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:

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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.

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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.