The Power of Ritual

Today the Catholic world elected a new pope.  It is the third time such an election has happened in my lifetime and the second time I was able to watch the new pope speak live (over a streamed video of course, sadly I am not currently in Rome) and it made me think about the way ritual and history are present in so many parts of our lives.  

I’m not Catholic.  My Great Aunt, who sadly passed last year, was a Benedictine nun, though, and I have grown up around so many Catholics that a good portion of their beliefs and practices are known to me.  Being a scholar of history I have picked up on still more.  Not all of it very nice.  But one thing the Catholics do well is ritual. 

Today I watched a man become something more in the eyes of over a billion people world wide in a rite that has lasted for centuries, following a dance laid out by people long dead.  Today I took part in many other rituals, much smaller and less significant perhaps, but still played out as I learned them from my parents and they from theirs and so on back to centuries so remote we have forgotten them entirely.  

History often has a way of unpacking those rituals for us.  Digging down into the earth to pull them out by the roots.  Sometimes what we see there isn't pretty.  It makes us question why we would practice such things in the first place, shock us with the sinister origins of sacred things or make us feel ridiculous with the realization of our superstitious tendencies.  

Sometimes it is lovely, it connects us to ancient mothers and fathers who guided tiny hands to craft something “just so” or to lovers of the past who see their echo in our loves of today.  History can make you cry at times with how beautiful it is and unite you inexorably to a Macedonian shepherd or Aztec scribe. It’s an adventure in discovering who and what we are as humans in a world more connected at its roots then it is divided.  The further we go back, the harder it is to deny that in the end there is far more that we have in common then we know.   

Today is a day for the little rituals, just like every day before and every day to come.  The big rituals, the ones that play out on special occasions will come and go too, the number of Popes that have worn St. Peter’s tiara is vast (this newest one is the fourteenth Leo alone!) and in days to come in the (hopefully distant!) future, there will be others. But it will always be important to Catholics as it lies at the heart of so many cherished traditions.

This is why it is more important than ever to learn our histories.  When things are difficult in the world around us it is easy to turn away from hard truths or reasons why and focus on the moment.  We can boil down historical snippets into sixty second TikTok’s and go on with the business of living.  Only, a lot of context can be missing in that sixty seconds, and connections can be hard to make in so short a time.  Those hard truths, those rituals, those long and personally sacred connections are the reasons why the moment is here.  It is because of the ebbs and flows of history that we have come, washed up upon this particular shore in this particular moment.  When we find the roots we will find the secrets of those who have lived through such times before and in so doing, learn the answers to how best to face the challenges of the days to come.