EPISODE 196 (Transcript) What About Ritual?: A Conversation with Selina Forsyth
Episode Transcript
Many thanks to listener, Caitlyn Hardy, for her work in transcribing this episode!
This episode can be found on any podcast app, or can be listened to here on Substack. All the show notes are found at this link as well:
CW: Hi, I'm Cynthia Winward.
SH: And I'm Susan Hinckley.
CW: And this is At Last She Said It. We are women of faith discussing complicated things. And the title of today's episode is, “What About Ritual? A Conversation with Selina Forsyth.” Welcome Selina.
SH: Hi Selina.
SF: Hi, so happy to be here.
CW: We're so glad you're here. And this whole season, we've been talking about women's spirituality, and we knew we couldn't get through this season without talking about ritual, and it can be so complicated when we talk about ritual, it gets tangled up with ordinances, and…
And so we're just excited to have a conversation with all of those, about all those things surrounding ritual and the beauty and the complicatedness of it with you today. So why don't, before we jump in, can you just give us a quick little snapshot of, of who you are and what brings you to this type of conversation with us.
SF: Yeah, I am also really excited about this conversation. When you launched this season about women's spirituality it really really just jived with me and, it, I heard your first couple of episodes and thought, Oh, this is a conversation that I want to have. And it made me think of ways that I, my spirituality has expanded recently.
I am currently studying to be a spiritual director. And part of that is accompanying people as they are exploring their own spirituality. And I was drawn to that because my definition of what spirituality looks like has really expanded in the last few years. And part of that has been diving into interfaith work and really appreciating, participating in celebrations with other people of other faiths, bringing my young family there, my husband and two young children.
Part of my love for spirituality, I think comes from being exposed to other religious traditions early on in my life. I had the privilege of attending an Episcopalian high school.
And I know Susan, you've talked on previous episodes about moonlighting with the Episcopalians.
SH: Holy envy.
SF: Yes, me too. Me too. And so that appreciation for this sort of high church, just beautiful way of worshiping with a focus on liturgy and the liturgical calendar really instilled that holy envy for me as well. And also I think a broader sense of imagination on what worship can look like and what needs spirituality can fill in my own life.
So when it came time for me to mark special occasions in my life in the past year without expense expanded sense of my own spirituality and my own ability to give myself permission to do things, I started creating rituals that felt like they better fit the moment that I was in and the need that I was trying to fill based on the inspiration of beautiful things I had observed all around.
So anyway, that's, that is how I came to be in this conversation. It was, I wanted to talk about some of these specific experiences with on the creation side of spiritual practice.
SH: Wow. I'm, now I'm really excited. She just said the phrase “on the creation side of spiritual practice.”
And I want to have a, I'm not used to thinking about my spiritual practices as a Latter-day Saint woman, having a big creative component, right? Because I haven't ever really felt like I had much to do with shaping what my worship experiences are, right? Or the ways that I'm…
CW: It was handed to us.
SH: Exactly. Exactly. I'm working off somebody else's script when I'm at church or participating in our ordinances or rituals. And so I love coming at this with the idea that there's a creative component here and that we can be participants in that. So, you did a great job of setting up this conversation.
SF: In addition to being a spiritual director in my faith life, professionally, I'm a social worker. I originally trained as a therapist, but now I work more on the macro [00:05:00] side of looking at social policy stuff. I really enjoy being able to have both of those sides, more of the quantitative research kind of focus, but then grounding that in a deep spiritual exploration from both my Mormon background and exploring further.
CW: Well, you're definitely the right person then. We're so glad that you've agreed to come on and talk about this. Before we take a deep dive into it and Susan's gonna be the master of ceremonies today for that. Susan, why don't you go ahead and just tell us kind of what some of your thoughts were…. Kind of introduce us into this topic.
SH: Yeah, the reason that Selina is actually joining us today is because she sent us an email that was detailing some of the rituals that she has created and sort of, putting them in the context of her own life as a Latter-day Saint woman.
And we knew that we had been wanting to address ritual, we had talked about some different ways of coming at it, but this way this really personal and creative way of coming at it is not something that I had really thought of. So my curiosity was definitely piqued by your email, Selina. It made, the first thing that I thought of, the second that I read your email, I thought of a quote from feminist artist Judy Chicago that I had referenced in a recent newsletter, and it was about her iconic installation, The Dinner Party, which people may or may not be familiar with.
If you're not, go look it up, it's very easy to find. But her installation imagines a table with place settings for 39 mythical and historical women. And she created it with the goal to sort of put women back into the historical record in a way that they had been omitted. And the reason that it came to me immediately when I thought of framing this discussion is that I came across an artist statement from her that said this, quote, “The Dinner Party suggests that women have the capacity to be prime symbol makers, to remake the world in our own image and likeness.”
And in our church, I have not felt like I am a symbol maker or a meaning maker because I feel like those things were prepackaged and handed to me. And as a woman, I don't even really see a woman's fingerprints on those things that I have received. Right? And we don't have that much ritual in our church.
But what we do have comes laden with a lot of heavy symbolism. And here's where it starts to get tangled up in ordinances, right? Because even the way that our ordinances are performed represent things about our doctrine and beliefs. Now, our rituals don't come from nowhere. They are crafted to communicate specific ideas as they are in all religion.
