Children are more honest. . .

Over the years I have lived with many who constantly remind me that ritual is just ritual and complain about rote recitation of the liturgy.  In my own tradition there are those who would insist that to worship may not be adiaphora but how you do it is.  Too often that is a direct slur against liturgy itself and the elevation of the worship of the heart over the rituals, ceremonies, and even words of the Mass.  It is tiring to hear the taunts of those who insist that empty liturgy and empty ritual is of no value whatsoever.  I fear it is the triumph of a rather false form of maturity that adults use to prove that they are not children.

The problem is that children are more honest than adults when it comes to symbolism, liturgy, ceremony, and ritual.  Adults too often fail to understand liturgy and ritual at all.  The very charge of empty ritual or outward ceremony that they so solemnly warn against only shows that they really do not get worship.  By their elevation of the higher rational activity of the mind, they signal that they are enemies of their own tradition and still in the dark about the real value of ceremony, ritual, and mere words.  

The Scriptures themselves do not disdain the value of ceremony.  Instead, the richness of Scripture is revealed in the way ritual is so easily woven into the pattern of belief.  It is impossible to read the Word of God and miss the unmistakable form of ritual unless you have opened the book with a bias against it.  To elevate the rational above the ritual is to turn the faith of the ages into something that mirrors more recent history more than it does the longer view of our history.  It is equally wrong to pit them against each other but the genius of Scripture is how they stand together, side by side.

Children get this.  Their learning as well as their play is rooted in ritual, repeated actions through which words are learned, language is experienced, and life framed.  The activity of play is too often falsely seen as the sole province of children and childhood.  St. Paul is invoked as having put away childish things and having outgrown the shape of life rooted in ritual and rite.  The reality is that we really never cease to experience life in this way even though it is often tempting to make it sound like merely an activity of childhood and the childish.  What we too often do is treat ritual as if it were too frivolous for adulthood.  How odd, then, that we have devolved into an entertainment culture in which the imagined reality of the video game and screen seems to consume more and more of our time over the established orders of marriage, children, family, and duty.

Some play is truly frivolous and some is even destructive, not simply a diversion but a destroyer of our humanity.  Some play is borne of the desire within our culture to find meaning but with a penchant for searching in all the wrong places, substituting false rituals for the authentic rituals of God, reflected in lives of honest faith and trust.  Some of this is reflected by the reverence given to the rituals of sport.  Games hold meanings higher than simple competition or entertainment and, often, the rituals of athletics or games are given a higher place than the rituals of common worship and devotion.   These games are themselves the game of replacing our deep religious need for things shallow and incapable ot answering that religious yearning for God, for meaning, and for purpose.  Most of all, the quest for transcendence. In this way some within the Church accept and given almost religious devotion to the rituals of play and games while at the same time insisting that these risk consuming us in the realm of religious devotion, preferring a cerebral religion over a ritualistic one.

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known. (1Co 13:11-12)  I propose that St. Paul here was not speaking of a maturity to be obtained in this world or this life but contrasting what we know now only by faith with what we shall know then, in eternity, face to face.  For now ritual is not a passing phase toward rational nirvana but its own very important shape of life here, by faith, toward eternity.  Until then, ritual allows us to practice and rehearse the eternal in the present, experiencing the foretaste of what is to come now by repeating what our Lord commanded.  The future is not something completely different but knowing fully and face to face what now we know only through a mirror dimly.  Until then, we practice or play, rehearing the rituals of our identity bequeathed to us by our Lord until we are ever swallowed up in the eternal, knowing its familiarity while also transcending what we have known now.