Sacred Routine

Dave Brisbin 8.7.22 What’s your first reaction to the words religious ritual? Positive? Negative? Typically, it’s a one-two punch of negatives: religion and ritual—both of which many people now denigrate, ridicule, as empty, meaningless, even cultish. Those criticisms are valid if ritual is performed thoughtlessly, without knowing the meaning of the symbols involved, as mere obedience or conformance to a group, to gain approval or status…but what if it isn’t any of those things? A sacrament is a religious ritual that we define as the outward expression of an inward transformation. When a person offers a transformed heart, with understanding of how the ritual expresses their transformation to the community, it’s filled with meaning—a shared experience and celebration that binds people together. We need ritual, but we need to expand it beyond the confines of church. In my twenties, as some point I realized that I always fell into deep depression on Sunday afternoons. Like clockwork. Not until my thirties when I had started going to a church again, did I realize the depression was gone. Growing up, my family went to mass every Sunday. Got up, dressed up, drove on the same streets to church, pancakes after at Paris’ restaurant every time. Here was ritual expanded beyond the religious experience, but not the spiritual. As humans we find connection in what is reliable and repeatable—acts regularly repeated in a set manner. In other words, a routine. Another word we don’t like. But routine is what our lives are made of. It’s what we do over and over that defines us to ourselves and others, not the exceptions no matter how exciting. Routine may feel like a four letter word, but it gives us the time and times we need to connect and bond with life. Even so, routine is also meaningless if done thoughtlessly with no understanding of what it symbolizes in our lives. But routine becomes ritual if we bring our awareness and fully participate, and it becomes sacramental the moment our transformed hearts can see the deeper implications of our presence meeting God’s presence in the connection it creates.