And then in our repetition of them, I think the idea is that those ideas get cemented in our minds, right? It's not just repetition for repetition's sake, but it's a way that in acting out important ideas, we internalize them. The other thing that ritual serves to do is create psychological togetherness.
But I feel like this can be, this has an additional element of challenge for women feeling connected when it doesn't, when the ritual itself doesn't necessarily feel like something that's that accessible to me symbolically or that I recognize myself in.
So I kind of approached this topic asking myself whether ritual was really important to me, or had been a, an important component of my own personal spiritual life and practice and therefore whether creating ritual would really be that resonant to me. It seems so foreign to me as a Latter-day Saint woman, I couldn't even really get my head around what does ritual mean to me and do I care enough about it to, sort of, take it for myself.
But then it occurred to me, I started to think about something that I was actually really intentional about as a mother, which was, I had this instinctive desire from the first second that I started having children to create rituals of love and belonging in our family. Family traditions, right?
And if you asked my kids what they remember about growing up with me as their mother, I think that you would hear about traditions, which are really just ritual by another name. Traditions are things that we repeatedly ate or did together, which were often to mark special occasions or events.
And often I would connect these traditions as we were developing them in my children's minds to ancestors that they never knew, right? This is something that we did at my grandparents’ Christmas party, or, these are the cookies that my great-grandmother baked.
I mean, there are all of these ways that I tied these things to other people who had been important in my own life and to ritual that had been important in my own life, which was a way of forging connection and helping my children sort of understand their place within something larger.
And so, I feel like I actually really do have a strong sense of the importance of ritual, that it was, it does feel deeply personal and connected to me, but I didn't [00:10:00] really realize it because I hadn't connected the dots, I guess, between the ways that I've made meaning in my own life as an LDS woman and the ways that I've been given meaning through the church.
So, LDS ritual has been created without women basically, right? And sometimes we don't even really participate in the rituals, we just observe them. We're not really direct participants, but we've had no part that I know of…women have had no part in informing the rituals that we've been handed with meaning, right?
We were not the meaning-makers in our religious practice. We're not the people who officially connected those dots. And so I feel like if women were allowed to, as Judy Chicago said, “remake the world” of LDS ritual “in our own image and likeness,” things might look very, very different. It's that flipping the script that you always talk about, Cynthia.
I can only imagine if we were to build the scaffolding for our spiritual practice, it might look, our church might look very different than it does now. And so, Selina, I want to talk about ritual generally today with you. And then I want to talk about ritual specifically and the ways that you are sort of taking ownership of it in your own life.
SF: Yeah.
SH: So let's start with what do we mean by ritual? Let's get really basic on that.
SF: Yeah, yeah. And I appreciate the way you framed this conversation because what comes to mind for me when you describe the rituals that you created with your family, which are rituals, and absolutely count as rituals.
SH: Yeah, I just had never thought of it until this. So I was excited by that connection.
SF: Yeah. So, one book that I have really appreciated is called The Power of Ritual. It's written by a person named Casper Turkyle, who looks at ritual and, including religious ritual, from a secular lens and sort of takes it apart and says, what is it doing?
And part of what he says makes up ritual is intention, attention, and repetition. And all of those things were in what you just described with your family, right? The intention to create meaning, the attention that we are focusing on this purposefully, and then the repetition over time.
And that's all that it takes and to create something powerful that carries meaning and can carry meaning across time. And so, so those are, those repeated actions, whether it's associated with a holiday or those the, or comes around at a certain time, or is just part of how you live your life.
I think Cynthia's example in a previous episode of the practice, the spiritual practice of salsa making is a fantastic example. And so, so all of those things, that's beautiful. And I want us to feel empowered to name that as ritual. And additionally, I think part of what I feel a hunger for as an LDS woman is to also have the power to create rituals for the quote unquote “bigger life moments,” right?
And I, by saying that I in no way want to denigrate what people would call mundane. I like, I absolutely love what you said early on in the season about the spirituality that shows up in that every day, right? That's, that is the the spirituality that makes up the majority of our lives.
And also in this moment where you have the birth of a child and then in the context of our church, the mother is not able to participate in that baby blessing. Those can be deep wounds, right? There, there are these particular moments that we also want to be able to feel empowered to create something around that.
SH: Yeah, that's specifically what I was thinking about when I said, sometimes we're just observers of the ritual. We don't even really get to participate in it.
CW: Yep. Baby blessings.
SH: Yeah. Yep.
CW: For sure.
SF: Yeah. And that's been a painful thing in my life. Right? But to the question of “What is ritual?” I think it encompasses both, right?
These everyday moments and the big moments. And as, as long as we are creating something with intention and attention that, and giving that form, I, there's a quote that I, as I was looking for a definition of ritual, I came across this quote and I don't really know who this this speaker is, who gave this quote….
SH: Okay, but he gave me one of my other most favorite quotes in the whole world, so….
SF: Okay.
SH: So trust him. Lay it on us.
