Ritual

Sundays of my childhood meant a short mini-van scramble to our white, clapboarded church, the oldest in town. The First-Parish’s tall white steeple stands stark against deep greens in summer and fiery reds in autumn. I sat straight in upright pews with spare, nubby cushions between bony bottom and hardwood. Wandering eyes found little to break the simplicity of the sanctuary: a smooth scroll at each pew’s end, a few brass nameplates for old ministers (same names as the streets of the town), a plaster rosette on the ceiling and the simple chandelier hanging from it. Better to gaze out the window and watch the leaves ripple in and out of a hundred panes of old glass, or follow the lazy floating of the dust caught in a straight bright sunbeam high above my head. Each Sunday I sang songs with fire and brimstone removed and, sometimes, inclusive language injected. I heard lovely, rich stories and sermons from my bearded atheist minister, looked out across a community of friends and neighbors as simply adorned as the church: white hair, creased smiles, casual sweaters. When the time came, my friends and I were dismissed to Sunday school where we learned about diverse religions of the world alongside our Bible stories. We were encouraged to treat all world views with respect and, even as children, to make our own informed decisions about theology. In 4th grade and 8th grade, we learned sex ed. I am Unitarian Universalist, and all of this is perfectly normal in my church.

Less normal among the UUs is ritual. Ok, we light a chalice at the beginning of each service, and there are occasionally ceremonies to welcome babies into our midst. I married my husband in that church with the same old minister with the now-white beard. I attended my dear friend’s memorial there. These are, I suppose, rituals. But ask my Recovering Catholic friends, and they will roll their eyes at this shadow of ritual and confess how deeply they still yearn for mass and communion. The UU church is predominantly thought and activism. It can all be done disembodied. Ritual is a deeper, more instinctive mystery.

This isn’t a criticism of my religion, exactly. I love my upbringing. I love my church. I am so grateful for worldly Sunday School, values of love and liberalism, and comprehensive sex education. I get a deep, visceral sense of home every time I climb the creaky stairs to that sanctuary. The lessons of my church landed in my body despite the intellectual setup.

It’s just that, when I entered somatic coaching school, and my teacher said, “There are some parts of the subconscious that can only be reached through ritual,” I felt the truth of it deeply. I had not tried to reach those places that only ritual can touch since I was a very little girl, playing in the woods, stealing a miniature pumpkin from a field to deliver to my dead cat’s grave. That the farmer caught me and ran across the field yelling at me, tiny pumpkin bulging in my overall pocket, did not help my budding ritual instincts.

It wasn’t just my puritanical church roots, nor that brush with that farmer that squelched ritual instincts. I have seen so many cases of ritual unfold as cruelty, trapping dear friends in cycles of self-punishment, pitting open souls against basic bodily instincts. And abuse! I lived for many years just a stone’s throw from The Mystic river. “That Mystic River?” My far-flung friends ask. Yes. That one. I know families who proudly encouraged sons to serve in sacred ritual devastated by pedophile priests. This was not just a salacious news story in my community. It is the lived reality of this place.

So no wonder my own upbringing treats ritual with such caution. No wonder I was raised with significant distrust of ritual.

But how deeply worthwhile it has been to overcome my biases and reclaim this precious piece of my humanity. How glad I am to wend my way down into the depths of myself that only ritual can touch.

My favorite rituals are nature-based, grounded in the earth an the trees and the seasons.

There is no better season to dive into ritual than October. Where I live, October is the brink. The leaves flare in golden orange as daylight plunges into darkness. As the sap of the trees flees to the roots and the birds fly South in great Vs above my head, as the wind whips up and the stars stretch ever clearer out into the cosmos, now is the time.

I’m not the only one to notice. Halloween (and, of course, Samhain) is a thinning-of-the-veil ritual. Day of the Dead is, too — though it was originally practiced at a different date. Many families, including my own, will decorate altars in honor of our dead in October. In this case, the date is not organically aligned with my local, Northern climate. Nov 1 for Day of the Dead was enforced by outsiders. Ritual is so powerful that if you are trying to coopt an entire culture, you must control their rituals first, hence the calendar change to align with All-Saints Day. Very little else about Dia de los Muertos seems to have changed, and I love that about the holiday. It feels timeless, untouchable, true. It is here for the living and here for the dead. I adopted the ritual of ofrendas into our family after Laurel died. It just felt right. Remembrance is so important, and setting the time and the space for this honor is powerful magic.

How perfect, then, that October is Infant Loss Awareness month.

I invite you into ritual October 15, which is tomorrow where I live, and today in New Zealand. The Wave of Light.

At 7pm, your local time, light a candle in honor of your baby — or babies, if you are grieving more than one. You can post a picture of your candle to social media, or you can just be with the small light playing in greater darkness, watching the warmth of the flame, and feeling a slice of humanity light up with this fire of remembrance. Hour by hour, 7pm changes, and more lights are lit, more candles burn, as the wave of light sweeps around the entire planet.

There’s something so isolating in out-of-order death. In modern times, it feels wrong, unspeakably, untouchably wrong when a baby dies. We have great scientific advances to thank for our isolation. Medicine, hygiene, vaccination, nutrition, clean water — all this has saved so very many babies. But it couldn’t save mine. Let yourself land in this moment of changing tide, light into dark, dark into light. Let yourself feel the veil thing. Let yourself be held in this universal experience of grief and death. The ONLY guarantee of living is dying. We and our babies belong.

If you feel so called, share a ritual that speaks to you in the comments below. I would love to hear what speaks to your deepest soul.