The Labyrinth, Postmodernity and Ritual
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Ritual and Change
One characteristic that I would add to the above list of characteristics of alternative worship is the strategic use of ritual itself. Most alternative worship services or events incorporate some sort of ritual or symbolic act. In Grace's booklet on getting started in worship, they describe ritual as facilitating encounter with the divine. 'Again and again we find that God meets us in ritual so we nearly always try and incorporate some sort of ritual that everybody is involved in... it opens up a window in the soul and the community through which the breeze of the Spirit can blow. It seems to draw a service together and seal what has taken place. It helps move worship from the head to the heart'.
Ritual and the Effect of Tradition
It is commonly assumed that ritual is used to maintain a rigid and dogmatic tradition. Anti-ritualists arise precisely because of this view. Douglas explores the way in which the anti-ritualists then invent their own new rituals, even if they don't recognise them as such. She suggests that in the history of revolt and anti-ritualism then giving way to a new recognition of the need to ritualise,
something is lost from the original cosmic ordering of symbols. We arise from the purging of old rituals simpler and poorer. The new sect goes back as far as the primitive church, as far as the first Pentecost, or as far as the flood, but the historical continuity is traced by a thin line. Only a narrow range of historical experience is recognised as antecedent to the present state...
There is a squeamish selection of ancestors: just as revolutionaries may evict kings and queens from the pages of history, anti-ritualists have rejected the list of saints and popes and tried to start again without any load of history.
This is a useful insight and we can see this process at work in new religious movements in history with their take on the truth which turns out to be very selective in the way Douglas describes. However this isn't the only way to understand ritual and tradition. In post modern times when so little seems fixed, and everything is in flux, tradition and continuity offer a sense of weight of history, an anchor point. The Christian tradition has 2000 years of history building on its previous 4000 years or so of history before that shared with the Jews. It's a tradition with a huge global network, diversity, examples and stories of ways in which the church has passed on the dangerous memory of Jesus, a catalogue of mistakes made and recovered from, and a wealth of spiritual resources.
But far from it being unchanging and fixed with a static set of 'cosmic symbols', it has been and is a living tradition. There are symbols (e.g. bread and wine) that have been passed down for thousands of years, but there are equally a whole range of new symbols and reinterpreted old symbols like the labyrinth. The kind of use of tradition to claim that things must remain the same is in that sense not faithful to tradition at all, it is rather a dead traditionalism. The tradition has to be struggled with and reformed to be carried forward.
To keep reforming religious tradition in a prophetic spirit is to be faithful. One of the interesting things about the reformation of the Christian tradition, is that while there are clearly limits to remaining faithful and legitimately staying within the tradition, it is from within the tradition itself that the tools and resources come to liberate from the way tradition has been used to oppress. So the injustices and inadequacies of a religious tradition are subverted paradoxically by the resources from within the tradition itself.
Alternative worship groups are traditional in precisely this sense. Unlike the anti-ritualists Douglas describes who ignore the weight of history, this is precisely where they look to find the resources to reinvigorate the tradition, to make it live within postmodern times. Beaudoin suggests that Xers 'must continually return to the resources of their inherited or freely chosen traditions, bringing them into the light of their own experiences of living in culture. They must take on their traditions, interpreting them anew for their unique culture'.
Ronald Grimes, who has pioneered Ritual Criticism, identifies three liabilities with new and invented rites:
- spiritual consumerism - the consumer consumes rite after rite without ever being satisfied
- cultural imperialism - the appropriation of sacred resources of other cultures
- experimentalism - always going for something new and lacking the courage to ever commit or make choices.
The location of alternative worship within a tradition minimises these liabilities. In this situation it is clear that not 'anything goes'. But rather than there being rigid and fixed categories of what is right however, the notion of 'faithful improvisation' is a helpful way of making sense of how the reframing of tradition will be judged to be authoritative or not.
Within tradition, the use of ritual can be 'a particularly effective means of mediating tradition and change, that is as a medium for appropriating some changes while maintaining a sense of cultural continuity'. One of the reasons for this is because ritual, even if relatively new and invented has the semblance of having been passed down from previous generations. So the appropriation of ritual by alternative worship groups is highly strategic in this sense.
An example of this is in the celebration of the Eucharist. Grace has developed several Eucharistic prayers that in the ritual are used in much the same way as one of the officially sanctioned prayers. The theological take of one is on the theme of hospitality, stressing Christ's open invitation to outsiders to share his table. If this was in a sermon, it could be thought of as someone's opinion, but in the heart of the Eucharist it seems to carry much more power and weight.
It is in fact a highly subversive text, raising questions about the church's practice of excluding certain groups of people from sharing the bread and wine. But as a ritual form, it is a very effective medium for change, whilst maintaining a sense of continuity. 'Whether it is being performed for the first time or the thousandth, the circumstance of being put in the ritual form gives something the effect of tradition'.
The strategies of the Labyrinth with regard to ritual and change weave together the threads discussed above. It is clearly a construct, an invented ritual. But it relates to a tool, a resource, an ancient spiritual practice within the Christian tradition, located in cathedrals, which has then been uniquely improvised with (hopefully in a faithful way).
Because of its appeal to the ancient tradition of labyrinth walking (explicitly stated on the users' guide), it has the semblance of being passed down from previous generations. In reality we have very little sense of whether its use in practice, the theological takes of the meditations, and the symbolism involved is anything like that employed by Christians in the medieval cathedrals!
We certainly know that the use of technology wasn't. Whilst Artress goes to great lengths to explain how the Chartres labyrinth design is an 'archetype', a divine imprint somehow etched into the fabric of creation itself which gives it its energy, this seems equally in its own way to be a construct of its time, then reinvented and given its own meaning by contemporary users.
Alternative worship lives on the margins, the threshold, of institutional religion. In this respect I suggest that its role is akin to the trickster and prophet, continually crossing boundaries and moving boundaries, disturbing notions of truth and property, and doing nothing less than opening the way to new possible worlds. It's more anti-structure than structure. Community is developed en route between its members rather than as an organised structure.
Taking the labyrinth as an example, all sorts of boundaries are crossed and property shifted. Contemporary cultural artefacts - televisions, computers, Discmans, are where they shouldn't be. What sounds at first like secular or 'new age' music is played behind meditations. All the rituals and symbolic acts are done without a priest in one of the most important cathedrals of the Church of England. In Holy Space there is bread and wine that the participant can help themselves to, while just innocently sitting there. It's not Eucharistic, or at least it hasn't been consecrated, but its symbolism is not lost on participants.
All the words, images and rituals are invented by people who are not licensed, not 'experts'. Nothing has had approval from the liturgical committees. The artists have crept back into the church. Bodies, symbols, experience, the senses are involved in worship and prayer. Everyday language and items, rather than sacred are used. Where is the boundary now between sacred and profane?
In this kind of shifting of boundaries the Labyrinth constructs a new world. But in doing so those developing it claim to be being faithful to the tradition they are located in (albeit on the margins). Whilst many in positions of power in the institution view alternative worship as dangerous and a threat, the tradition needs to create spaces for the trickster to maintain its vitality. There needs to be a dialectic between structure and anti-structure.