Rooted & Open

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Hayley and Vince tell stories about the value of being rooted in an open community and the power of rituals in everyday life. (Image from @scotthepainter)

SPEAKER NOTES

Rooted & Open, wk 1

Intro

Hayley set up:

• Today we wanted to talk more about how being “rooted and open” is joint value for us
  • we have started to use this language more frequently, maybe you’ve caught it in our welcome each week
• While openness is a more obvious value in multicultural, progressive spaces like Chicago, rootedness can feel more suspect,
  • Does being rooted automatically make you more closed off? — Ahh! Run away!
  • Of course lots of understandable reasons for this fear!
  • There are unhealthy and dangerous expressions of what gets labeled as Christian tradition or Christian values — so it’s understandable wanting some distance from harmful (and often loud) voices
• But there is great value in embracing being rooted
  • If you do feel drawn toward grounding yourself in Christianity — know that there is rich and longstanding tradition that can align with your values (and as a church, aligns with our values!)
• Rooted AND open…maybe there are ways to hold both?

This in mind, we had a discussion Sunday a couple weeks ago about our community's rich diversity in experience of Christian rituals —

• Things like funerals and baptisms and baby dedications and confirmations and weddings, or things like communion or confession or worship or prayer practices

I brought us to a ==quote== from philosopher Byung-Chul Han in his book The Disappearance of Rituals:

Rituals are to time what a home is to space: they render time habitable.

They give life structure, furnishing, hand holds. They give what we’re calling “rootedness”.

Rituals help us know what to do — ==quote off==

• in big moments, like deaths, or births, or becoming an adult rites of passage, or marriage, or a big move to a new place
• but also in everyday moments — daily stress relief, weekly reflection, regular re-connection and re-calibration

Which is why Han thinks we need to recover a sense of ritual.

• Not writing as a Christian, so he’s not fighting for a team.
• Han’s book is just observing the challenges of the achievement and performance society of our late modern era,
• held together most by a global economy (that places constant demands on us), rather than being held together by local sacred stories or ritual practices (that give life meaning and structure)
• Being held together by a global economy absolutely means we get that value of “openness” — that’s for sure — very few of us are closed off from the globalized, Internet-connected modern world
• But would we say we’re held together in harmony? Not so much.
• Paradoxically, the openness of a global economy leaves many feeling isolated
• I’m compelled by Han’s argument that that’s because we’re “without a home base” when we don’t have rootedness to sacred ritual and story (in addition to openness)
• I recently listened to an episode of the podcast Armchair Expert where they interviewed social psychologist and Harvard professor, Michael Norton
  • The focus of the episode was the power of rituals
  • And in it, he cites a super interesting study on rain rituals, rain dances that occur spontaneously across cultures and over human history
  • Brings up the question of why would all of these different groups have rain rituals if it doesn’t actually make it rain?
  • The predictor of how they emerge is living in a region that has unpredictable drought
  • It’s an “answer” to a problem with no clear solution
  • Times of drought could force people into a scarcity mindset, every person for themselves
  • Instead there’s an established ritual and practice that actually brings people together
    • Biggest thing rain rituals show us: these communities can say “we have a shared history. Generations before us have gotten through drought doing this ritual. It’s possible to stay together”
• The gift of ritual, of rootedness is that it brings us deeper into communities with shared history and an ongoing commitment of staying together

Yeah! They help us know what to do — especially in uncertainty.

For us in the modern world, the uncertainty is not weather patterns; we know how to predict those now with technology. But, despite the hubris of Silicon Valley tech bros, the extreme openness of unchecked technological advance can’t remove all uncertainty and solve all our world’s problems.

Uncertainty is unavoidably part of life.

Openness alone can’t save us from that; we need ritual and rootedness just as much as the ancients did, just for different reasons.

So today, we want to share some stories and anecdotes that dance around our hope to be rooted here at BLC.

Maybe we can do that in a way that doesn’t sacrifice openness, and leads to a better openness than the global economy’s openness.

Story 1 - H

• When I think of being rooted in ritual, the first thing that comes to mind for me is the yearly rhythm of returning to summer camp each year when I was growing up
• There was a certain “set-apart-ness” of this time
• I would go from my typical suburban life to a camp on a lake in New Hampshire
  • If you yourself did not grow up with the summer ritual of church camp: the vibe was big games of capture the flag, tie dye t-shirts and friendship bracelets, campfires and 2 worship sessions a day
  • Often viewed this as a reset, a renewal, regular rhythm that held a lot of expectation. I looked forward to it for the rest of year
• Throughout the years since my camp-going days, I’ve done the necessary work to decipher what was good and helpful about camp and what may have passed on some damaging theology and limiting practices
  • Nadia Bolz Weber says something along the lines of “ you know you’re healing when acknowledging the good doesn’t betray the bad”
• I think why a yearly week at camp was so helpful: was that it was a unique combination of silliness and levity AND processing belief and sharing the hard parts of life with a wider community
  • We don’t often have this combination
• Even though there a messy parts — beliefs I know longer subscribe to, the barriers around being there — I can still look back on this time and acknowledge its imperfect beauty and the sense of being grounded it brought to my life

Comments or Anecdotes

An idea comes to mind for me from Fr. Richard Rohr, a Franciscan Priest who is one of our more regular quotations here because he is so prolific and helpful to so many:

The first half of life is about forming a safe, solid container for a person to be poured into. The second half of life is about being poured out of that container.

