At 3pm on a Thursday in late August, I sat around a irori in a bustling pottery studio near St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota.
There for a three day personal retreat at the Abbey, I had wandered in earlier that day hopeful for a tour – only to find Richard Bresnahan, the studio’s director, hard at work loading up the wood kiln for its biyearly firing. With the precision only afforded to one in busy seasons, he both dismissed me from the studio and invited me back to their 3pm tea time.
Not sure what to expect, I wandered back just a few hours later and took my seat in a wooden chair circling the irori. The silent flames flickered in front of me. Next to me, a student – just years after graduation – silently formed clay frogs without error, each of them being placed onto a bat as if it were a lily pad. A girl walked in, talking to her husband about paint matching and renovations while he washed shallow cups at the sink. Richard trimmed a tray with a bamboo tool. A group of six women came in – wandering around to look at all of the unpriced pottery lining the shelves. And one-by-one, the chairs around me filled up.
The cups – freshly washed and slowly drying in the stable air – were passed around. The teapot lowered over the fire. And the silence of the studio burst into questions and conversations: “What made you want to do an apprenticeship here?” “Is it hard to engage in a slower process?” “Why are you on a retreat?” “Do you plan these girls’ outings regularly?” The cups filled, and any sense of nerves at the prospect of sitting around an unfamiliar table with strangers gave way to hospitality and gentle conversation.
Richard continued to busy himself with the preparations for the kiln firing while we drank slowly out of the fruits of its labor – our cups solidified and stained by the heat and ash of the fire that brought thousands of pieces to life over the years. We learned that the studio paused for tea several times a day, at regular intervals. Time to reconnect and recalibrate before the work continued. Daily, it was punctual. A predictable pause in the midst of so much work.
It was not unlike the rhythms of the Benedictine monks, just steps from the studio’s door. At 7am, 12pm, 5pm, and 7pm, I had learned the rhythm of the bells which called the faithful into prayer. Three bells meant that prayer would begin in fifteen minutes. At the hour, the bells would toll three times again – then, in deeper tone, 5 times, 7 times, 12 times to mark the hour. The rhythm had become so familiar that just two days in, I found my body involuntarily rising from the dock where I had stopped to watch the water at the moment the first set of three rang out over the campus.
This practice of prayer had not just become a way that I had come to keep time, absent of a watch or a phone, but they had become a means to grace for me. One night, I had spent several hours wrestling in bed with the unbelievable nature of forgiveness and repentance – wrestling over the scandal of grace, the wild idea that God forgives us for that which we have done and left undone. The next morning, I awoke early to go to prayer, where monks chanted in unison a paraphrase of Joel 2: “If you turn to God with all your heart, then the Lord will turn back to you.” That taste of Scripture felt like God’s grace to me – a reminder of who the Lord always has been, and is today.
I experienced the mercy of God in Psalms sung as one voice, over steadfast saint and wrestling skeptic alike; the reverence of God in the ways in which the brothers entered and exited, always stopping to bow before the cross before and after a word left their lips; the consistency of the faithful in the ways in which their work stopped in order to rest in the rhythms of Scripture, prayer, confession, and eucharist.
While it seemed impossible to bring this rhythm back into my urban context, I couldn’t help but be entranced by its possibilities. The intentionality of regularly stepping away from the work of the day to return to the grace and words which undergirds it felt like a gulp of water after years of swallowing sand. This is what I have been missing.
Rituals are regular, life-giving rhythms. They are not optional things we stumble into occasionally. They are the life which undergirds the work.
God’s people, for millennia, have understood ritual better than the American church often does today. The early people of God engaged in regular times of worship, sacrifice, feast, and repentance. The idea of ritual is held so closely that manna is maintained so that the next generation might look upon it and remember God’s provision. The words of the Passover are passed down to the next generation so that they might remember God’s saving grace for their ancestors – the reason for their life today. The Shema (“Hear, O Israel”) becomes the refrain by which the people of God awake, being drawn back to it as they enter houses, fold the verse upon their arms, bind it on their forehead. Jubilee becomes a release from the grip of financial tyranny. The rhythms are not accidental; they are intentional. They are not optional; they are a core part of what it means to be the people of God. You can count them on a calendar. You can mark them in the day. They are not a place in which the people of God occasionally fall; they are the way in which the people of God find their lives and their footing in a constantly moving world.
Even in the New Testament, ritual remains. Jesus’ death is preceded by a celebration of the Passover feast, a continuation of Old Testament ritual even as the new covenant enters onto the scene. After His death and resurrection, the early church meets together daily in the temple courts (Acts 2:46). They are urged to not neglect meeting together regularly (Hebrews 10:25). Even communion is passed down as ritual: “what I received, I pass on to you… as often as you do this…” (1 Corinthians 15). And again, ritual was not accidental – it was embedded into the life of the early church. It was the life-giving practice that preceded the busyness and bustle of ordinary life. Ritual undergirded that which was most precious.
What if it’s possible that what we face today is not just a failure of sound theology in the American church, but a failure of the right place of ritual in the lives of God’s people?
Only 30% of those who identify as Christian attend church weekly (Gallup), and only 2% of people prayed audibly – with a group or collectively as a church – once in the past three months (Barna).
“We are what we repeatedly do,” the saying goes. If that’s true, then we are less shaped by the faith that we once professed in Sunday School, and more shaped by the faith practices we regularly engage in. And, therefore, our faith – and our formation into the people of God – is stunted when we opt out of ritual practice.
A return to ritual provides the fertile ground through which our life and faith grows more and more into the image of Jesus, Who Himself did not neglect the ritual practices given to the people of God. Through regular ritual – prayer, worship, confession, communion, absolution – we find a theological ground which can withstand the movement of life:
- Showing up to be formed – whether we’re tired, anxious, or disappointed – decenters our own fickle desires and places our focus on the God who is always present, always worthy.
- Actively valuing weekly worship causes us to be shaped by Scriptures we did not choose for ourselves, reminding us of the importance of the whole of Scripture and providing us with a Biblical breadth and depth that grows our understanding of and relationship to God as revealed in the Old and New Testament.
- Gathering with the Saints of all ages gives us the opportunity to be ministered to and be sung over in seasons of lack and of plenty, placing us in a community designed to form, encourage, disciple, and love one another without reservation or choice of who is included.
- Prioritizing the Lord’s Supper reminds us of the cost of God’s sacrifice and the state of our sin, reminding us regularly that only Christ’s sacrifice – not our good behavior – has the power to cleanse and nourish us toward new life.
- Praying with others gives the space for communal discernment of God’s will, letting the Holy Spirit speak through the lives of God’s people for our good and the good of the entire assembly.
- Hearing God’s promise proclaimed in benediction or absolution reminds us that God’s mercy is given to us as a gift, that we might have our affections turned toward Him wholly.
Ritual, then, is not an optional practice for the people of God, but a living and breathing response to the knowledge of the same God who has called those well before us into ritual practices. We practice ritual not for the sake of ritual itself, but for the formational role it holds in our lives – for the power it has to sustain the rest of our living. Our rituals provide regular practices that reconnect us with the One who made us.
So, how’s your ritual practice? Are there daily, weekly, or monthly rhythms you might need to prioritize so that you are more and more formed as a person of God in the context of the people of God? What sustains you? Is it possible that your life might feel so unmoored, dull, or dead because nothing is holding it steady or providing nutritious fertilizer for that which you wish to see grow?
The bell that calls our souls toward the life-giving rhythms of God is tolling – where are your feet headed?
Photo courtesy of St. John’s Pottery
Caitlyn Stenerson 