Episode 196: What About Ritual? | A Conversation with Selina Forsyth
“For me, broadening my thinking about ritual has given me more freedom to bring my whole self and my creativity to my spiritual life, as well as meet my unique and evolving spiritual needs,” explains Selina Forsyth, who joins Cynthia and Susan to discuss ritual in the lives of Latter-day Saint women. What about when the rituals provided by our religion no longer fit? Even if they do remain deeply meaningful, in a church where women have not been involved in creating official sacred rituals—and sometimes participate in them only as observers—it can be hard to feel we have authority to create personal sacred rituals for ourselves. Episode 196 is a conversation about the intentional making and marking of meaning in the big and small moments of our lives.
Notes & Quotes:
connect with Selina: contact@selinaforsyth.com
The Dinner Party, by Judy Chicago, ca 1979
See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love, by Valarie Kaur
The Power of Ritual: How to Create Meaning and Connection in Everything You Do, by Casper ter Kuile
The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters, by Priya Parker
Remaking Gathering: Entering the Mess, Crossing the Thresholds, Priya Parker with Krista Tippet, On Being podcast, 9/30/2021
“’The Dinner Party’ suggests that women have the capacity to be prime symbol-makers, to remake the world in our own image and likeness.” —Judy Chicago
“Ceremony may be self-derived, it may come from vision, it may be given by a teacher, it may be 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.” —Stephen Harrod Buhner
“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 I do believe that if your culture or tradition doesn’t have the specific ritual 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/poet.” —Elizabeth Gilbert
“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 peoples 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.” —John O’Donohue
Thinking about this episode, I find myself reflecting on how ritual is helping me navigate a strained period in a relationship with someone I’ve always liked and respected. I work at an Episcopal cathedral, not only as a musician participating directly in worship, but also doing admin work to support both liturgical music and a concert series we host. Growing up, I literally thought that being Mormon meant that I couldn’t study music because I wouldn’t be able to attend other churches in order to be a professional church musician, so with this job and other things I’m doing in my life, I’m in the middle of putting myself back together the way I was always meant to be. But it’s been messy at times. We’ve been through a leadership transition in my corner of the cathedral, and I was also pushing my boss’s boss pretty hard on some other changes I thought we should be working on. I was probably pushing too hard, and I wasn’t always handling things very well, but neither was he, and it culminated in a very difficult conversation. I almost certainly left feeling more battered than he did, for all his good intentions as a leader. It’s been difficult to know how to behave around him since then, but my way of establishing and then sustaining normal diplomatic relations has been to lean in on aspects of ritual. Some of your listeners will be familiar with the tradition of passing the peace, when you greet others in the congregation during the middle of the service, partly as a way to be reconciled before everyone moves on to Communion. What may be less well known to those who haven’t attended Episcopal services before is that any baptized Christian is welcome to receive Communion but that those who don’t wish to receive Communion may cross their arms over their chest and receive a brief blessing instead. Mormons may consider themselves to be Christians, but many other Christians don’t accept that. Since the only form of baptism I’ve ever had is a Mormon baptism, I’m always careful to receive a blessing rather than taking Communion. Those two ritual practices have been a lifeline for me in the weeks since that difficult conversation, offering me a way to signal my intent to move forward in a productive way. I still feel uncomfortable around our boss, but ritual is what has helped me to engage in a more wholehearted way than I could at first. I’ve gotten to the point where I can chat with him about safe topics, like running shoes or cycling, but I couldn’t find it in me to chat about those other things until I’d had a few weeks of just doggedly passing the peace and going up for a blessing, insisting on maintaining the ties of community that we both value. When I had nothing inside myself other than anger and disbelief at what I saw as unfair about the conversation, I had ritual that exists outside and around all of us who opt into that community together. And I did get to opt in. No one would have batted an eyelid and most wouldn’t even have realized if I had found excuses to avoid passing the peace or asking to receive a blessing. I didn’t know how to interact when we passed in the hallway, but I knew how to say, “I’m still in this with you and everyone else,” when we were leading worship. Ritual was the way I showed that I was doing my best to make my peace with a new equilibrium. Ritual is what is keeping me tethered to my desire for strong, constructive relationships with people I work with and care about.