Week 1, Day 5: sacred/mundane, distraction/attention
Yesterday, I received a WhatsApp message from my brother, who’s currently living with our parents, which read:
Have you ever listened to Blinded by Your Grace by Stormzy? It’s a really really beautiful song about his faith in God getting him through bad times. I was playing it on the speaker at home, doing a bit of work and feeling super super peaceful. I love the song a lot. The end is incredibly rousing and triumphant. It ends, and without a break at all, I just hear dad in the kitchen saying, “Hey Siri, how do you mix grout powder?”
We acknowledged how much beauty and silliness there was in the proximity between the sacred and the mundane of this moment; how quickly a spiritual or sacred feeling can be disrupted by something as mundane as a 60-something year old man asking a robot how to mix grout powder.
This is not how I thought I was going to open this blog post - today I’ve had two incredibly beautiful calls with inspiring women, in Ireland and in the US - but this story captured something really important that Yael Benvenuto Ladin and I discussed on my last call of today: the relationship between the sacred and the mundane.
Yael works for At The Well, an organisation based in the US that supports women and non-binary people around the world to set up and/or participate in monthly well circles around the time of the new and full moon, informed by the Jewish practice of Rosh Chodesh. Rosh Chodesh is a celebration that marks the start of each month, and is traditionally a moment celebrated by women (though At The Well has a more inclusive understanding of gender in regards to this ritual).
As part of our conversation, I shared with Yael something that had come up in the last call I had in Hastings - a conversation with Sabine Pinon, which I haven’t yet written about. Sabine has been involved in women’s circles for many years, in both Australia and now in France, and as part of our conversation she shared the importance of keeping the mundane out of sacred spaces. We talked about how ritual spaces, such as women’s circles, benefit from being approached as sacred, or special, and therefore set apart from the mundane. This might mean: not discussing what you had for breakfast (or your shopping list or cleaning rota or anything else that could be considered mundane and day-to-day); wearing special clothes or make-up or jewellery to mark the moment; using different or more formal language… etc. I shared this with Yael, as I agreed with Sabine that there is something about ritual spaces that benefit from an absence of the quotidian. But Yael reflected that, in Judaism, there is no difference between the sacred and the mundane - we are aiming, at all times, to live the sacred as embodied. The sacred should flow throughout our lives. She also shared that she struggles with the idea that one single ritual can, in and of itself, be transformative, reflecting that what we should perhaps instead be aiming for is a regular, cyclical relationship with ritual, where it becomes an overall part of our lives, rather than a standalone event. This idea of integrating ritual more fully into our lives, and therefore bringing the sacred into close interaction with the mundane, is not something I have spent much time exploring and am excited to think more about.
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Before my conversation with Yael, I spoke to Helen Phelan, Professor of Arts Practice at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance. Helen’s book, ‘Singing the Rite to Belong: Music, Ritual and the New Irish’, explores the role of ritual performance and music in fostering experiences of belonging, particularly in the contexts of migration and asylum. We talked about the role of ritual in supporting people seeking safety, and the power of simplicity in rituals. Helen reflected on the power of coming together to “sing a song and drink tea”, and how that can be just as powerful as a ritual that has much more ceremony about it, whether candles, or a beautiful building, or many moving parts… It is perhaps the quality of the attention you bring to the activity that dictates its power, as opposed to just the content of the activity itself. As Casper Ter Kuile explains in his book, “attention, intention and repetition” are what turn a habit or an action into a ritual.
As part of our conversation Helen and I also reflected on the power of ritual to help us pay attention to the things that we might otherwise neglect to, or be too scared to. Helen reflected that,
“A lot of spaces we create in the contemporary world are spaces of distraction and entertainment where we try to avoid coming face to face with the terrifying reality of being alive”
Rituals are contained - they have a structure; a beginning, middle and an end; a leader - and therefore they are safe. We allow ourselves to explore things we might otherwise not know how to, or not be brave enough to. This feeling of safety allows us to interact with the fundamental realities of our lives and our lived experiences without needing distraction. Such is the power of a ritual.
I wonder whether, in paying closer attention to the day-to-day things, we are in a way turning the mundane into something more sacred. In this way a ritual might become a key part of the fabric of our lives, and not something set apart from it. This is connects to Yael’s point that rituals should be cyclical and part of our lives, facilitating transformation over time, rather than expecting them to bring about a grand change in a singular moment.
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In both of my conversations today, we talked about who holds the power and responsibility to make rituals and ceremonies happen today. In a world that is less connected to and, crucially, less trusting of religious institutions and therefore ‘traditional’ clergy, who has “ritual authority”? I loved hearing Helen’s reflections on this question. She said,
“There’s a gap in leadership; we are at a point of change from some of the traditional holders of ritual authority, which would have resided in religious, political and community traditions. When you don’t trust the ritual authority, it’s very hard for leadership to emerge from that… We are living in a time that is rudderless. But as often happens in those times, something organic can come into this space. If it doesn’t exist it ends up growing because of the sheer need for it. Whatever leadership is out there, it is less institutionalised, less organised and therefore harder to pinpoint. It’s more ephemeral, less sustainable but it’s there. Ritual is increasingly emancipating itself from the stronghold that religion had… People are beginning to realise that the ritual instinct is far deeper than the exclusively religious one.”
This idea that a less institutionalised, less organised leadership is more ephemeral and therefore less sustainable has really stuck with me since we spoke. Is this a problem? Should we be seeking to make the work of ritual sustainable again, and if we do would that mean it becomes institutional again? What would we lose if this were to happen? What do we gain from ritual being in the hands of individuals and communities?
Yael also shared that At The Well is working hard to empower people who are not clergy to “do ritual leadership”, decentralising and deinstitutionalising the practice to make it more accessible and more malleable to the needs of the people and the moment. So, who are these people? It seems that ritual leadership is being taken on by those who are already concerned with ideas of belonging, connection, inclusion, social justice and celebration - which is so many of us! It’s community groups, NGOs, collectives of artists, educators, family members, farmers, makers… In moving away from institutions, ritual is being brought into our day-to-day spaces - spaces we have ownership over - which, once again, reminds us that the sacred and the mundane can exist much more closely than we might think.