SF: Okay. Okay. So the the quote is, “Ceremony may be self derived. It may come from vision. It may be given by a teacher. It may be [00:15:00] cultural, but from all sources, it has the same underlying root. It is a process in which the human capacity for sacred feeling and reverence is given form and expression.”
And I love that. I so, so this is Stephen Herod Buhner. I don't actually know how to pronounce his name, but I love that idea of taking that inherent spirituality and sacred feeling that we have, and giving it form in the world. And, and that can look like any number of things and can include LDS ordinances, but is a much bigger category than LDS ordinances.
Right? And so, it's hard, as you said that we kind of conflate these two in the church that, if we have any ritual, it must be these particular set of ordinances that really are controlled by people who have received priesthood ordination. And that doesn't have to be, right? I hope for a time when women are included in all aspects of our institutional life at church, including LDS ritual in a church setting.
And we can create ritual outside of that to serve spiritual needs that we have now and in the future.
SH: I think one reason that we, that I haven't felt like ritual was maybe so important in my religious practice as it, as I feel like I see it sometimes in other churches is that we're sort of detached from the liturgical calendar in our church, right?
So the things that I would define as ritual are pretty much specifically priesthood ordinances.
CW: Good point.
SF: And those priesthood ordinances have a specific narrative around them about being the things we need sort of to check off for, often for an afterlife reason, or we are told that we need them.
SH: Right.
SF: And so, it is hard if you are told that you need it to connect it with what you may feel are your actual needs or your lived experience of your needs.
SH: 100%. Yeah.
CW: Oh, there we go.
SH: I knew you were going to like that, Cynthia.
CW: She said it out loud.
SH: She said it.
SF: Yeah. So yeah, that I want to broaden our thinking and make space for people for whom LDS ordinances as they stand now are very meaningful and very important.
SH: Right. Right.
SF: And, and just say, that can be there and the category can be so much broader than that.
SH: Yes, yes.
SF: And make space for other things as well and other life moments.
SH: Beautiful.
CW: And make space, I think, I love Selina that you touched on, for so many people, maybe all of our current rituals, ordinances, they do check all the boxes, but maybe they don't quite understand their daughter-in-law for whom it doesn't.
And so this could be an episode, maybe, that somebody could share with a loved one so that they could be better understood. So I just think there, there are so many reasons to be having this discussion today.
INTERLUDE MUSIC
SH: Okay, Selina, I feel like it's important in this conversation to acknowledge some of the reasons why our LDS rituals may be ill-fitting for some women.
SF: Yeah.
SH: Because I'm sure we have women listening to this who are thinking, I'm just fine with all of our rituals. And then I'm sure we have other women who are thinking, thank you for finally saying it out loud that these rituals aren't doing everything that I need.
So, why might some women want to create their own rituals? Why might some women feel like they need to augment this part of their spiritual practice?
SF: Yeah, well, I will I'll speak first to my own personal experience and I mentioned this briefly that for me, I have two children and it was always really hard for me to imagine not being able to participate in my own child's baby blessing. Baby blessings are a point of particular pain for a lot of LDS women being excluded from them.
But I think it's emblematic of our experience with the rest of ritual in the church for reasons we already mentioned, right? That direct participation in the ritual often comes with priesthood and we don't have that.
SH: All right, right.
SF: And so that makes a lot of the purposes of ritual around that community building, around that meaning-making more difficult to access.
That along with that some of the rituals have explicitly or implicitly broadcast messages to us that we're lesser, right? And we don't have to go into temple I feel like, as much because you've talked about that in other [00:20:00] episodes and, but those are, that's all very relevant here, right?
But across the board, we may not feel like agents or players.
SH: Right, right. It's that psychological togetherness that I was talking about earlier, like sometimes I feel like there's something that gets in the way of that. When I don't get to directly participate in the ritual.
SF: Yeah.
SH: And I'm sort of missing that component of it.
CW: And not only like the direct participation as we're talking about specifically here about women, but then I feel like even many men in our life who would like to participate, right? There, they can be excluded as well for reasons of quote unquote “worthiness.” Look at our temple ceremonies, how many people are excluded.
Younger siblings don't usually get to go to a wedding because they haven't been endowed and they're not allowed in. So I just think they're, it's just so layered, this exclusion process within our church that I just have a lot of compassion for women, for myself. I'm going to throw myself in there.
When this pain just bubbles to the surface around what should be, I think, a very celebratory event. It just adds to it.
SF: Definitely.
SH: So then the question for me becomes, is there value in continuing those rituals even if we also seize a more creative approach to somehow building our own? Like, is a hybrid model maybe the answer for some women?
I don't know. And then also, where would women possibly get permission to do such a thing? Because I know that permission is a big challenge for a lot of women in the church. It's just huge. And so it seems almost like it, it's something as sacred as ordinances, right? And how deeply connected they are with ritual.
They're really the representatives of ritual in our church. Wow, where can women get permission to do that? Do you have any ideas about that, advice, help, anything?
SF: Yeah. I think reframing what ritual can mean is a big first step to say, okay, even if you are in a place where you want to view the ordinances as primary, you can say there's still that space and but there's all of the rest of this, right?
All of the, all of the rest of this. And you can say, okay, there's the ordinances and that's them. And I have space in my own life to create what's meaningful for me. If those ordinances are feeling more problematic or difficult for you at this time, you can also say this is not feeding me.
