The 2nd Day of Christmas. Finding good ritual
“Bring the heart if you come to Us”
Several years ago, my wife Almut made a surprise find of a carved Christmas angel in a local art store. Since then we have developed a tradition: sometime in the days before Christmas, Almut and I have a small procession in our house from where ever our Christmas angel is stored to where ever we have decided to display it that year. The doors to the nativity scene in the angel’s robes will be closed with a ribbon, and we won’t open them until late on Christmas Eve. Now that Hannah has joined us, we get to tell her the Christmas story by showing her the figures in the Christmas Angel nativity scene. Standing in front of this rustic carving and telling the Christmas story to my daughter is one of the most deeply moving experiences I have had. It has become a ritual with great meaning.
We generally have an ambivalent relationship with ritual. We both found a time in our lives when we tired of ritual, when it seemed confining rather than focusing, dry and dusty rather than verdant. Though living in different worlds, we both felt the pull away from tradition to more lively expression of our faith. This sweeping away is a good impulse. As Almut says, paraphrasing Kierkegaard, “Sometimes you have to lose your ritual in order to find it again.”
Indeed, later in life we have returned to the older rituals with softened hearts and now find meaning in them. And we have adopted rituals such as Benedictine morning and evening prayer to give a structure to lives. In this COVID time, we dearly miss the times we have spent at monasteries doing the prayer cycle. Both the new and the millennia-old traditions seem the best possible containers to hold our grief, joy, or ambivalence. This falling away and returning to ritual seems to be an often-told tale.
Now that we are experiencing late parenthood, we are discovering a third approach to ritual; simple joyful presence to the repetition and to the experience. Hannah, our 21 month old, loves ritual. She loves doing rituals with us. She insists we pray before meals and that we light candles at meals. In the morning and throughout the day she polices the candles on our house altar. When they go out, she runs to get us and point to them, saying “On!” We have a statue of Mary from St. John’s Abbey on our altar, and Hannah now identifies Mary (“Mi-ma!”) in many nativity scenes.
Hannah also loves the evening ritual of snuggling close to me in the carrying harness as we walk through the neighborhood, all wrapped up and warm. We look at the lights, touch noses, breath each other’s breath, and I sing psalms to her. This ritual surely connects us to each other, but it is holy because, in Martin Buber’s words, it creates a space where there is a third presence. Rituals connect us to each other in part because they include us all in the Divine embrace. Hannah and I do our evening ritual several nights a week and it is usually successful in getting her to sleep. Except when it isn’t and I bring a crying child home… And some nights I find the grace to see even this as enfolded in the Divine embrace.
This COVID Christmas is a once in a lifetime opportunity to reflect on our daily rituals. The enforced isolation casts us back on our own resources and on our own tenuous grasp of the holy. But it also opens a space that we can fill with rituals that give structure to our longing. They provide a form, a frame, and an architecture in time that support the slow and painful birth of the divine within us and that bind us together in love. Having abandoned them once, we can now re-inhabit them in that love.
“Bring a thousand bags of gold,
And God will only tell you:
“Bring the heart if you come to Us.” ”
Practice: Find your own ritual for this journey
As we walk through these 12 Days of Christmas, we invite you to construct a ritual, a container, to hold your devotion. Some accommodation in physical space is helpful, though not necessary. It might be a single candle in the living room, or a simple altar, or tea in your favorite cup, or a familiar walk.
What is essential is the wisdom and grace to keep working at prayer in times of inspiration and of irritation (COVID times have given each of us plenty of these). So do find a regular time, however short it might be and even if it is a moveable feast. Hannah’s candle lighting rituals last no more than a few minutes. And give yourself grace when somehow you cannot manage to be faithful.
May God grant us, and you, the perseverance, wisdom, and grace these days to do so.
A Blessing
May you bring your heart to ritual this Christmas
When you cannot find space, may you stumble upon it
When your space is in disrepair, may God come to you even in a stable
When you cannot find time, may Grace embrace you by surprise
And when you cannot find your heart,
may you have the grace to bring your lack and your longing to God
May you know, in fleeting glimpses,
that what you seek is also seeking you.
CH
This post is part of our 12 Days of Christmas Series 2020/21: Cradling Hope, a Contemplative Journey towards the heart of Christmas. You can still enroll and follow along. To enter our virtual gathering space click here. To share your thoughts with us, write us here. To offer your gift, click here. If you are looking for personal consultation, visit our PathFinder.
Peace and Blessings, Almut & Chuck
