Relig-ish by Mee-Chapman Rachelle;

Author:Mee-Chapman, Rachelle;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chalice Press
Published: 2016-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

Living Rituals

I don’t know exactly what prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed . . .”

—Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day”

I believe poets are our prophets, and one my most relied upon seers is Mary Oliver. I especially appreciate this passage, from “The Summer Day.” I love how Oliver takes an ordinary—some might say frivolous—moment and turns it into prayer. (Or maybe it’s more that she is paying attention, so she notices that it is already prayer.) After naming this everyday moment as something transcendent, Oliver goes on to ask, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” It’s from this last questioning line of the poem that my online community, Flock, takes its most long-running ritual. Each Sunday evening, as we set our intentions for the upcoming week, we ask one another, “Tell me, what is it you intend to do with your one wild, precious life?”

We have only this one life that we’re sure of, friend. Wild and mysterious, precious and treasured, everyday and overly familiar—and it is our ultimate task to honor it and live it well. To pay attention, and name the ordinary for what it truly is—sacred. To help you do that, I invite you to treat your daily rhythm as ritual, as an act of self-care and soulcare.

As religious folks, we got used to having the familiar rhythms around us, demarcated by rituals. For the purpose of our work together here we will define a ritual as a set of repeated actions and words, that along with symbolic objects, help us connect more concretely with otherwise unseen and untouchable truths. In our religious past we may have had daily, weekly, and seasonal rituals. Turning the pages of leather Bibles with onion-skin thin pages at morning devotions. Folding hands and bowing heads at evening prayers with an uttered “Amen.” Bread and wine passed on Sunday mornings with the whispered words, “Take, and eat.” Candles and prayers of Friday nights. Sacred objects. Sacred words. Sacred action. These were the rituals that held our truths and kept them front and center in the buzz of our daily life.

While the beliefs behind these rituals may have shifted, and their functionality may have ebbed, the need and the hunger for ritual remains. Yet without the formality of church or temple, the everyday parts of our life can seem too mundane to be holy. Feeding the dog. Washing the dishes. Washing ourselves. Going to bed. All of these things can hang on us like a chore—mundane activities from a mundane existence.

What I want to tell you friend, is this. You can dismiss most of your life by naming it mundane, or you can value these ordinary things for what they really are—the building blocks of your be-ing and the DNA of your life.

You can decry the actions of your daily life as profane, or you can honor them as sacred.

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