On Ritual and Intentionality
January 24, 2021
The way we approach rituals is complicated, which is to say, not uniform. There are a host of things we do in life and in the church that I would call rituals, where a ritual is something we do without thinking of why we do it. I hesitantly applaud this tendency. Sometimes we idolize intentionality, failing to recognize that our habits reveal a deep part of who we are. We do things habitually when they are a part of our very nature—revealing not just who we want to show other people, but who we are. When we attend church without really thinking about why we attend church, we’re showing that we are people who just naturally go to church. When we read Scripture every day without being able to articulate why it is necessary or what it is doing, we are showing by our actions that we are inherently people who rely on the word of God.
Again, hesitantly. The danger of ritual is separating the act from the meaning. We continue to do the action in the hopes that other people will see us doing it and assume we are people shaped by the meaning as well. This is the pitfall of hypocrisy the Pharisees fell into. They habitually performed the rituals prescribed by the Law in order to gain standing among God’s people.
How are we to avoid the pit? Certainly not by abandoning the ritual! That’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater. No, keep the ritual, but perform it with an open heart, allowing the ritual to work deep in our being, shaping us and forming us. Consider why you are performing the ritual. Add to the regular performing of the action the awareness of the purpose of the action.
There is a tendency to elevate intentionality over ritual—intentionality is good, ritual isn’t. Sometimes this can lead us astray, encouraging us to stop performing the action because we don’t really feel like it. But there are a lot of things in life that are good for us to do, whether we feel like doing them or not. You’re tired and just want to fall asleep on the couch? Get up, go brush your teeth, get dressed for bed, say your prayers, and go to sleep in your bed. You may not feel like doing all that, but it’s good for your health and well-being and you’ll thank yourself in the morning when you wake up without a crick in your neck from sleeping in a strange position!
We need intentional rituals in our lives. The rituals help us stay on the right track, giving us a baseline of action that we consistently perform. “I may get nothing else done today, but as long as I do these things I will continue to function and live.” Adding intentionality keeps them from becoming hypocritical, allowing them to sink into our hearts and change, not just what we do, but who we are. We should intentionally implement religious rituals, both communal and personal. As a church we can have rituals we perform every Sunday (the Lord’s Supper, a sermon, singing). As individuals we can have rituals we perform every day (prayer, reading Scripture). The next step is articulating precisely why you do those rituals, and what they are doing in you.
—John Coffey
