Revolution in Ritual

Reflections submitted as final paper for Transforming Ritual Craft, a class in Starr King School for the Ministry under Taya Shere December 16, 2016. This was edited December 18, 2016. I am aware this piece is inchoate (partly because I was limited to 5 pages) but I am motivated to keep developing it.

This paper primarily reflects my experiences of the rituals that happened on Standing Rock.  Rituals which involved interfaith representation, age-old tradition, and what seems like flowing leaderless order (leaderful?).  Most of the principles I cite below are not learned from Standing Rock alone but are long-held hunches that have found affirmation and confirmation at Standing Rock.

Standing Rock is my fifth successful resistance.  (I’ve supported dissidents in Burma and East Timor, and have aided in the release of a UU minister in Burundi who was imprisoned by a repressive government. And I’ve participated in 2 regime changes in the Philippines).

Obama denied easement to DAPL last December 4.  But, of course, every success is fleeting and incomplete.  And as such, I am faced with the growing edges in which I need to master the art of revolution which have striking parallels in my growing edges in the art of ritual.

From my very limited experience, these are the parallel principles I’ve learned in ritual and revolution.

1. No one survives a real conversation.[1] David Whyte said this.

Authentic conversations ought to break us. Conversation is the best way to wage conflict and yet we waste so much time trying to suppress our conflicts within it, turn away from confronting our real questions, pretend that total agreement can be achieved all the time in something we call consensus. We come into prayer with proselytizing propositions that we defend like dogma.

According to Edmund Leach, “We engage in rituals in order to transmit collective messages to ourselves” and these messages are always about the social order.[2]

2. We are always in ceremony. (Everything is ritual)

Because of the pains that might arise from conversations, as stated above, there is a need for properly breaking together.  There is a need for a ritual to hold comunitas[3] where even long-opposing views can co-exist, sharing time and space, and aligning with a spirit that is better named, like “Mni Wiconi” or “Water is life!”

“Man does not simply exist, but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment”, said Victor Frankl.  And because of this we are constantly in liminal space if we should live deliberately as ritual and revolution calls for.

3. Emotions will hasten change faster than ideas ever will.

Victor Hugo once said, “Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come. There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.”   But now we have Donald Trump, a person offering no new idea but possesses the ability to embody all the emotions of fear and anger in USA’s uncertain future.  

Ritual fulfills the need to hold emotions in such a way that although they may burst forth like from a dam and the dam may break, yet the waters will never cause damage.  Ritual provides enough symbols to hold the waters of emotions in ways that bring back the scattered to the fold.  In revolution, it is important to ensure enough forums are available to channel emotions into constructive endeavors.

"Ritual controls emotion while releasing it”, says Driver.[4]  But I would be more careful in the use of the word control.  I would say that the ideas are better when initiated by the proper attitude and motivations towards them through emotional transmission.

“From the moment when the hunter becomes aware of the passion and compassion in his own heart, a revolution begins that will overturn the ruler of the realm.  Although the king continues to give orders, an essential shift has occurred that makes the woman of the soul the ruling force of the story.”[7]

4. Change is easier than resisting it.

There is no cause for violence.  It takes more power and force to maintain order than to disrupt it.  Time has always been on the side of change.  Inertia cannot withstand it.  

Also, the revolutionary has no patent on resistance. In fact, the Establishment will demonstrate the strongest resistance with the advantage of resources.  However, it will also prove to have the  shortage of rhetoric given the evidence of people suffering in its wake.  And often the revolutionary, once successful, can find itself resisting change too.

“But the immediacy of communitas --- as opposed to the jural-political character of structure --- can seldom be maintained for very long. Communitas itself soon develops a structure, in which free relationships between individuals become converted into norm-governed relationships between social personae.”[5]

“What is sezied upon as tradition is usually a rather new synthesis of custom and accommodation…In addition, those who convert tend to embrace some aspects of tradition more than others and bring with them new needs to which the tradition must respond.”

The revolutionary and the ritual cannot propose only resistance to Establishment.  It needs to introduce a way of life, a way of being, a next step.

5. Kindness is never done alone.

Ritual is where we can feel community. This is where community can be together for each one. Community is about knowing that each relationship is connected to the rest of the others in it. Kindness cannot be taken up by one person who is not supported by others too.

6. Successes will be temporary and incomplete.

Success will always be incremental.  Revolutions will always be necessary.  What is important is to keep participating.  Like ritual, revolution is a doorway to effect rites of passage.

Thomas Jefferson said every generation needs a revolution.  For Filipinos, every generation has 2 revolutions. This is how the Philippines has been hard to rule over by the Spanish, Japanese, the US, a dictator, and a plunderer.  Each of them getting ousted by us.