Annual summer camp is part of your container. That’s rootedness being beneficial — helping form your container. Eventually life will pour us out of those containers, but we need a container to start.

If we don’t have a container to start, we have openness, and that’s great, BUT we have no rootedness, and in those cases there’s not enough solidity or structure to collect all that’s being poured into us.

• I love that visual. And truly I’m grateful for the established rootedness I’ve had since the beginning of my life, even if I’ve had to do some uprooting and re-planting
  • In many ways I think because openness is so encouraged around us, rootedness is harder to muster up on our own. We just inherently need other people and sometimes set institutions to guide the rooted part
• It also brings to mind how we can have callbacks to and echoes of collective rituals in daily life: smaller reminders of bigger practices
• Recently talking to my therapist about how moments that invoke shame can cause us to dredge up alllll the other moments we have felt shame
  • when you can’t fall asleep at night and your brain decides it’s a great time to think through all of your most awkward moments and big mistakes from the past (just me?)
• I think the opposite can happen too - we can develop more regular, maybe daily rituals that help bring to mind bigger communal practices in our life
• Or things in everyday life that just happen to offer reminders of rootedness and community
  • Even today, the smell of pine trees or the way the morning feels when it’s a bit cooler and has just rained, brings to mind the summer camp ritual
• And there still is freedom to “edit” or reimagine rituals as well — I think it’s a natural progression that doesn’t go against the idea of being rooted, it’s just a part of navigating what exactly you want to be rooted in
  • I don’t know if I would necessarily send my kids to a faith-based summer camp
  • But i do A. want them to feel connected to a community that holds levity and “seriousness”
  • B. Have a regular sense of a reset or renewal that they look forward to in the year

Yeah, absolutely. That’s the wisdom of a middle ground between

• the exhaustion of modern life with a deficit in rituals, on one hand, where you have to rely solely on your own genius to choose the right things from the modern world’s endless choices
• and on the other hand, experiences of “ugh this ritual is so rote and meaningless” or “this ritual is so harmful and gross”
• in the middle is receive AND adapt, inherit AND critique
• Jesus models this with his own Hebrew tradition
  • He says: “I did not come to abolish the Hebrew’s Law of Moses, but to fulfill it.”
  • And yet his teachings often take the form of “You have heard it said, but I say…”

Yes, critiquing and reimagining rituals and ways of thinking is part of tradition, not an interruptor to tradition

Vince, what story does this idea of being rooted and open bring to mind for you?

Story 2 - V

Mine is a sad story. A tale of two families with miscarriages in my wider circles —

• one not very rooted,
• one deeply rooted —

The rooted family had a small service for their little family with their minister, where they prayed and clung to hope, or as the Christian scriptures name it “to the resurrection of the dead”, they cried with trusted friends in their life, particularly their faith community, and have integrated the story of their lost child into the story of their family with physical reminders, like a plaque to commemorate them.

They don’t flinch or fall apart when the wound of their miscarriage is brought up today years later. It has been processed.

The unrooted family didn’t have any kind of muscle memory for or imagination of a ritual to process their grief.

They avoid remembering that season of life. They never talk about it.

When you’re not rooted into some kind of tradition to help you through life’s cycles, especially the hard ones, then “what do we do?” is overwhelming!

It should not be left to us as individual people or families to come up with our own ways to process such pain. Of course, some particularly resilient unrooted people can and do, and maybe they show us on Instagram or write a best-selling self help book, but they’re the exceptions that prove the rule. For most of us, this is exactly why we need religious rootedness in a longstanding sacred story and set of practices. Because otherwise, what do we do when we’re in such pain?

Comments or Anecdotes

• I think the ritual of marking the difficult (not just the joyous and exciting) can be a true gift of religious tradition
  • You have the company of current community
  • And you have the stories and traditions of communities that have come before you
  • Combats one of the biggest lies we can tell ourselves when we’re in a difficult season - I’m alone. I’m the only one experiencing this
• We have a lot modeled in broader culture of marking joyous, celebratory moments— birthdays and anniversaries and weddings and births ( no one really has to teach us to do this well)
• But I think we do need helpful teachers and models for marking the difficult, heavier times. Doesn’t come as naturally
  • Broader culture - when we’re held together by the global economy- tells us: you can’t slow down to process the pain
    • The average bereavement time in the US is 5 days. For an immediate family member
  • But then in some religious settings too, you have over-spiritualizing, this rush toward meaning making, God’s plan is beyond our plan. It’s hard to honor and process the pain there as well

Yes, great call. It has to be a set of traditions or rituals that we receive as mature or wise. If it’s answering questions we’re not asking, or rushing us, then that’s not any better than being unrooted.

