Ritual

When I was growing up, a family ritual at the breakfast table involved passing around a plastic loaf of bread with a hundred or more strips of cardboard stuck into the rectangular opening along the top, each three-inch strip a pale green or pink or some other color. I don’t recall how we knew which was the front and which was the back, but we would draw a strip from the front, read out loud the Bible verse on one side and a thought for the day on the other, and then we’d stick it into the back.

The poem, Mindful, by Mary Oliver on Elise’s poetry Friday blogpost brought this all back to me. I didn’t read the poem out loud, and I was alone in front of my computer screen, but I thought to myself, what if I started my morning with a thought like this every morning? Would it make a difference?

I remember the plastic loaf, the colored strips of cardboard. Did I absorb what was read? Did those words change my life?

Ritual is an act of faith. For any number of reasons you can decide to do something, to repeat doing something. When words like ritual and faith are used, our minds tend to be diverted to churchy things, ultimate things, but I am only really talking of ritual as a simple process in which we might consider consciously trying to implant some thoughts into our minds by repeating some actions and words with a little intent. Faith, in this case, only means we don’t know what will come of our actions.

In Oliver’s poem, she writes of seeing the things that ‘instruct her over and over in joy.’ Of course, that takes some paying attention. What could I do to remember to pay closer attention each day to the things that bring me joy?

It seems somewhat impractical to collect bits of writing, store them in some sort of box, and pick one out each morning and read it out loud. But with our family ritual, we never poured milk onto our cereal until we were finished reading so sogginess wasn’t an issue. It didn’t take much more time than teeth brushing. But did it do us any good? Or perhaps if you don’t pay some attention to more than the plastic and the cardboard, the ritual itself is as empty as many of the other things we do in our lives. But at least I learned something about what a ritual is. Choosing what to focus some attention on and what the impact will be remain open questions.

Still, I’m trying to pay more attention to things that bear repeating. I intend more often to try to recognize what satisfies my soul – to attend.

But forget my words for a time, here’s Mary Oliver’s:

Mindful

Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in a haystack
of light.
It is what I was born for--
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world--
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation,
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant--
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these--
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean's shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

--Mary Oliver