Rituals are primarily instruments designed to change a situation:  They are more like washing machines than books.  A book may be about washing, but the machine takes in dirty clothes and if all goes well, transforms them into cleaner ones… Rites of passage are peformed not simply to mark transitions but to effect them.[8]

7. Revolution is allyship. Period.

“The poor shall inherit the earth.” Matthew 5:4

There are no poor allies if you truly believe in subversion.  What both ritual and revolution teaches us is that there is wealth in relationships, not in cold cash.  And when we change our relationships, we change ourselves, and thus, we change the world.  There really is no revolution without communitas.  And communitas are held by what Victor Turner calls “open morality”.[9]

According to Victor Turner, jokers, are “figures, representing the poor and the deformed, appear to symbolize the moral values of communitas as against the coercive power of supreme political rulers. Folk literature abounds in symbolic figures, such as "holy beggars," "third sons," "little tailors," and "simpletons," who strip off the pretensions of holders of high rank and office and reduce them to the level of common humanity and mortality.”

8.  We come to experience the again and again.

Perpetual rituals repeated over generations can be embedded in culture like breaking bread among opponents. For instance the constant battle between good and evil have been ritualized in many religions. Including, for example, a ritual of water conquering oil, can become a constant reminder of the value of life over greed.

Because there is no revolution without communitas, it is important to note that, “[c]ommunitas cannot stand alone if the material and organizational needs of human beings are to be adequately met.  Self-care is important in revolution as well as in ritual.   Although there are many rituals involving self-immolation, self-denial, and altruism, these activities cannot be ritualized without being repeatable, replicable or cyclical.  Thus, participants of both ritual and revolution need to survive them.  When a conflict has held on too long, the message is clear that the waging of this conflict may extend to perpetuity because we are going against ways of life that have complex networks entangled and invested in it.  In such a case, we need to take greater care of breeding communitas, beloved community, to build the case for the alternative.

9. Truth-telling is the first act of justice.

Justice, in the context of truth-telling, thus demands and facilitates intimacy as an act of revealing the truth about oneself regarding matters of everyday life: keeping healthy; having a job; caring for family; find, maintaining, or dissolving relationships; resolving legal cases.[12]

We need to be genuine about our concerns, about what impacts us, and about our fragility. We need to come vulnerable when we come to ask for change in revolution or ritual.

10. The crisis is of the imagination.

According to Robert Bellah, in modern ritual,  “Evil is no longer a force battling good in the universe or an intrinsic quality of the soul; it is the result of negative social conditions, emotional experiences, and sometimes psychophysiological determinations.”[13]

I agree with Bellah in that the enemy is our lack of imagination.  Because imagination could make us wiser and freer.  As I said above, change is about wisdom and freedom and not force.   And Grimes agrees I suppose when he said, “The fantasy of initiation, more than the memory of it, can shape how people act when they attempt to conceptualize or ritualize passage into adulthood. By fantasy I mean a particular way of imagining.”[14]

As discussed above, revolution is also a rite of passage.  And our goal in revolution and in ritual is to imagine a different self.   “When I change, the world changes”[15] because we all belong to an interdependent web of existence.  To imagine a different self is such a serious endeavor with understated potentialities, given that people have, on average, only 3 degrees of separation between us.[16]

Opponents are only projections of who we can truly imagine ourselves to be.  In fact, as Standing Rock taught me, we can only win if our narrative can win, that one in which we are the protagonist.  For instance, the unresolved narratives between Ishamel and Isaac continues to reverberate through time in unresolved conflict in Israel.   But if one day, a hidden scroll could be found in which they made a pact and said, we shall be equals, then the narrative changes in our imagination, but will not stay in our imagination only and will project itself out into the world.

There is nothing but ritual.  There is nothing but revolution.

REFERENCES:

[1] http://www.onbeing.org/program/david-whyte-the-conversational-nature-of-reality/transcript/8581

[2] Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1992), 64.

[3] Tom Faw Driver. Liberating Rites : Understanding the Transformative Power of Ritual. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), Appendix B, page 232.

[4] Ibid, 156.

[5] Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, (New Brunswick, NJ: Aldine Transaction, 2008), 132

[6] Catherine Bell, 256

[7] Meade, Michael. The Water of Life:Initiation and the Tempering of the Soul (Kindle Locations 5272-5273). GreenFire Press. Kindle Edition.

[8] Tom F. Driver, The Magic of Ritual: Our Need for Liberating Rites that Transform Our Lives and Communities (San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins, 1991), 93 as cited in Wendy Ulrich, The Temple Experience: Passage to Healing and Holiness, (Springville, UT: Cedar Fort, 2012), 18

[9] Victor Turner, 132

[10] Ibid., 110

[11] Victor Turner, 129

[12] Aditya Malik, Tales of Justice and Rituals of Divine Embodiment: Oral Narratives from the Central Himalayas, (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2016), 92

[13] Catherine Bell, 81.

[14] Ronald Grimes, Deeply Into The Bone: Reinventing Rites of Passage, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 111

[15] Ma Theresa Gustilo Gallardo, “When I Change, The World Changes”, accessed December 14, 2016, http://www.uua.org/worship/words/opening-invocation-responsive-reading-opening-invocation-responsive-reading-litany recited in the Opening Ceremonies of the International Council of Unitarians and Universalists in this video of the opening ceremonies: https://vimeo.com/87182032.

[16] Smriti Bhagat, Moira Burke, Carlos Diuk, Ismail Onur Filiz, Sergey Edunov, "Three and a half degrees of separation", writtedn February 4, 2016, accessed Decebmer 14, 2016, https://research.fb.com/three-and-a-half-degrees-of-separation.