And I need to be fed. Right? I need to be able to find practices, spaces that are going to nourish me in the needs that I have and that might look different from what it looks like at church. But expanding what you view your spiritual life to be to every part of your life means of course your life is more than what you do at church.
And there are these things that can still connect you to a church community, and it's possible that's not your only community, and it's not your only aspect of of your identity, and it's your, not your only need. And so I, I do believe that these things can live side by side according to what is going to nourish the individual in their real needs.
In a discussion of spiritual needs, it's important to name that often we've been told that these specific ordinances are our spiritual needs. That there have been talks that talk about what is the next ordinance that you need. And when we talk about the covenant path, it makes it seem like, okay, there's the next mile marker, the next check mark.
And that is the only place that my focus can be. And so it can make it hard to think about what even are my needs?
SH: Right, right.
SF: And to name those for yourself. I have been in a number of conversations where I've asked people, if you could redesign church based on your spiritual needs, what would it look like?
And the response that I've gotten is, I've never even thought about what my spiritual needs are. I, that's not vocabulary that I have.
And so, thinking more about needs that we may be experiencing: it could be rejuvenation, meaning, community, connection, joy, reconciliation, awe and wonder, encouragement, fortitude, space to explore and expand, to be really seen and known for who you are, being oriented to your own values, being challenged….
There, there's, I could go on and on about what could be spiritual needs that you may feel.
SH: I want to be in that church. That whole list. [00:25:00]
CW: Yes. As you're rattling off that list, Selina, I'm thinking, I bet that would actually be really helpful. Like you say, when you've asked women, what are your spiritual needs?
And it's like, wait. What? I get to define what my spiritual needs are? Just hearing that list, just hearing that list, like rejuvenation. Puh-leeze. I'm over here raising my hand. Like, that would be absolutely amazing. So maybe even just throwing out that list right there could make this whole episode worth it for women because they could think about some of those things and think, yes, now that you mentioned it, yes, I need awe and wonder for sure.
SF: Yeah.
CW: That's a beautiful list right there. Thank you so much.
SH: Yeah. It's so good. And I was just thinking like a lot of women may not even know where to begin with figuring out what their spiritual needs are because they've really just never been asked to think of that.
And for me really, I think, it came from, like, I started to learn some of these things about myself through spiritual foraging, I guess is what I'm going to call it. And I would sample things, I would find things, and I, and it was really easy for me to know which things were delicious to me, right, and which ones felt like they were feeding me in ways that I hadn't been fed before.
So, but I had to first give myself permission to even take that journey and go out looking for new spiritual food.
SF: Yeah. And it takes it takes a certain kind of attention to be able to notice these things about yourself that, that can be blocked when you think you already know. And you think that you have been given the exhaustive list of what one can need.
So that's that resonates with my experience as well, Susan, but I think also back to your point about permission, once you start to recognize some of these needs in yourself it may be easier to give yourself permission to find something that fills them. Once you name them as this is not just an uncomfortable feeling because I'm not doing it right.
No, this is a spiritual need that may need to be filled for you in a different way than it is filled for someone else that you know.
SH: Okay. So then now let's try to drop ritual back into the conversation. So if you start to identify that you have some spiritual needs, why…ritual? Why is that something to consider in beginning to address those and to sort of augment your spiritual life?
SF: There, there are a few different reasons why ritual is really powerful. One is that developing ritual can operate on symbolism that can be really powerful. And this is something that we talk about in church, even if we don't often know how to interact with it.
But developing out that symbolism can create a container for things that we have difficulty holding on our own, or that words have difficulty holding. And given that so much of what we do in church is word-based, and then the spiritual practices that we're given, are word-based as far as reading the scriptures and saying prayers and and things like this and listening to Conference talks or other sermons, sometimes ritual brings in a different element, sometimes an element of embodiment that you are doing things with your body.
You are, you are acting something out. It operates at a different level, and there are experiences that we go through in our lives, that may be the medium that you need to be able to hold that experience. I love this quote from Elizabeth Gilbert:
“This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don't have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down.
“We all need such places of ritual safekeeping…” and here, goes to the permission. “And I do believe that if your culture or tradition doesn't have the specific ritual that you are craving, then you are absolutely permitted to make up a ceremony of your own devising, fixing your own broken-down emotional systems with all the do-it-yourself resourcefulness of a generous plumber or poet.”
SH: Gorgeous.
CW: Yep.
SF: I love that. So that's one aspect is, ritual can contain things that are big. I will put a caveat there to say you may not, it may not be helpful to put a ton of pressure on yourself to create that if it's your first time creating something. But that is potential that is there.
So that that's one part of it. And another part is that ritual, and this adds on to what I've said, ritual is a particular way of paying attention. [00:30:00] It is perhaps an amplified way of paying attention, which I think of as the foundational spiritual skill.
And as we pay attention to things through ritual, they become more meaningful in our lives.