• The podcast I mentioned earlier, Armchair Expert, had an episode on grief after their episode on ritual
  • We’re not the only ones thinking about this!
• They interviewed Cody Delistraty (writer and journalist) who wrote a book on grief practices after he lost his mom to cancer
• Something he said that I thought was really helpful was that when we talk about our grief, we give others permission to talk about their grief as well
  • We give the green light that it’s okay to talk about your pain instead of compartmentalizing what we are experiencing
  • And when communities and cultures have set practices surrounding grief, that sense of permission comes even more naturally
  • Again, helpful in building in ritual around heaviness, not just the celebratory

On the topic of our culture knowing a bit more naturally how to do celebrations, I do think it’s worth looking at the opposite side of that coin.

• To go back to Han’s idea that we are an achievement and performance society held together by a global economy
• I think this is the reason celebration comes naturally to us — celebration works in the logic of “grow, grow, grow, more, more, more, bigger, bigger, bigger”
• BUT there IS still a difference between celebration inside that kind of logic and celebration inside the logic of a sacred story or wisdom tradition.
• I think about planning weddings with couples from BLC are getting married
• I just got to officiate for a BLC couple last weekend, and their wedding was a joy, because there was a beautiful mix of inherited sacred Christian story and tradition AND individual choices to change language or forgo something traditional.
• It was rooted AND open.
• But without rootedness to a sacred story, celebrations like a wedding can so easily be absorbed into the logic of “bigger, better, more”
• And I think that’s how we get that unfortunately paradigmatic picture in our culture of weddings being insanely stressful, insanely expensive, where you HAVE to achieve and perform YOUR unique wedding, where the worst thing in the world would be for it to conform to a cookie cutter — which leads to more conflict and tension and burnout than it does to meaningful celebration.

Yeah, the performance aspect can definitely seep into ritual celebrations like weddings

• We were actually just at 2 weddings these past 2 weeks
• And they were beautifully unique!
  • The first wedding, the couple really wanted an outdoor ceremony in this one particular spot. And the weather did not cooperate. But they decided to still have the ceremony outdoors- so we sat under umbrellas in the steady rain and celebrated with them
    • Now on rainy days this couple has a reminder of their wedding. Or looking at pictures- all their guests with umbrellas cheering them on, they can say “remember when…”
  • The second wedding, the ceremony was on a boat. We set sail on a replica schooner in Salem MA and even set off a little canon after they had been declared husband and wife
    • Now seeing this boat or boats like it gets to be a reminder of the bigger ritual of their wedding
  • Both weddings had a feel of being surrounded by and rooted in family, family that was committed to sitting in the rain and boarding a boat
• Slowing down to pause and say “remember when…”, to hold onto daily reminders of rituals helps to stay in a place of valuing connection over achievement
• And recognizing the biggest value of celebrations that mark big life changes (like weddings or graduations or births) is acknowledging the embeddedness within community
  • Embeddedness that shows up in the good times and is an essential gift in the more difficult times

Ending → Prayer

One last anecdote:

I remember a conversation about baby dedications (a ritual we practice here) with a young family in our church that had understandable hesitancy about engaging in the ritual.

• There was a simultaneous draw and repulsion.
  • Because they felt safe in our community and wanted to welcome their children into that kind of belonging,
  • BUT they also had so much familiarity with Christian rituals that were so closed-minded they weren’t sure whether or not they identified as Christian enough to partake in such a ritual with integrity — their fear was like: “are we being disingenuous?”.
  • So reflective. I loved that they wanted to take that seriously.

People who value openness and have seen rootedness lead to being closed off still often want the Spiritual — we want God and communal bonds — but we’re wary of institutionalized religion.

I totally vibe with that in a lot of ways.

But what if, because we’re human beings not disembodied spirits, it just can’t ever be as clean as “unfiltered access to God”?

• We are people who are born somewhere, into something.
• We can’t come from nowhere.
• We have to have a home base, a container, to healthily mature.

What this couple and I dreamed about together in that conversation was: what if being rooted doesn’t automatically mean sacrificing openness?

• What if we can humbly and maturely receive what is good from the cultures and religious traditions that form our containers, AND critique the exclusion and tribalism that needs to be critiqued from them?
• So we can pass on our cultures and religious traditions more open than we received them.
• AND none of us feel homeless.
• Again, Jesus is a model, as this is what he is doing with his own Hebrew tradition in the Gospels.

If you are coming from a non-dominant culture, you likely see the necessity of this kind of call more readily, because you are practiced in balancing home culture with broader culture.

• I encourage you to see this as a spiritual call as well!

But to my fellow white people, multiple generations removed from our ancestors’ ethnic roots, it’s harder for us to see this. It’s easier for us to be swept up in “openness alone will save us” ideas.

• My encouragement to us is: don’t be afraid to get rooted. You need what rootedness can offer you.

This can be as simple as making Sunday service a priority in your calendar, especially if you’re a family. But NOT because you’re going to hell if you don’t, or your kids are going to hell if you don’t. BECAUSE you as a human being need some rootedness to sacred story and belonging in your life. Jesus said “come to me all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest”. I cannot think of a more applicable promise for exhausting modern city life.

Let me pray…