LITTLE LITURGIES FOR UNCERTAIN TIMES
For our collective safety, we now embrace social distancing and turn inward to cloister ourselves for an indeterminate amount of time. In fact, at a deep, societal level our use of time is now completely disrupted. Collectively, we hesitate, unable to expect what will happen to us, our loved ones, our communities, our world.
Yet against this anxiety and uncertainty, we can create something set apart and meaningful, the very qualities of the holy and sacred. In the forms of ritual and liturgy, we can create new, miniature kinds of time. These practices can be productive, reflective, and flourishing to prepare for a future we cannot yet envision.
As we determine how we will spend these long hours, our daily routines now become our deliberate management of how we move through each day. Within these routines, we can focus on particular reflective moments when we pause and take stock in what we are doing. Now in this time of uncertainty is the opportunity to recapture the power and agency of the ancient practices of ritual and liturgy.
Ritual, a meaningfully repeated performed practice, is a word that can seem distant, reserved for the esoteric. But really, rituals are small reminders, reflections of ourselves in our actions. We perform rituals so readily and nonchalantly that we ignore how important they are to and for us. They are our special spaces.
Liturgies are more determined things, the “stuff” in ritual’s form. They are the sequence of meaningful words and actions, often most visible in church. They are creations for a community to be performed and shared together. Liturgies have a beginning, a middle, and an end. As long as we keep the structure, we can change the contents as we need. Liturgies are special forms of created time.
In our new, restricted spaces we can create new space and time with rituals of “micro-liturgies”, bespoke creations of meaningful words and activities ordered for meaningful interaction. Rituals help us focus. Liturgies help us create order. In this time of disorder, let us find new ways to spend our time not distracting ourselves, but engaging each other in meaningful ways.
When ritual is performed and liturgy created, we create certain time within this uncertain age. COVID-19 is invisible, but we can see each other gather together in our particular space or online. We may not know when COVID-19 is at our door, but we know what comes next in the liturgy. We know we can perform this ritual again. The regularity and anticipation of ritual is a reassuring thing, fresh and alive. When we create something for ourselves, we have focused power over our circumstances even if only for a few minutes.
Often, the best rituals are organic, intimately created and shared. To share in this creation means we remember and perform them together. We move our bodies and use our voices. We embody and share what is important. We graciously allow flexibility, error, and the unexpected. In ritual, we create a space for mystery. Creating mystery for ourselves has a power that uncertainty from the outside cannot overcome. When illness, sorrow, and death enter our lives, together we already have our created structures to face it. We can adjust our liturgies as appropriate and necessary for next time.
Such intimate creativity requires vulnerability - another risk in a time when we take every precaution for self-preservation. In sharing this vulnerability, new solidarity is found in the creation of the form that is strengthened through the repetition that is ritual. We affect each other. It is impossible to not be affected.
Creating liturgy is a power people are unaware they already possess. It can be a restful, restorative power, creating a small world where sickness and suffering can be actively confronted. Our liturgies can be safeguards against the turmoils of our current age. They are things to look forward to, practices to be refined.
Micro-liturgy is what people gathering together make it. It is a kind of stone soup: everyone brings something meaningful to add. They requires planning. Perhaps the ritual takes place after a meal or the day’s most tedious or most stressful time. It begins with an opportunity to leave our tumultuous time and enter not a chosen time, but a time chosen. It means agreeing upon who will take on which parts and when.
This micro-liturgy begins with a call away from disorder and uncertainty. Perhaps, it begins with a reading from the Book of Common Prayer, or a favorite poem, or a calm word of encouragement. By listening, we demonstrate that we hear this call. We then move forward within our created time. We bring meanings that reassure and comfort, those things we would like to remember outside our ritual space. Micro-liturgies have a shared activity, perhaps telling stories or drawing or singing, even a small game. Whatever your intimate community finds strength and solace in doing together, add these things.
Micro-liturgies create short times of silence for whatever is needed at that time that day, mourning, rest, prayer. During this time we perhaps hear a passing siren or a nearby cough. We remember those people and events important to us. Then, we reach the part in our little liturgy when we acknowledge the end of our ritual. We acknowledge aloud our time’s end. We say what we are thankful for, what we want to remember. We say farewell. Perhaps, a sign of peace is given. We remain in each other’s hearts and minds, even if we are living in the same home.
We now reenter the time and space of our greater, chaotic world. We have not ignored, abandoned, or denied it. We have turned our focus for a short, ordered time. We have found community, strength, and hopefully peace. Perhaps, it is enough if only until the next time we gather. Ritual and liturgy can only survive if it is repeated.
For our ritual’s continuation, we must look forward - if only to the next time we gather. We must create these healthy, self-created, self-sustaining rituals and liturgies of constructive repetition so that we do not succumb to a chaotic, downward spiral of despair. We find ourselves waiting for when sickness comes into our lives and for the time afterward when we must determine how our lives must change. In this time of transition, while we wait, we can create new practices.
Though this part comes first, it is mentioned last because it is so important: to create rituals of micro-liturgies in this fraught time when we are together alone, we must prepare our meeting place. One thing we can anticipate is where our ritual will take place for us. Perhaps a kitchen table or a laptop camera, but let us make cleaning and preparing where this ritual takes place part of the ritual.
Micro-liturgies do not change the turmoil virus is wreaking on our lives or stop suffering and death. They do not halt this pandemic or cure the sick. They are not meant to. It is not part of our ritual or liturgy. Micro-liturgies are ways to intimately relate in this time of anxiety and sorrow. They are what we make them for each other and ourselves again and again and again until they have fulfilled their purpose through the end.
