Ritual Teaches Hope

What is so special about stories and songs around a campfire? Does the care we take to gather the driftwood and prepare the place to kindle it, waiting till dark, getting the marshmallows, sharpening the sticks – does all this somehow contribute to the storytelling and singing? Fond memories tell us that it does. This simple ritual of family and community is like church. From both sources we learn stories and songs to carry home, but we take much more. From ritual we absorb other understandings as we sing in harmony, look into each other’s faces, share food – learnings that transcend words and notes.

Ritual is about the next level above the story, the song, the action. In the church, ritual helps us experience not just the facts of faith, but how we are to live in Christian community.

One Sunday morning in Advent I had a chance to reflect on the role of ritual in worship. The colour blue was all over the place – the choir and all the vestments in the worship space were in the beautiful colour of the season. On the way into worship I passed by a poster by Judeth Pekala Hawkins called Magnificat. This image of a girl reaching up into a starlit sky was echoed inside. As the choir led us in singing a psalm, a little group of girls moved with the music each time we sang the refrain, “My soul gives glory to God my Saviour.” Women and girls of various ages lit the Advent candle and read scripture.

After the service in the hall where we have coffee, a staff member proudly pointed out a huge wall hanging of paper with a figure on a blue background like the Magnificat. She said, “Everybody in the congregation will get a chance to write down a hope on a white star and we’ll fill the sky with them.”

“How beautiful,” I said, and I was thinking of hope.

Children are gifted by growing up in a church where ritual is not only there for them to observe, but for them to help create! They are our Magnificat. Their hopes are bound up with Mary’s, and mine are bound up in their hopes, and for them, too. Imagine how we could be enriched by ritual that touches the whole church family.

Ritual is always part of church worship, even if a church does not consider itself to be very liturgical. What we do when we enter, where we sit, how we take Communion are all parts of ritual. How we do any of these ritual actions always reflects in some way our attitude about them. We might say, for example, “this is the joyful feast,” but in fact approach Communion very somberly.

Music, ritual, and liturgy can shape our faith in so many ways, and often we aren’t aware it is happening. Not only Magnificats, but creeds, scriptures, and ancient texts are often kept alive through the music and ritual of worship. Songs like “Go Down, Moses” have been sung in the oral tradition to make a Bible story the song of a struggling people. Gestures such as kneelings, standings, sittings, handshakes, hugs need no words to express their meaning, but are sometimes as important as words as we learn how to be Christians. Conversely, the more that ritual actions and liturgical songs are absent from worship, the more we depend on text and story alone to keep our attention and tell us how to be a Christian.

Well-crafted ritual doesn’t just happen. It takes planning. When pastors, musicians, educators, and mission coordinators get their heads together to plan integrated worship learning and serving experiences that relate to the whole church family, everybody is sure to learn more about how to be Christian. And that is a vision filled with hope.

Arthur G. Clyde is Minister for Worship, Music, and Liturgical Arts in the Worship and Education Ministry team, Local Church Ministries, United Church of Christ. 


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