So, I’m gonna spit out another quote, which talks about how religion has provided some of those ceremonies for people, but as they have stopped working for some people, that creates its own vacuum. So the quote says, “With the demise of religion many people are left stranded in a chasm of emptiness and doubt without rituals to recognize, celebrate, or negotiate the vital thresholds of people's lives. The key crossings pass by undistinguished from the mundane everyday rituals of life. If we approach our decisive thresholds with reverence and attention, the crossing will bring us more than we could have ever hoped for.”
So, just the attention we pay to it in itself can bring meaning to an experience.
CW: When you were saying that, you know, maybe if we could be, don't put a lot of pressure on ourselves, right? If this is the first time we're kind of looking at our own life and saying, “Oh my gosh, now I'm in charge of making my own rituals? This is a lot of pressure!”
SH: Right. It's too much.
CW: It is! It’s too much! I totally agree with that. And for me, it's been putting that attention into things like we talked about in the very beginning of the season with Brittany Hartley, things that maybe we were already doing that we can just do with greater intention.
And so there's this spot on the Provo trail that I, whenever I get to, I've trained myself now. I take out my earbuds, whatever podcast I'm listening to, and I look up into the trees for just even two or three hundred yards and listen. And I try not to walk with my eyes closed because I want to see the leaves, but I also want to pay greater attention to the bird song that I hear.
And that has become a deeply important ritual and it's simply paying attention. I'm not doing anything that I wasn't already doing before I decided to make this a ritual other than just really paying attention, taking some deep breaths, closing my eyes at the correct moment, keeping them open at the correct moment so I don't fall off the trail, and just listening and just thanking God in that moment for birds and for nature and that I'm here in this moment, completely present, listening.
I mean, that's how simple it can be, is finding something that's already giving you meaning and joy and just really focusing for 300 yards on what that could, how that can feed my soul.
So yeah, don't make it too complicated. At least not if, I mean, if you want to, you can, but personally speaking, no, for me I'm always going to take a simple, “I'm lazy” way into adding meaning into my life. So.
SH: That also makes me think that like with family tradition, sometimes it's just throwing up a bunch of stuff and see what sticks, right?
Something becomes a tradition. Because for some reason, who knows why, there was a glimmer of meaning. It was meaningful for some reason and so we did it again next time, right? It stuck around. But nobody set out with intention to say this is going to be our tradition and this is what it represents, right?
You can sort of connect those dots of meaning and sort of mine for them in your experiences and activities as you're going along, exactly like you just said, Cynthia. You must have realized at some point, “Hey, I feel good at this part of the trail when I look up in the trees,” right? “What is this doing for me?”
And so you started to do it with some regularity and you have a ritual now, but it's not because it's anything that you've scripted in advance. It just sort of happened for you. You found meaning there.
CW: Yeah.
SF: Yeah. And I think, uh, as the theme of permission comes up here that we can give ourselves permission for it to look like any number of things, anywhere on this spectrum, from the really low additional effort to to say, “that's enough, that is the, what I am already doing. That's enough,” and recognizing and putting my attention there is enough, right?
And then all the way to some people may have trouble giving themselves permission to do something more elaborate because they feel like, Oh, I'm, overstepping or something like that.
And we can give ourselves permission for what we're already doing to be enough. Or if we wanted to three, create something, who knows? The sky's the limit but that none of these is a “should,” and none of these is a “have to.” This is all about what do I authentically feel like is going to fill the spiritual need that I am identifying for myself at this moment.
SH: Perfect.
CW: Yeah. This isn't about making more work for [00:35:00] women, right?
SF: Correct. Correct.
CW: No more guilt. No more. Yeah, no more pressures or how you said, should to, or pressure, exactly.
SF: And no, no more comparison that that somebody else is doing this differently than I am and I should be doing it like that. No, this is about an increase in freedom.
INTERLUDE MUSIC
SF: As we've talked about the spectrum from the very small moments to these landmark moments that, that people may want a way to mark. You might think of this as my examples today are going to be from birth, baby blessings. One experience I had preparing myself for a birth experience, but it can be, it can be anything.
And particularly one might think about any life transition. So moving into a new home or taking a new job. If there's a change in your family structure like a child is leaving or a relationship may be beginning or ending or renewing. Or even if it's your own faith journey and you want to mark or honor a new stage in your own growth that any of these might be times when you might consider finding a way to, to mark this as you move forward.
SH: I loved that word “thresholds” as a way of sort of identifying natural places in our lives where a ritual might be appropriate.
SF: Yeah. The, in, in her book, See No Stranger, Valerie Kaur has a beautiful example of an aspirational threshold that she came to where she decided to create a ritual where she enthroned her own wise woman and put aside the chattering voices that were holding her back.
And so, it can even be, something that, that growth you hope to step into. It really this is wide open.
SH: Okay. So if, yeah, tell if a woman is sitting there thinking, I wouldn't even know where to begin. Give us some thoughts about that.
SF: Yeah I want to emphasize again that I'm, I am not some expert here to give you prescriptions on how it must be done.
I, this is just ideas out of my own personal experience and what I have found meaningful. So I'm going to give three ideas. One is, comes from Priya Parker's book, The Art of Gathering, which I love. She talks about when you are gathering people to choose a disputable purpose for what the gathering you're putting together and what she means there is something specific enough that someone might disagree on what this should be for.
