Religion without ritual?

As you might have guessed from the glowing description of my church’s ministerial candidate and of our first worship experience with him, we voted last Sunday to call our new minister!

I was antsy the whole morning. After the morning worship, followed by a short coffee hour, followed by about an hour and a half of pre-vote discussion, part of me wanted to jump out of my seat and cry out, “Are we ever going to have a new and permanent minister?! C’mon, people!”

Not the holiest thoughts, but there you have it. Of course the antsy-ness had little to do with my wonderful fellow congregants and it wasn’t just the product of an afternoon of waiting around church. It was the result of two years of transition.

Some part of those two years has been exciting. New interim staff members, new lay leaders, new programs and a new sense of collective identity have breathed fresh life into an already vibrant congregation.

But no change is without cost — the costs of saying goodbye to beloved ministers, treasured familiarities, and of course, the valuable sense of simply knowing how things are done. There’s such a thing as too much change, too quickly.

Religious life is as much about ritual as it is about the new insights and fresh experience; over the last two years I’ve come to value those rituals more. To answer the question above, I don’t want a religion without ritual. When I return on a Sunday morning to our sanctuary, I remember the first time I sat there, and felt the presence of the sacred pervading the room like the light shining in through the windows. And I remember all the times since when, in a moment of prayer or music or silence, I’ve felt again the sacred enveloping me.

When I hear our congregation recite together our call to prayer (”What does God require of thee, but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”), I remember what a beacon of hope those words were to me in my first months at church. And the song, “Come, Come, Whoever You Are” will always remind me of one of my earliest small group worship experiences.

These rituals also have collective power, to join Unitarian Universalists across time and space. When I go to a new congregation and see the worship leader light the chalice, I feel connected to that community, and we are all together acknowledging our connection to a larger tradition. When I sing “Spirit of Life” (a hymn widely used in UU worship), I have a sense of peace and fellowship with my fellow singers, whether or not we know each other well.

Even though Unitarian Universalism is a religion sometimes associated with throwing off tradition, I believe our religion is at its best when we have both innovation and continuity – when we have the wisdom and power to throw off those traditions that are oppressive or stultifying, and to maintain those traditions that give us continuity and open our hearts to sacred.