I’ve been working intermittently for about 30 years (first as a writer of feminist/neopagan rituals, and then as a sort of wildcat theorist) on the question of aesthetics in liturgical language. Of course there’s more to ritual than language, but the words surrounding ritual actions can make or break them: they may not be infelicitous performances in J. L. Austin’s sense of a botched formula that makes the ritual ineffectual, but they can sure make a ritual hard to take seriously. It’s not the action but the tone that fails: instead of conviction and concentrated power, there’s just sentiment (sappy readings at weddings) or ideology (contrived gender-balanced metaphors with only the faintest wheezing spark of imagination). Music helps – kirtan, for example, can be quite simple and still worth repeating ad infinitum – but the minute you have a quatrain or a paragraph to chant, you need to know something about compelling spoken language.
What are the sources of conviction in new rituals? Generally, private experience and/or identity politics. Private experience can include wide reading as well as life experience, so it isn’t always obscurely private, but it may be too idiosyncratic for general use. Identity-based rituals are generalized enough – as long as you belong securely to the identity group – but tend to be self-congratulatory and morally naive, and quickly wear thin. When trust in the old religious forms has eroded, and the impetus for new ritual is either the self’s or an identity group’s (perceived) needs, it’s easy to lose the ambition to devise broadly sustaining liturgies with a long life – easy to make the ritual disposable, not worth repeating. Surely modernity (and even postmodernity) can do better than that.
How do we make the necessary link between private rituals, identity-group rituals, ritual theatre, wishful revivals (or questionable appropriations) of old rituals, rituals done in a therapeutic setting, and the urgent need for demanding, powerful, and morally complex public ritual? The most profound sources of material for new ritual aren’t rationalism, feminism, or the need for “spirituality,” but nature and history; it’s disquieting that neither mainstream religion, with its inane efforts at relevance, nor the many atomized and fragmented attempts at independent ritual, have managed to produce a coherent and widely usable ritual response to the late 20th and early 21st century (which provide all too much nature and history – nature lost and history got, on the whole). Surely it matters to do this. Joanna Macy’s “despair and empowerment” rituals may be on the right track, but intimate workshops using informal language don’t fill the need for formal, artistically shaped public expression.
Certainly I include my own work among the failed efforts; my little book “In Medias Res: Liturgy for the Estranged” is an attempt to orchestrate serious thinking and poetic language into a formal ritual structure, but it is idiosyncratic and couldn’t be widely used in its present form. Still, I want to offer the style and method (and the aphorisms on the theory and practice of ritual) to others who are dissatisfied with the presently available language. My critique of modern mainstream revisions, “The Bones Reassemble,” draws on cognitive science and psychotherapy in ways that may also be useful to independents.
I also want to give advance notice of Peter Elbow’s forthcoming “Vulgar Eloquence,” which like his other books will be about the writing process generally, but has very interesting resonances with the question of ritual language. And I’d be interested to hear from others who are working on these questions.
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