Part II: I get poetical and highfalutin’ on Friday nights. Sorry.
Meaning. The thin line which separates a life lived on autopilot–a rote life–and a life worth living. Life is necessarily composed of humdrum, day-in-day-out aspects, but if that is life’s extent, life’s totality, then life can get to feel a bit routine.
Ritual represents the effort–the purposeful, sometimes painstaking effort–to insert into or derive meaning from life. We are capable, both theologically and biologically, of living thoughtlessly. We can love, work, speak, and play without intention, care, or purpose. But what happens when we seek to structure our lives and activities according to a purpose? What is the result of rigorously and carefully crafting life, church, marriage, or friendship according to a specific and sought-after goal? Ritual. Our purposes imbue our daily activities with meaning. The higher good that we seek directs, and calls into being, certain behaviors and ways of living.
Why do I go to church on Sunday? What is the purpose which calls forth a Sunday observance of God’s Lordship? To what end do we sing, speak and greet? How does that end direct the methods we use to reach it?
Church, Angel games, camping trips, stops at 7-11, van rides, and churros at Disneyland are all susceptible to ritualizing. That is, by attention and intention, we can make any act in life something more than it seems to be. With sufficient care, enjoyment, and appreciation, anything we love can gain meaning and become ritual, and I for one could do with a bit more of all of that.
April 3rd, 2006 at 6:56 pm
I, perhaps like everyone else who has read your last entry, can find nothing to disagree with. I can’t really think of anything to add, either. But I’m wondering how does one love without intention or care? One might stumble or ‘fall in love.’ But that is more infatuation or attraction than love. Doesn’t real love, almost by definition, include both intention and care?
April 5th, 2006 at 9:10 am
Agreed. Love, in its best definition, does necessarily include action, and I think we all have a tendency to forget that on a daily basis. In my work, I often find myself dealing with relationships in which love has devolved into convenience, commerce, or complaint. Keeping love love is hard. Letting it degrade is easy. So people wait to “feel” love before they act–as though love, at least as we understand it biblically, has much of anything to do with feeling. Any psychologist worth their salt knows that, most of the time, feeling follows action, which follows intention. In other words, act loving first, and often feeling will follow suit.