Meaning, Ritual, and Relationship: Reality Creation and Co-Creation

Once upon a time, our earliest ancestors invented storytelling. They made narrative sense of creation, weaving the forms and flows of nature into patterns of meaning.[1] Seasonal and celestial events provided the “backdrop against which all human dramas [were] played,”[2] as cultures and customs evolved around the preparation and the sharing of food and music, love and beauty. Gestures, sounds, and symbols were imbued with shared significance, drawing threads of meaning to the great drama of being alive together with everything that is. 

      With those threads, the fabric of collective social experience gave form to structures of language, belief, and power. To retain their vigor generation after generation, these structures were repeatedly affirmed through symbolic reenactments, or rituals, which tied the knots in the social fabric, so to speak.[3] Human civilization itself originated with the invention of ritual.[4]

      Civilization is sustained through the regular reenactment of its rituals, especially those that foster social coherence and assert meaning that humans share together as “sense” or “order.” Of course, there is no “sense” to divine order.[5] Creation exists, merely and gloriously – and it draws itself near. Mass attracts mass. We call this physical property of creation “gravity.” In humans, we call it “love.” It is not spiritual hubris that inspires me to declare unequivocally that all humans seek to love and be loved. Every human being who has ever lived was once a baby innocently seeking to suckle from mother. Every adult was once a small child playing make-believe characters, and a teenager doing something odd to inspire affection from a peer. Being human is about being human together.

      From an evolutionary perspective, cooperation and empathy were useful adaptations for minimizing the risks of going without food, shelter, or love.    Modern neuroscientific research observes that mirror neurons link us physiobiologically to the emotional states of others.[1] We are hardwired to participate in the physical and emotional realities of other humans, and few experiences are as emotionally poignant as our shared rituals. They remind us of the things that we forget we hold sacred down to our very makeup – being together, connecting deeply, meaning something to each other. 

Through ritual, we cast and recast our ideas of self, other, and the world, and put them in relationship to each other. I offer description by way of example, drawing particularly from the realm of religion, which makes use of ritual explicitly. Consider a baptism, a confirmation, a bar/bat mitzvah, a wedding, a funeral. Among adult readers ensconced in modern American culture, it is likely that similar images are conjured to mind at the mention of these rituals. Thinking of a baby’s baptism would probably summon images of a clergy person speaking aloud in a house of worship, next turning attention to the baby in question, then applying water in some way to the baby’s body and giving the baby a name. With a wedding, one might imagine ritual attendees split down the middle observing two people speaking to each other with another person at the head who, at the end, pronounces them wed, which makes it so.[6] While details vary in every case, ritual action is marked by these discernible patterns that serve to alter social reality for those involved.

20 May 2019

[1] The pattern itself is prescriptive of being, and it does not require further assertion when realized as such. To this view, there is nothing that is not part of the great cosmic ritual of existence. Ritual prescribes itself. 

[2] Apffel-Marglin. (2012). “Beyond Absolute Time and Space,” 163.

[3] Kertzer, Thomas. (1988).  Ritual, Politics, and Power.

[4] Rappaport, Roy A. (1999). Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity.

[5] Except love, which is the (f)act of its existence.

[6] Austin, J.L. (1970). “Performative Utterances,” 233.