caregivers is to provide children with access to language that is worthy of the experience they are already having. Unfortunately, we often tell the child what his or her experience should be. We smother those original images. Tradition can work for the child if we allow the images to work without coercion. We sometimes say, “If you don’t do this, God will punish you!” We should simply ask, “What was it like to play?” There is a fundamental need to nurture the imagination of the child. Imagination is that gift which enables us to engage in dialogue with the mystery of God’s presence.
Adults and narrative
Bernard Lonergan says that experience yields insight. Yet narrative, story, and myth provide a type of meaning at the highest level of experience. Narrative occurs at a level of condensed experience before abstract insight. Here we see the patterns of our life and the patterns we search for. Here there is conflict and contrast, searching and groping, renewal and new beginnings. We recognize conflict, search for solutions, and find resolutions that are new beginnings.
In Hollywood films are tested with audiences before their release. People instinctively recognize and respond to good stories and see things that have escaped the professionals. In a pre-screening of “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” the audience was not satisfied. The producers, at great expense, went back, filmed, and added a sequence wherein Julia Roberts apologizes to Cameron Diaz. The added moment provided the needed resolution that resulted in a box office hit. Joseph Campbell takes a postmodern stance and calls for us to find and enter our own myth, a myth that will aid us in our own search and resolution.