Ritual Isn’t the Enemy; Empty Ritual Is

When our church decided to celebrate the Lord’s Supper weekly, I heard valid concerns that the ordinance would lose significance. If “absence makes the heart grow fonder,” does frequency make the heart grow colder? If we do it every single week, won’t it become an empty ritual? Won’t we forget what it means and just go through the motions?

American culture isn’t typically kind to ritual. The inheritance of Romanticism dominates the way we think about the world. What matters most is individual experience. Spontaneity is valued above order. The individual is prioritized above the group. Emotion takes precedence over reason. Under the values of our culture, ritual struggles to find a welcome home in our thought lives. If the good life is defined as chasing new experiences that make me feel a certain way, why on earth would I engage in something that asks me to participate again and again regardless of how I feel?

Of course, as hard as we try, we can’t really avoid ritual. Millions of us wake up every single morning and immediately grab our phones and begin scrolling. That’s a ritual. When you kiss your spouse goodbye on your way out the door, you are enacting another ritual. When a behavior becomes a routine habit, we’ve crossed the line into ritual. If you focused closely on your typical day, you would discover all kinds of rituals.

It would seem then that ritual is an unavoidable aspect of being human. God created us as ritualized beings, meaning we learn and develop as human beings by following the ritual patterns of others. You do the things you do because you’ve repeated rituals you’ve learned from others. As Dru Johnson writes in Human Rites: The Power of Rituals, Habits, and Sacraments, “We are ritualed creatures, designed to understand everything from microbiology to statistical models to the emotions of others through ritual performance.”  You may not like rituals, but you can’t avoid them.

If ritual is unavoidable, then we need to approach the subject more intentionally. In other words, once I’ve established that I follow rituals, I need to focus on choosing my rituals wisely and trying to get the most out of them. Johnson writes, “If our bodily practices determine how we understand the world, then we might want to ask ourselves these important questions: Who is offering us the rituals we practice? By what authority? And to what end?” We need to accept the undeniable fact that we all practice rituals every day and take more control over what rituals we choose to follow.

Isn’t it strange that no one ever says, “I don’t want to scroll my Instagram feed every day because then it will lose meaning”? And yet, here we are, day after day, sometimes hour after hour, being shaped by that ritual. The daily ritual of digital technology makes us antsy when a screen isn’t glowing in front of our faces. We crave stimulation, are easily bored, and need constant “connection.” Social media is so impactful because it’s so easily ritualized. How many times have you found yourself opening your favorite social media app without even thinking about it? Your body is literally going through the motions. This seems like the epitome of empty ritual.

Ritual isn’t our enemy. Empty ritual is. Our problem with ritual is that we’ve been following all kinds of scripts with little thought devoted to the question of how those habits are shaping us. Too often, we find ourselves on repeat mode, just going through the motions because we haven’t realized that better scripts are available. We feel trapped inside the ritualized economy our culture has created for us, and we don’t know many people offering superior ritualized alternatives. We feel trapped in a ritualistic cycle that dehumanizes us.

Here’s where the rituals of Jesus come into play. What if you commit to waking up every day and grabbing your Bible before your phone? What if you initiated a daily habit of speaking to Jesus in prayer before informing the world about another day in the life of a millennial on Instagram? What if you took a break from digital technology altogether and spent the time normally devoted to the screen in prayer?

But, of course, those personal rituals are just the beginning. Christ calls us to gather with his people, to confess our sins to one another, to sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs with one another. He meets us at the table with his body broken and his blood poured out. He meets us when the Spirit-filled preacher proclaims the gospel faithfully each week. We need these rituals because these rituals shape us into the kind of people Christ calls us to be. We need rituals. Let’s leave empty ritual behind.

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