Good ritual isn't a commodity that we shop for.
Especially when we're experimenting with the
creation of personal or group ritual from the grass roots up, there's always
the possibility that we'll try to turn ritual into a perfect fulfilment of
fantasy. Paradoxically, succeeding in that might be the worst thing that could
come of ritual practice, if it lets us off the hook from becoming more
self-aware about our motivations and aspirations. (I've heard people refer to heavily scripted, complex, and edgy erotic experiences as ritual, as though labelling them as
such automatically explained the complexity and shut down deeper reflection about what the experiences
meant and what could be learned from them.)
So it's really important to fuck it up.
It's harder for rituals to point to something beyond
themselves if they're perfect. Flaws remind us that there's always a tension in
ritual between, "here and now" and "not yet" or "not
literally." In Christian liturgy, the sharing of bread and wine symbolizes
a banquet at the end of time; but what you get is one sip of usually bad wine
and a wafer that looks and tastes like fish food: this is a banquet in which
you share, but only by anticipation of what's still to come, and in
acknowledgment that life as we're living
it isn't there yet. (Gordon Lathrop, a
Lutheran liturgical theologian, talks about the tension between fulfilment and
foretaste in his book Holy Things.)
Turning a Christian Eucharist into a five-course meal centered around artisanal
baguettes and Chateuneuf-du-Pape would weaken its power as ritual, not
strengthen it.
In the queer men's lingam puja that I've described
this summer, the erotic content of the ritual stays more or less veiled. If it
were acted out as a fulfilled fantasy of communal sexual experience, it might
satisfy one or a few participants, but to the exclusion of others. And it would
lose much of its power to make us dig deeper into the meaning of desire in our
spiritual lives. So instead of staging an orgy (not that there's anything wrong
with an orgy), we circle meditatively around a symbol of the erotic energy that
galvanizes our lives and unites us with the rhythms of the natural world.
Good ritual may help
us to feel more fulfilled and at home in our lives. But at least as importantly,
we have to break it open, so we can see
through the cracks to what's Outside, and so we can grow beyond what we're yet
able to ask, or even imagine.