Not that anyone is going to disagree in the context of your own ritual, but specific enough that it's not just, Oh, we're here to celebrate my birthday. But something that, that goes more specific such that it, it guides your decision making about it. So I'm recommending for, in the context of ritual, if you are able to identify a specific spiritual need that you are feeling, such as rejuvenation, that might make something look different from a different spiritual need like reconciliation, right?
And having a purpose that is specific enough to guide what you end up doing will help if you're wondering where to begin. And then and I will, I'll I'm going to run through these three ideas and then give examples from some of the rituals that I've I've done for myself.
SH: Oh, perfect.
SF: The second idea I have here is draw on what feels meaningful and beautiful to you already. So there are probably words or quotes or songs, stories they may be from your religious tradition, like scripture stories or things like that. Or not! Images, formats, or way of ways of going about things that you've experienced.
For me, given that I just love to explore different religious traditions, a lot of my inspiration has come from those, as I already mentioned. Episcopalian worship has been big for me. But. I, with that, I also want to say a caveat of treat other people's religious and sacred practices with respect.
That we're not looking to wholesale copy something out of another tradition and taking it out of context. There are ways that that, that can be that can be harmful for people. For example, if if you were to take a, an, another sacred practice and use it for something that is the opposite of how it's intended that the, that can be disrespectful to to a spiritual community.
I want to credit my friend, Madathai Singh here, who has deep roots in Mormonism, Judaism, and Sikhism. And and I talked to him about how to do this well. He gave me the pointers of: don't ever sell ritual. Remember to cite your sources, remember to credit where your inspiration comes from and then don't use it for the opposite as intended.
So an example there being the Passover Seder is very sacred to a lot of to, to Jewish people. And yes, using it to celebrate Jesus and Easter can feel very disrespectful to them. [00:40:00] So, so just points to be careful about there.
CW: So well said. Yeah.
SF: Then, the third idea I want to say is use it to gather the community that you need, and you get to be choosy about the community that you need.
It, there may be a particular time in your life that you need a specific type of community. It can just be you. It can just be a ritual that you do by yourself. And even if you do it alone, it can help you orient yourself toward your community or connect to the larger human story as we talked to, talked about.
But it also, if you choose to involve other people, it can be an incredibly rich way to strengthen a relationship to say, “This is a particular moment in my life and I wanted you to be here to celebrate it with me or to go through it with me.” And, at a time when we all know that social isolation is on the rise and it is difficult to develop community, this can be one powerful way to be intentional about that.
SH: I want to put a plug right here for there's a really great On Being conversation if women want to hear more about this and sort of getting to the specifics of planning events and gatherings and rituals. There's a great On Being conversation with Priya Parker and Krista Tippett that I will link to in the show notes so that women can go and hear an expert on this or someone who has at least devoted a lot of research to it talk more about it and give some specifics.
SF: Her work has been life changing for me on this topic, so. Very much recommend. So those are my three ideas: identify your need as your purpose, draw inspiration from what's meaningful to you, and then use your ritual to gather the community that you need. So with those three I have a couple of examples from my own life of rituals that I've created that have been meaningful for me and my community.
The first one was a women's circle that preceded the birth of my second child. And for me, this was a time when I was deeply fearful about what was coming because I had had a traumatic first experience with childbirth. And just to give context, I mean, so fearful that I had a panic attack just walking through the birth unit where I was going to deliver. And so, with that I felt a keen need for the strength of other women.
And I drew inspiration from what I had known about how early Mormon women used to gather to bless and anoint a woman who was going to go into childbirth.
CW: Yep.
SH: Right.
SF: And so, so speaking of rituals that when Susan, you said we haven't had a hand in informing rituals, at one point we did!
SH: Yes we did!
SF: So, so….
SH: But not in, I would say many of our listeners’ lifetimes that is, that has not been part of certain experiences.
SF: Certainly. And it hadn't been part of mine, but I was inspired by that. And I felt the need for something like that to prepare me for my upcoming experience. And so with that, I decided that the community that I wanted around me, was, included a lot of women that were close to me who ranged on this spectrum of Orthodox LDS belief.
Some very, very orthodox and some who had never been LDS or had left the church, some who didn't believe in God, et cetera. And so, so I decided to create a ritual that would be inclusive to the people that I wanted around me giving me strength. So what I did was send out an invitation to say I, to these specific women who had all gone through childbirth and that didn't have to be part of it, but it was important to me at that time and said,
“I need to gather strength. And so I want you to come to my home prepared with stories of a time that you have navigated a difficult transition, could be childbirth related or not, and how you exercised strength to navigate or overcome that.”
And then I told them beforehand that we would all share the stories in a confidential setting.
And then after that, there would be a circle around me in which these women would bless me in preparation for childbirth, whatever that meant to them. And so that could be a prayer, it could be reading a poem or something that they had pre-written for the occasion, or it could be participating in silence by lending their support from their hearts and spirits.
And so that's what we did. And it was incredibly moving and powerful for me.
SH: This is making me want to cry just hearing you even talk about it.
CW: I'm already sitting here crying, Susan!
SH: It's amazing. Wow. [00:45:00] Okay.
