Radical Ritual
The holiday season is officially upon us and it’s possible that you feel excitement, nostalgia, grief, anger, pressure, disgust, joy, or all of the above rotating through you like the scenes in the Nutcracker thrown in a blender.
Most of us grew up with traditions of some kind around the holidays – even if that tradition was an adamant refusal to participate in anything prescribed or inspired by organized religion or dominant culture.
Gift giving, attending holy services, lighting the menorah each night, caroling, decorating, gathering together with family to eat, drink, and be merry… At their roots, these traditions grew out of a deep reverence for and celebration of meaning and gratitude, practices to help us honor the mysterious benevolence of life and to nurture our experience of belonging and embedment. For many of us, they’ve devolved into obligatory, rote activities that reinforce our disembodiment and our enslavement to the monotheistic and consumerist traditions that have shaped Western Industrial Culture.
It's tempting to imagine the solution is to throw it all out. In actuality, the solution is to take a sacred pause, step back, and look at what you are participating in and why so that you can decide with intention which rituals you will keep, and which you will let go.
It also means you might begin to add in some new traditions that feel generative to you. These could be rituals that your ancestors of blood and bone would have undertaken at this time of year that have been lost to more recent generations. Or, perhaps, ones that the ancestors of the particular place that you live in would have enacted. You could also create something new and never-before-seen that comes to you seemingly out of nowhere.
The truly radical act here is not pushing away or cutting off, but instead designing informed, intentional rituals and traditions that nourish ourselves, our loved ones, and that honor our betrothal to the other than human world.
Across cultures and over millennia, rituals and ceremonies were used to mark and anchor thresholds and initiations and were deeply integrated into well human cultures. In the modern era, ceremony and ritual have been stripped of their meaning and transformative power, and instead have mostly devolved into impersonal, watered-down, formulaic conventions that mark our process of further homogenization and domestication – picture most graduation and wedding ceremonies. Yet, in their original roles, ceremony and ritual marked a threshold crossing calling each human into more of their essential expression and contribution; a thing without which The World would not be whole.
In January we are offering a weekend immersion into Eros, Ceremony & Belonging, designed to support your relationship with each of these fundamental aspects of our human experience. Whether you're new to ceremony or a veteran ceremonialist, this weekend is designed to give you just enough community reflection and support for whatever threshold you are crossing. We hope you'll join us!
