Ceremony and the 21st Century
Now is the time to know
That all you do is sacred.
Hafiz
Making Ceremony is a way of reminding ourselves that in fact all that we do is sacred. It is also a way of intensifying an experience that we want to mark. Last year we in Britain struggled with the horror that was the Foot and Mouth epidemic. I felt very concerned and also powerless in face of it. I decided to do the one thing that I was good at: construct and enact a public ceremony of grieving for the animals being sacrificed. Good Friday seemed an auspicious day, so that was the day we chose and the ceremony came together something like this.
Four drummers gently drummed the heartbeat and so held and built the space. At first they stood close to two women who knelt on the pavement, drawing cloven hoofed animals with their chalks while a third enclosed the drawings with a quotation from Chief Seathl. As people started to gather, the drummers moved out, enlarging the sacred space. As the sun set we started. We told of the plight of the animals and of the importance of grief. Grief is like the salt of life – it gives it vibrancy and meaning and by contrast serves to heighten our joy. As people lit candles, they spoke their own prayers or told their own experiences. Tears were added to a flower-filled chalice of spring water, which was later emptied into the river so that the river could take our tears to the sea and the sea could carry them around the globe and all the earth should know of our grief. We read an amended extract from one of Lorka’s poems. We sang Geronimo’s chant, a lament, and then we prayed for inspiration. As the prayer finished, the great West doors of Bath Abbey opened and light flooded out onto our group. A crowd of people poured out and swelled our ranks. For a short while, Christians and their traditional enemies – the earth spirituality peoples - joined together. So the ceremony closed and as we left, we looked back at a simple circle of candles illuminating the drawing and the words: our testament to our relations that we remembered them and we mourned their passing.
What was perhaps most surprising was the reactions of people whom I hardly knew – tradespeople I met like the papershop man, the garageman, everybody in my part of town – expressed gratitude for what we had done. And the farmers who came had a space to weep and for their tears to be honoured.
It is always harder to judge what effect your ceremony has had on a deeper level. However, it is through our myths and stories that the future is built. Our memories shape our dreams for the future. So every time that we do a good ceremony, make a powerful drama expressing ritually and symbolically how things might be at their most beautiful, we fill our memory with that experience and that will affect our future actions. If we believe in the concept of collective consciousness, that as humans we tune into a pool of all human ideas, dreams and activity, then we understand that we are feeding dreams and experiences of beauty and harmony into the general pool for all to be touched by.
Making ceremony, we attempt to move out of ordinary time and space. The simplest way to do this was taught to me many years ago by Arnold Keyserling, then President of the European Association of Humanistic Psychology and, at the same time, apprenticed to Hyemeyohsts Storm. He suggested that we set aside a particular time of day perhaps for as little as ten minutes or so. The important thing was that it should always be the same time. During that period, we laid out a small cloth, something as insignificant as a handkerchief, and sat quietly with the same intention every day. In this very small way, we start to create ceremonial space for ourselves. A place and a time outside the normal run of our lives where we invite the unexpected and the other to enter.
But is ceremony really relevant in a world not of feathers, smudge or tipi but of Garnier, Nike and Renault Clio? Where the wildness of the ocean sells Guinness and the great Quetzal is transmuted into a road marking.
Most of us live in urban settings and have lost touch with much of our traditional mythology and ritual. In losing touch with these ancient circles of mystery, which were once the gateways to uncommon dimensions of reality, we have lost touch with the wilderness of our own souls.
Perhaps it is precisely because we are so barraged by advertising hype, political spin and journalistic licence that we need now more than ever the anchors that remind us of the realities of our lives. Getting lost in a delusional, fragmented post-modern world of virtual reality, we become addicted to adrenalin, throw ourselves out of balance and then are terrified to discover that one in three of us will contract cancer and need psychiatric help during our lifetimes.
We can create our own ceremonies or we can learn from ancient traditions – Ceremony, and particularly the ceremonies that are rooted in an earth-based spiritual tradition, help us regain our balance, our sense of purpose, and a deep feeling of belonging in the natural world that brings with it a strong sense of joy.
Ceremony is the basis for all shamanic and spiritual work. It is through ceremony that we communicate with the Divine, with the Goddess, with Great Spirit. It is ceremony that creates the space for shamanic healing, for rites of passage, for us to quest our true purpose in life; and it offers a strong base on which to build community.
such as those of the Native Americans – where ceremony and ritual have been honed over generations. As an Elder said to me once when about to start a sweatlodge –“I am just the water pourer. It is the ceremony itself that holds the mystery and the healing.”
And that is the point. Ceremonies can be held at many levels and for many purposes. The most potent of these aim to open a connection with the divine source, with the creative energy behind all form. The hope is to ask for mediation, to attempt a change for the better that is begun on the inner subtle levels and whose effects are then experienced in the mundane. Thus in a Navajo healing, sand paintings will be made and chants will be sung to anchor the patient firmly back into a place of balance in a world that includes their relations, their landscape and the spirits that watch over all of these. If it is successful, this will imprint itself into the being of the patient who will be able to hold the experience of being well and held safe in his universe; and his symptoms will disappear.
Ceremony reminds us that the line between our everyday world and the divine is fine and easily crossed. Nowhere is this better taught than in the Native American Medicine Wheel teachings.
As Beautiful Painted Arrow says, behind all form is the light-filled void; behind every chant and drumbeat is the silence. But all of life is not dismissed as an illusion. Here is a tradition that brings spiritual teachings down from the sky and imbues every animate and inanimate object with life. Spirit dwell within the whole of creation. The mundane world is a manifestation of the divine.
