On Routines & Rituals

Earlier this summer I asked what day it was and a friend replied, “It’s Blursday.”

For months now, we have been without our typical routines. We have had to cancel annual Memorial Day Weekend trips and Fourth of July celebrations, and had Vacation Bible School and summer camp on-line. Normally, these events help us give our lives balance -- we only have to do X until Y comes, and then we only have to do Y until Z comes, and then after Z...it will be CHRISTMAS!!! We can handle what we've been given more easily if its broken down into manageable segments. We feel more in control and we feel safe.

Likewise, the monotony of routine tasks and responsibilities without rites of passage that allow us to "level-up" or to help us transition from one phase to another or without feasts to celebrate goals we have been working towards, we lose our sense of purpose. What are we doing? Where are we going? Our beloved rituals help us process big feelings and make meaning of our lives. The lack of balance and the loss of our purpose has left many of us reaching for anything we can hold on to in order to make the world stop spinning.

And even though school is beginning again, and it might feel like that is the thing to which we can hold, we are still living in the midst of a pandemic. Our schedules, and big things we are looking forward to, might yet still be interrupted. We can choose to continue to drift along, or we can seek to create routines and rituals that help us digest our current situations and help us bring meaning to the lives we are living.

The Power of Christian Formation at Home

Melissa Rau, Director for Partnership and New Initiatives at the Episcopal Church Foundation and liaison to FORMA, has described the formation that happens at church as 'dessert' and the formation that happens at home and in our everyday lives as our 'meat and potatoes.'

For the individuals or households that attend every weekly offering provided by their local congregation, they might receive between 1-3 hours of instruction, influence, experience, and relationship. Subtracting time spent at school, that leaves about an average of 125 hours a week spent at home or with family. Research has shown that the influence of mentors and teachers not related to a young person are invaluable -- we all know another adult can tell your child something you've been saying for years and it's suddenly like they're hearing it for the first time! Research, though, has also shown that if values and habits are not modeled and reinforced at home, they are less likely to stick long-term.

It's not a volley between home and church and whose responsibility it is to be in charge of a young person's formation as a Christian. It's also not a competition between home and church about which is better equipped to to facilitate that formation. When a young person is baptized, we all make promises to support them in their life in Christ. It takes both!

For years we have been mostly eating dessert and are now finding ourselves malnourished. It has been time, and now might be the perfect time, to re-vision what hearty, nourishing formation as Christians looks like in our lives and communities of faith. This offering hopes to help households create a daily routine of self-reflection and prayer and/or weekly rituals of story sharing centered around a meal, with a variety of ways to further explore the story, in addition to a challenge to be changed or change something in the world around them as a result of how God speaks to them through each story.

On Multi-Generational or Cyclical Learning...

In the Episcopal Church, we value life-long formation. It is like the Mustard Seed. When I was 4, I heard the story of Noah's Ark and loved to sing the Noah's Ark-ee song and do the motions of the rain pouring for forty-daysies daysies. The story was like a tiny mustard seed planted in my heart. When I was 14, I heard the story again as a VBS helper and felt a little uncomfortable about all of the destruction, but understood that God was washing away all of the bad things we had done in order to bring new life. The story had grown a trunk from my heart to my head, perhaps the size of a large bush, as I wondered about some hard things. When I was 24 and was preparing for the first year of EfM, not only did I read the story again, but I read the chapters that followed and learned for the first time what happened after Noah and his family left the Ark. The story had now grown branches throughout my head and into a large tree and left me wondering and wrestling with our continued brokenness as humans even in the wake of something as powerful as a flood. As my body and mind grew and developed, so did my capacity for understanding what God was teaching me through these stories. We continue to learn the same stories over and over throughout our lives--repeating them every three years-- and each time we receive them with a newness revealed because we are not the same people we were when we first heard the story. Likewise, as you read and explore these sacred stories with members of your household who are younger or older than you, the experience to learn not only from where you are on your journey, but also from where they are on their journey, enriches us and strengthens our relationships with one another.

Sources

To Dance With God by Gertrud Mueller Nelson

Bless This Mess: A Modern Guide to Faith and Parenting in a Chaotic World by the Rev. Molly Baskette and Ellen O'Donnell, PhD