Disrupting ritual

May 18, 2018 4:04 PM

The Ritual Design Lab is working to generate new rituals for modern life, with an eye to user experience.
posted by clawsoon (13 comments total)

This is a fascinating idea, and I see the value in it. It sounds easy to make a ritual for yourself, but I think being told what to do can be a vitally important and underrated part of a ritual. Even traditions, a form of ritual themselves, tend to form organically rather than be established with personal intent.

That said, I grew up in a religious household and I would rather see current religious institutions seek to accommodate the needs illustrated in this article. That's surely just my personal preference, but I see my kids growing up in our secular home and I see them missing out on the experiences and rituals I participated in at their age. This has given me a lot to think about, since there was as much, if not more, bad that came with the good of my religious upbringing. I guess I'll start thinking about rituals.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 5:32 PM on May 18, 2018 [4 favorites]

Also that article introduced me to the idea of "Mipsters" which is something I am deeply ambivalent about.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 5:36 PM on May 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

How can I transfer my own sins onto a live chicken?

$20, same as in town, and the chicken needs to agree.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:44 PM on May 18, 2018 [11 favorites]

Also, “spiritual entrepreneurs” makes my skin crawl.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:46 PM on May 18, 2018 [11 favorites]

... nope nope nope.

Speaking on a practical level: rituals are great and all, but in my experience people seek out religion and religious-adjacent experiences for the support and validation of a larger community who share their values and can do this sort of thing *together*. I just don't see solitary, custom rituals ever gaining any real traction over big group stuff.

Even if it had legs, I'm almost with Steinlauf:

To the rabbi, there’s an even graver risk that comes with separating ritual from religion. “When it’s ensconced in religious life,” he said, “ritual doesn’t just serve to validate your experience or to help you through a difficult moment.” It also situates your experience within a larger framework of moral imperatives, and makes demands of you, including that you be of service to others. “Someone may say, ‘I’m just helping somebody who had a bad day at work to process and move on.’ Well, okay, that could be effective—but to what extent are you actually helping the ultimate job of all ritual life, which is to give you the message that it’s not all about you? Rituals that are designed as one-offs for individuals are divorced from that—and that’s very dangerous.”

The place I differ from the rabbi is this: a lot of religion is selfish, personal and commodified too. That has a long history in the US, and I think it's gone quite poorly for everybody but the grifters at the top.

So even if this could really be a thing, I'd be wary of it for roughly the reasons outlined above.
posted by mordax at 7:21 PM on May 18, 2018 [5 favorites]

I'll just link my comment from yesterday in a different thread.
posted by hippybear at 8:14 PM on May 18, 2018 [4 favorites]

Life imitating Portlandia: “One should never outsource one’s role as a ritual artisan. That is giving away one’s power,” said Jeltje Gordon-Lennox, a psychotherapist and ritual designer in Geneva, Switzerland.
posted by bokinney at 8:23 PM on May 18, 2018 [2 favorites]

Yeah, I'm not much of one for outsourcing. I'm reminded of the story of a fad meditation practice from the sixties, in which you were given your own customized mantra and told never to disclose it to anyone else ever; when people inevitably did, they discovered that there were only about five. I'm of the mind that personal rituals have to be created by the self and that trusting that something that has meaning to you has meaning, period, is maybe the one essential ingredient.
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:08 PM on May 18, 2018

Religion co-opted ritual way back when. All humans are ritualistic about most things; they just don't realize it. We develop and deploy habits without even thinking about it. Being made to think about them and consciously choose them can be very empowering and often liberates one from inefficient or unhealthy rituals. Plus it has the added benefit of encourging people to see meaning as a thing they make and add to experiences rather than as something that preexists in the experience itself. Things mean nothing on their own, which means we get to make them mean what we need them to mean.
posted by eustacescrubb at 3:09 AM on May 19, 2018 [2 favorites]

As an atheist who is strongly drawn to the structure, ritual, and community of religion, I've found that Unitarian Universalism strikes a good balance between dictating shared rituals and encouraging each congregant to find their own ways of creating meaning.

The Silicon Valley entrepreneurial vibe of the Ritual Design Lab is a little off-putting IMO, but the underlying practice seems both fun and valuable. I'd love to try something similar with a group of ritualistically inclined UUs.
posted by Kilter at 6:06 AM on May 19, 2018 [1 favorite]

The rituals that I see a lot are to harm. Placement of objects to project hate. Rocks, glass, canine tooth shaped is better. (The poet said he never met a truly evil person. That has not been my experience.)
posted by JohnR at 7:48 AM on May 19, 2018

"...spiritual entrepreneurs Columbia Business School....." This feels like something I read a while ago that was along the lines of advice to youngsters on how to be little entrepreneurs, it had lots of suggestions that seemed to be based on charging for things that I think should be given freely. Like helping old people carry their things in from their car, "Ill do that for 5 dollars Mrs. Congonowitz!!!"
posted by Pembquist at 10:03 AM on May 19, 2018 [3 favorites]

I mean, we probably need a lot of new rituals if we are going to survive long-term on this rock in space. Which should we adopt?
posted by anthill at 11:47 AM on May 20, 2018