INTRODUCTORY UNIT - RITUALS, CULTURE AND US

9. THE BENEFITS OF RITUAL - TWO PERSPECTIVES

From the point of view of the cultural group, there are many significant points about ceremonial life cycle ritual. The first is that the ceremony is to one degree or other a public ceremony, witnessed by members of the community. In that sense it is a cementing moment emphasizing the connection of the individual to the group and confirming it publicly. It bestows public communal validity upon the new status that is being marked in the ceremony. This, of course, is particularly important when the individual has become marginalized and distanced from the group.

Another major function of the ceremony, from the collective cultural point of view, is that it provides an opportunity to emphasize and publicly proclaim the values that represent the group and that have been embedded in the ceremony through the generations. It is an opportunity for the group to educate the individual into a new stage of immersion in the values system of the group. This is especially true in those ceremonies (most prominently at maturity or puberty), which demand learning and preparation on the part of the individual before she or he comes to the ceremony, since they provide a chance for the accumulated group wisdom to filter through to the particular individual.

From the point of view of the participating individual, in addition to the aspect of linking up to the group, there are a number of other issues that must be considered when evaluating the importance of the ritual ceremony. The ritual moment is a chance to take stock, to frame a moment with meaning, to single out a particular and significant moment in the life process and focus on it in a way that infuses it with enormous significance and alerts the individual to the importance of self-examination and introspection. It is a means of signaling to individuals, who might otherwise take such change for granted, that they have come to a particular moment of great importance in their life and a chance (even an obligation) at such moments to take stock of the meaning of the moment in life's passage.

Many of these life-passage moments are fraught with private anxiety, and even personal crisis for the individual. The ceremony can serve as a comforting reminder that others have passed through the same difficult stage before, and that it is publicly accepted that this is a particularly tense time for the individual. It can be viewed as the culture's way of comforting the individual in his or her individual anxiety and pain, and announcing to the individual that this is merely the prelude to a new status within the community.

This last point bears emphasizing. In many cultures, life cycle ceremonies almost always have a transitional aspect, marking the passage of the individual to a new status within the collective. The ceremony offers and denotes a publicly proclaimed way of allowing the individual to be removed from the previous status and to pass to the assumption of the new status within the community, within a public forum.

An additional function for the individual is the encounter with the deepest truths that the culture has produced. In this way, a person is confronted with deep cultural truths about the material world, the spiritual world and his or her role in relation to those two worlds.

Another very important function of the ceremony for the individual is connected to the symbolic aspects of ritual, which are present on all such occasions. If, as mentioned, the life cycle changes tend to be situated at junctures of individual life when a person feels anxiety, the symbolic aspects of ceremony can often provide a physical anchor for those anxieties, making them easier for the individual to deal with. The very physicality of symbol can channel the anxieties and help overcome them.

A final aspect is the importance of the ceremony for the individual in later retrospect. We tend to remember the life cycle ceremonies. They become fixed landmarks in our lives and in our memories. When we try and assess our lives and our progress in life, it is useful to have such landmarks, which enable us to recall the events of our lives. In fact, while we are likely to be unable to recall in detail the majority of our lives, the "anchored" life cycle events can almost always be remembered in great detail. This, too, is an important benefit for the individual.

When examining the sum total of the important aspects of ceremonial life cycle ritual, both from the individual point of view and from the point of view of the cultural community, it is clear that these ceremonies mark occasions of potentially great significance for all involved.

Clearly, that potential is not always realized. Often, as previously mentioned, the individual has become detached from the cultural group. In many cases, the deep meanings of the ceremony are not clear to the participants who retain the external elements which often seem ridiculous, meaningless and superficial, when separated from their deeper layers of meaning. Sometimes, the philosophies and belief systems of the participants are so at odds with the world-views on which the ceremonies are based that there is estrangement from the culture, while the relationship between the participants and the cultural group is strained and results in alienation.

Frequently, too, those whose task it is to represent the culture to the individuals do not know how to present it in a manner that is comprehensible to the individual participants. Very often, the ritual is pushed to the front, while the meaning is forgotten, so that the ceremony becomes a meaningless exercise in sterile ritual rather than a meaningful encounter with deep cultural truths. For all these reasons, what should be a momentous encounter between the individual and him or herself, and between the individual and his or her culture, often fails to achieve its full or even its partial potential. In cultural terms, the moment has been wasted.