SF: Yeah. And the feeling in that room was palpable. And again this is a group of women who many of them did not know one another before coming.
They were connected to me, but felt a strong sense of connection to one another going away from that. And the stories that were shared were incredible. And I did find the strength that I needed in that setting, and and went on to have a beautiful childbirth experience.
SH: Wow. Wow.
CW: Wow, wow, wow.
I'm just sitting here though thinking about this experience that you created, Selina, thinking, I want to do that now in my own life for other things I'm going through. I think that could be so applicable to so many of these thresholds, right? That we've talked about. So what a gift you've just given a gift to so many of us.
Thank you.
SH: Thank you.
SF: And I hope, I hope that the majority of listeners can also feel that that's not a threatening thing to do. At least I know in our experience in my, the circle of women that I invited, even the women who might, who, who certainly wouldn't want to challenge priesthood or whatever, that, that hold a very orthodox belief, it was very meaningful and non-threatening to them.
And so I hope that the, this can show that the, this can work in a variety of frameworks of belief.
SH: You did a beautiful job of disconnecting it from blessing as we think about it in a traditional
priesthood blessing sense by expanding your definition of what it can mean to bless someone.
CW: Yeah.
SH: And I feel like that made it so it would be non-threatening to even to people for whom initially the idea might be a little itchy for whatever reason.
SF: Yep, yep. And that, that was my intent in that setting. I also wouldn't, I wouldn't hold it against anyone who comes from a different framework and wants to handle that differently.
SH: Sure.
SF: But that worked incredibly well for the need that I was feeling at the time.
INTERLUDE MUSIC
SF: The second example of ritual came shortly thereafter and it was the naming and blessing of my child. Again, I, I've expressed before that I did not want to be excluded from the experience of of my baby's blessing. And so what we chose to do, my husband and I talked about this a lot and together designed another ritual that we could hold in our home for this special occasion.
And this particularly came out of an inspiration and a feeling of need for community that I, a need to create this sense of community for my child. In thinking about creating a baby blessing I thought a lot about something that I had heard an Episcopalian priest at my school, at my high school, say about infant baptism.
And he told me that for him, in his tradition, infant baptism was less about any promise that the person baptized was making and more about a promise that the community was making to receive that child and support their spiritual growth and within that community. And I wanted that for my baby.
And so, so a lot of the ritual was designed around that idea. It was that we were gathering a community that would walk this child through their life. And then also blessing that child with what we feel is important.
So the main needs there were addressing our community but also celebrating new life, reconfiguring and making space in our family, and then reaffirming our values that we want to live into for that child, our articulating hopes, and then also there was a significant section on gratitude for my healing experience during pregnancy.
So all of that tied into how we created this this ritual with the inspiration of the format of Episcopalian worship services which, if you're not familiar it's much like, a Catholic mass or other high church setting.
There is a lot of call and response from the person, between the person leading the ceremony and the congregation.
And so, my husband and I co-wrote this script. I wrote most of it, but we collaborated on it together. And then I acted as the celebrant, or the person leading the service.
And so every person who attended [00:50:00] had a little pamphlet in their hand, just like happens at an Episcopalian worship service. And so it was easy to follow along and see where we were and where they were called on to, to participate. So there were, there was a place in there for the story of the pregnancy, which included a poem that I wrote that set up how much thought we had put into the name that we gave my son.
And then extended that name to him as a blessing to say, his this is what Ethan means, and this is our hopes for you. And this is what Simon means, and this is our hopes for you around that name. I know we're probably running out of time, but if I could give a little, just read a little example of what that, so, for the section on his middle name, I read out:
“Simon is a Hebrew name which means listener. Your father and I believe that listening reflects one of the most fundamental attributes of God. We understand God as being the most with, shutting out no aspect of what is. God is able to hold all things in love. Not only does God listen to us when we pray, God listens by being profoundly with us in, as, and through all of our experiences.
We hope your name reminds you to listen deeply to other people, to recorded wisdom, to the natural world, to your life, and to the workings of the spirit in you. We hope that learning to listen deeply will teach you to find the face of God in all people and all things.
In giving you this name, we also intend to call to your mind, Jesus's follower, Simon Peter, and all those who have had their names changed by God. Your father and I don't know all that life and God will have in store for you, but we hope that when God calls you to be someone more than you have been, you will listen and rise to it.”
SH: Oh my gosh.
CW: Oh!
SH: Oh my goodness, it's so beautiful and it feels like something I'm starving for. It's so interesting observing my own reaction to this when I approach the conversation thing. I don't even know if I really, how much I would really care about ritual. No, I care deeply, Selina. This is so, so meaningful.
I want to point out one thing that we, that Cynthia and I have the benefit of that our listeners don't right now, and that is we're looking at the notes that were prepared for this. And I feel like it would be helpful for women to see is as we're looking in your section of notes here where you put these together, you've identified three things in approaching each of these rituals, right?
What are the needs that I'm looking to address with this. What's my inspiration for it? And then who is the community that I want to create this ritual with? And so I feel like those three things are such specific, like someone can write that down on a piece of paper and really think about those three things as they approach it and it will give shape to what you might want to consider doing next.
SF: Absolutely. Absolutely. And that is a formula that hopefully people can run with. And again, give shape to this as you feel moved to do so.