That all you do is sacred.
Hafiz
Making Ceremony is a way of reminding ourselves that in fact all that we do is sacred. It is also a way of intensifying an experience that we want to mark. Last year we in Britain struggled with the horror that was the Foot and Mouth epidemic. I felt very concerned and also powerless in face of it. I decided to do the one thing that I was good at: construct and enact a public ceremony of grieving for the animals being sacrificed. Good Friday seemed an auspicious day, so that was the day we chose and the ceremony came together something like this.
Four drummers gently drummed the heartbeat and so held and built the space. At first they stood close to two women who knelt on the pavement, drawing cloven hoofed animals with their chalks while a third enclosed the drawings with a quotation from Chief Seathl. As people started to gather, the drummers moved out, enlarging the sacred space. As the sun set we started. We told of the plight of the animals and of the importance of grief. Grief is like the salt of life – it gives it vibrancy and meaning and by contrast serves to heighten our joy. As people lit candles, they spoke their own prayers or told their own experiences. Tears were added to a flower-filled chalice of spring water, which was later emptied into the river so that the river could take our tears to the sea and the sea could carry them around the globe and all the earth should know of our grief. We read an amended extract from one of Lorka’s poems. We sang Geronimo’s chant, a lament, and then we prayed for inspiration. As the prayer finished, the great West doors of Bath Abbey opened and light flooded out onto our group. A crowd of people poured out and swelled our ranks. For a short while, Christians and their traditional enemies – the earth spirituality peoples - joined together. So the ceremony closed and as we left, we looked back at a simple circle of candles illuminating the drawing and the words: our testament to our relations that we remembered them and we mourned their passing.
What was perhaps most surprising was the reactions of people whom I hardly knew – tradespeople I met like the papershop man, the garageman, everybody in my part of town – expressed gratitude for what we had done. And the farmers who came had a space to weep and for their tears to be honoured.
It is always harder to judge what effect your ceremony has had on a deeper level. However, it is through our myths and stories that the future is built. Our memories shape our dreams for the future. So every time that we do a good ceremony, make a powerful drama expressing ritually and symbolically how things might be at their most beautiful, we fill our memory with that experience and that will affect our future actions. If we believe in the concept of collective consciousness, that as humans we tune into a pool of all human ideas, dreams and activity, then we understand that we are feeding dreams and experiences of beauty and harmony into the general pool for all to be touched by.
Making ceremony, we attempt to move out of ordinary time and space. The simplest way to do this was taught to me many years ago by Arnold Keyserling, then President of the European Association of Humanistic Psychology and, at the same time, apprenticed to Hyemeyohsts Storm. He suggested that we set aside a particular time of day perhaps for as little as ten minutes or so. The important thing was that it should always be the same time. During that period, we laid out a small cloth, something as insignificant as a handkerchief, and sat quietly with the same intention every day. In this very small way, we start to create ceremonial space for ourselves. A place and a time outside the normal run of our lives where we invite the unexpected and the other to enter.
But is ceremony really relevant in a world not of feathers, smudge or tipi but of Garnier, Nike and Renault Clio? Where the wildness of the ocean sells Guinness and the great Quetzal is transmuted into a road marking.
Most of us live in urban settings and have lost touch with much of our traditional mythology and ritual. In losing touch with these ancient circles of mystery, which were once the gateways to uncommon dimensions of reality, we have lost touch with the wilderness of our own souls.
Perhaps it is precisely because we are so barraged by advertising hype, political spin and journalistic licence that we need now more than ever the anchors that remind us of the realities of our lives. Getting lost in a delusional, fragmented post-modern world of virtual reality, we become addicted to adrenalin, throw ourselves out of balance and then are terrified to discover that one in three of us will contract cancer and need psychiatric help during our lifetimes.
We can create our own ceremonies or we can learn from ancient traditions – Ceremony, and particularly the ceremonies that are rooted in an earth-based spiritual tradition, help us regain our balance, our sense of purpose, and a deep feeling of belonging in the natural world that brings with it a strong sense of joy.
Ceremony is the basis for all shamanic and spiritual work. It is through ceremony that we communicate with the Divine, with the Goddess, with Great Spirit. It is ceremony that creates the space for shamanic healing, for rites of passage, for us to quest our true purpose in life; and it offers a strong base on which to build community.
such as those of the Native Americans – where ceremony and ritual have been honed over generations. As an Elder said to me once when about to start a sweatlodge –“I am just the water pourer. It is the ceremony itself that holds the mystery and the healing.”
And that is the point. Ceremonies can be held at many levels and for many purposes. The most potent of these aim to open a connection with the divine source, with the creative energy behind all form. The hope is to ask for mediation, to attempt a change for the better that is begun on the inner subtle levels and whose effects are then experienced in the mundane. Thus in a Navajo healing, sand paintings will be made and chants will be sung to anchor the patient firmly back into a place of balance in a world that includes their relations, their landscape and the spirits that watch over all of these. If it is successful, this will imprint itself into the being of the patient who will be able to hold the experience of being well and held safe in his universe; and his symptoms will disappear.
Ceremony reminds us that the line between our everyday world and the divine is fine and easily crossed. Nowhere is this better taught than in the Native American Medicine Wheel teachings.
As Beautiful Painted Arrow says, behind all form is the light-filled void; behind every chant and drumbeat is the silence. But all of life is not dismissed as an illusion. Here is a tradition that brings spiritual teachings down from the sky and imbues every animate and inanimate object with life. Spirit dwell within the whole of creation. The mundane world is a manifestation of the divine.
