Five and a Half Objects

The Sacred isn’t just something we discover out there, or within. It’s also something we invent with our bodies. And something that invents us.

That’s my summary, in twenty-four words, of Brent Plate’s A History of Religion in 5 1/2 Objects (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014). It’s that rarest of all phenomena, a book by an academic who can write clearly and accessibly for an intelligent non-specialist, without sacrificing subtlety or suggestiveness. It’s the kind of book that will unsettle anyone who thinks his own spiritual path offers an exclusive or unique access to the Divine. And it’s an antidote to what I’m going to offend some people by calling mystified shamanic woo-woo.

Plate starts by making in his own words a fundamental point about our experience in human bodies--we’re not complete. We feel partial, because we are partial. We’re not each a whole, but a half. We long for completion, and we try to find it by a whole slew of means: drugs, companionship, sex, the perfect relationship, our i-Phone, the touch of a dog.

We also look for it by reaching out further, when these stopgap measures fail to satisfy, toward the Mystery. We create religion. But we get sidetracked into believing that religion is about disembodied teaching, or that the spirit is separate from our flesh, even antithetical to our flesh. Religion, Plate insists, is about tying body together with the longings we experience for relation to what is beyond us. And we do that through the means of the senses.

Plate’s five objects are stones, incense, drums, crosses, and bread. In each case, it’s the physical practice of what we do with these objects that comes first, not an abstract understanding of the meaning of our action. We act, then we think about the meaning of our action. First comes practice, then comes belief. We set stones on top of one another to mark a place out as noteworthy, or even sacred. Later, we create an explanation for what made us do it.

We make a memorial quilt panel for someone we’ve loved. Only later do  we experience what our grief might mean in the larger world, when we see our handiwork incorporated into a display that honors hundreds or thousands of those lost to HIV-AIDS. We lay a bouquet of flowers in a public space to honor someone who’s died. But the meaning of what we’ve done depends on the offerings that others have already made there, and on the offerings that will follow. We witness our love for someone by buying a cheap lock and shackling it to the grate on the Pont des Arts in Paris. All this is not only about discovering or expressing what’s within us. It’s just as much about inventing it, making it real through the senses and through the body.

This turns our understanding of the relationship between ritual and the soul inside out. We want the rituals we participate in to be immediately and easily meaningful. Many of us want their purpose and significance spelled out for us ahead of time, and we’re uncomfortable with doing something before we understand why we’re doing it.

It’s not a bad idea to resist this impulse for clarity. “Listen to your art,” says Marina Abramovic. “It knows more than you do.” The same can be said, sometimes, of ritual. Long ago, Pascal said, “Kneel down, move your lips, and you will believe.” Walk into the river and submerge yourself. Afterwards, you may understand that you longed to be cleansed. Ring a bell at the door of a temple, and afterwards you may get it that you needed to announce your entrance into the Presence of what’s honored there. Bow to someone who smudges you with sage, and later you may understand that the smoke has prepared you to take what happens afterwards more seriously. Hold your wrist out and let someone tie a red thread around it, and days later it may go on bearing witness that the ritual it was part of is still working its way through your consciousness. Your urge to sit quietly at the back of a church with your eyes closed for five minutes every afternoon doesn’t require your belief in a creed.

First we do. Then we understand.

But the reverse of this trust in the integrity of the ritual before you completely understand it is also true. Plate’s approach also invites us to build ritual from the roots of our experience up, when we need to, instead of waiting helplessly for some expert to hand it down to us ready-made. Your favorite park bench may work better for you than the back pew of a cathedral. A ritual doesn’t depend for its authenticity on an esoteric meaning fully possessed only by some master of the tradition. Being recited in a language no one in the room knows except for the officiant doesn’t make a chant more effective. Exotic materials aren’t necessarily preferable to what’s around us from day to day. Something as ordinary as water or wine or bread or a candle becomes extraordinary because of how it’s used, and the care with which it’s treated, and because of how its use encourages us to sink further down into its deep multiple meanings for our life.

“...one point of a history of religion is that all these sacred rituals were, over time and space, made up. All traditions adapt and change, fitting new environments,” as Plate puts it (p. 133). If someone tells you that a ritual is legitimate because it was transmitted by astral projection from a palaeolithic holy man, run, don't walk, in the opposite direction.

We build a spiritual practice for ourselves out of the materials that are on hand. There’s nothing to wait for, no expertise you need that you don’t already have, no clear understanding that has to come first. Pick up the tools. They’ll teach you what you need to know.