SH: Beautiful. Well Selina, I keep thinking that maybe I've hit our favorite conversation of the season, but I see now that I had not yet hit our favorite conversation this season.
I have loved talking with you about this. Thank you so much, It has landed as a gift for me personally. So thank you so much for your insights and for your willingness to share personally some of the things that you've done. We like to have a few minutes at the end of every conversation for some more lighthearted questions.
And so Cynthia, do you want to ask Selina some of those now?
CW: All right, let's do our lightning round. Selina, what is a favorite book of yours?
SF: I have so many. I've mentioned a couple in the, right. Yeah. I've mentioned a couple in the session, the conversation already. But I'll add to this a couple by Parker Palmer, who is a wonderful Quaker writer.
His book, Let Your Life Speak has influenced me greatly.
CW: A woman you look up to.
SF: I mentioned also Valerie Kaur. And I loved her book, See No Stranger. But along with that, I'll say, I got to hear her speak at a conference. And her presence bore her message in such a palpable way. It really inspired me and was a profoundly experience, spiritual experience that changed the course of my decision making on some things. And I just aspire to have that kind of powerful presence that empowers others to face their fears.
CW: I think you're our second guest this season to talk about Valerie Kaur and the book and I will add my voice also. See No Stranger is so beautiful.
SF: So good.
CW: A favorite quote?
SF: I come back again and again to the part of the play Les Miserables that [00:55:00] says “To love another person is to see the face of God.”
SH: So good.
CW: And lastly, what do you know? What's one thing that you know today?
SF: The diversity of human experience is vast and I say that because it is amazing to me as I really listen to people's experiences that I feel like the more I learn, the less I know.
But I, I do feel that I see God's hand leading people in an astonishing variety of directions.
CW: Amen.
SH: Beautiful. I will link to everything in our show notes, so I hope that listeners will go there if they have more questions and maybe a way that they can connect with you? Can we also put that in the show notes?
SF: Yeah, absolutely.
SH: Okay.
SF: And I'll say too if you are looking for a more detailed example of, especially around baby blessings, I know how hard that can be for people. My script that I wrote is not available anywhere, but if you contact me individually, I would be happy to share that with individuals.
Not, not that this will be the ritual that is meaningful for you, but if you're looking for an example as you're creating your own, I'm happy to share that. And if that's interesting to you or you just want to talk about anything else, you can contact me at contact@selinaforsyth.com.
That's my email address.
CW: Beautiful.
SH: Thank you so much. I hope we have an opportunity to have our paths cross again conversationally if not in real life, Selina. Thank you so much for sharing with us.
CW: Thank you. Yeah.
SF: Absolutely. Thank you.
Voicemail from Kim: As I'm working through the process of untangling the spiritual from the religious, I find myself viewing religion like a paint-by-numbers kit. It hands you a lackluster brush, tells you where to put the colors, and outlines the picture for you. But this approach sends progress. An artist learning their trade experiments, they break rules and they get messy.
And even if they start out by mimicking a master's painting as they're learning, they'll eventually develop the skills that are necessary to create something that's entirely their own. Church, to me, feels like the dollar store paint-by-numbers kit. It's great for producing a generic picture for the untrained masses, it gets the job done, but it doesn't really teach you how to paint.
After years of being chastised for any deviation and commanded to paint only within the prescribed lines, those lines are feeling too restrictive. The tools provided are no longer sufficient for my growth as an artist. I want more than what that kit can offer. And I've had to look to outside sources for that guidance.
Suddenly, with a blank canvas in front of me, and access to a multitude of unfamiliar tools, I realize in all these years of putting paint to paper, I've never learned how to paint. The kit I was handed was meant to produce a beautiful picture. And it is beautiful, but it's only one picture. And upon closer inspection, it's flawed and very basic.
I crave more. I want to paint a masterpiece that I'm proud of and truly love. My soul aches to be set free, to play in color and shapes and lines, to push boundaries and discover what's possible. But I'll never achieve that if I stick with the kit.
Voicemail 2: Responding to your episodes about sister missionaries, it got me thinking about my own experience.
I turned 18 right around the time that the age change happened and got to see the cultural shifts that happened for women right around that time. I remember suddenly there was all this pressure. We were seniors in high school to prepare to serve missions and as we were preparing to graduate and graduating, so many had submitted their papers.
I remember Sister Oscarson was the Young Women's President at the time. She came to our stake and said to the young women, you do not have to serve if you do not want to. That's not what this is. And then I remember a bunch of girls that I knew in my ward I went to school with withdrew their applications because they had felt pressured.
And then when I went to college, we got to see more changes. Young men only wanted to marry returned missionaries and friends of mine were not getting dates because the guys were uninterested if you weren't planning on serving or hadn't served. And I was dumped at one point because I had no intention to serve a mission, and I was attending BYU-Idaho.
And then in another weird twist, one of my roommates at BYU-Idaho did want to serve and she went to our bishop and he wouldn't help her because he said he felt like she was supposed to get married. So she had to wait [01:00:00] until she went home so her home ward bishop could help her.
So there are, even for those of us who didn't serve, a lot changed.
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