[A sermon delivered to the Oxford Unitarians congregation on Sunday, 10th of October 2021]
We find ourselves in a time of festivals. Not long ago, my fiancée Zosh, an eclectic Pagan was celebrating the Autumn Equinox, quickly after that we have the festival of St Michael and All Angles – Michaelmas – the festival that gives its name to the first of the three Oxford terms. Many churches celebrate Harvest around this time. Later there will be All Souls and All Hallows.
But why mark, say, the equinox? And what does it mean to “mark” a day? I would imagine that to mark a day would be to acknowledge its significance somehow, yet the act of simply saying to oneself “I acknowledge the significance of this day” does not cut the mustard. Imagine celebrating your birthday or the birthday of someone you love just by saying “I acknowledge the significance of this day” and then moving on with the day as if it were any other – with no thought of candles or cake or even singing a single line of ‘Happy Birthday’ – most would find such a way of marking a birthday absurdly unsatisfactory.
Ancient peoples throughout Western Europe, and indeed in many other parts of the world, built grand monuments simply to assist them in marking the equinoxes and solstices of the year. Can you imagine if those ancient peoples, upon waking up on solstice morning, simply said “I acknowledge the significance of this day” and then returned to activities of ancient life as if nothing had happened (activities I like to think of as including the hunting of mammoth interspersed with mocking the inverter of the wheel by telling them that their invention will surly never catch on)? If this was the case, then we would be left with a lot of disappointed archaeologists today. I think we would also be left without a great deal of religion. Religion is not just the intellectual acknowledgement or understanding of significance but the practice of doing something about it.
As such I think there are more people who are religious then there are people who claim to be religious. Take what scholars in the Study of Religion refer to as civil religion as an example. It is quite possible that even someone who believes themselves to be an atheist and hostile to religion, believing it to all be made up nonsense, will still stand for the national anthem of their country at the beginning of a football match – despite someone having made up the ritual of standing for national anthems at football matches in order to mark their significance.
Yet I believe that, at their best, rituals should be intentional. Without intention rituals are just habit. Doing the washing up every Thursday at six o’clock while idly thinking about anything from the car your friend is considering buying to your fantasy football team selection for the coming weekend not a ritual but a habit, yet mindfully doing the washing up every Thursday at six o’clock is very much a ritual.
While rituals such as doing the washing up may seem like an excuse to mystify a down to earth activity, some ritual occasions are created to reacquaint people with the earth. This was in part what the Rev. Robert Hawker probably had in mind when he created the modern Harvest Festival service for his Cornish church in 1843. Cornwall, a county famous for its agricultural and fishing industries was, by the mid-1800s quickly becoming associated with another industry – mining. Hawker probably knew that so many of his parishioners would be living their working lives underground and that, because of this, they would be completely cut off from the seasonal cycle of the year. While the harvest service seems like an ancient and timeless institution, it is, at least in the format we know it, a distinctly modern affair.
A surprising amount of our rituals are like this. Very few have origins that are shrouded in the mists of time. On ritual that comes to mind is the Time Ceremony of Merton College. This ritual sees the students of Merton process backwards anticlockwise around the college’s fellow’s quad while wearing full academic dress for an hour on the night the clocks go back, between 2am British Summer Time and 2am Greenwich Mean Time. This ceremony is believed to keep the universe safe by stabilising the time-space continuum. A bold claim seeing as this tradition only began in 1971.
There seems to be a deep-seated human desire for ritual, so much so that, where ritual does not exist, it becomes necessary to invent it. This is what a group of Russian revolutionaries concluded in the early 1900s. Among them was Maxim Gorky, who’s literary work would become world famous. They formed a faction of the Bolshevik Party known as the ‘God-builders’ after their stance that, after the revolution, the Bolshevik Party would need to create new ritual and symbolism by placing current religious ritual and symbolism into a socialist context. This move was strongly opposed by Lenin who viewed the agenda of the God-builders as idealist.
Someone who would agree with Lenin’s materialist opposition to ritual would be our own Joseph Priestley – arguably the most famous Unitarian minister of the 1700s. Priestley was as firmer materialist as he was a Christian. For him the rational core of Christianity had been corrupted by the mainstream churches. In 1782 Priestley would write what he would later refer to as his “most valuable work”, a book that would be so influential among radicals that Thomas Jefferson would refer to it as “the basis of my own faith” – this work was entitled A History of the Corruptions of Christianity. His is writings like Lenin, Priestley does not hold back from fierce criticism of what he disapproves. Priestley especially took aim at Roman Catholicism and, using the language of his day wrote that,
Dr. Middleton, who observed the present popish worship […], mentions other points of resemblance [with Heathenism], so numerous, and so little varied, that he says he could have imagined himself present in the ancient heathen temples; and he is confident that a considerable knowledge of heathen ritual might be learned from them. Candles are continually burning in the present churches as in the former temples, incense is always smoking, many of the images are daubed with red ochre, as those of the heathen gods often were, their faces are black with the smoke of candles and incense […]
Joseph Priestley, A History of the Corruptions of Christianity (London: The British and Foreign Unitarian Association, 1871), p.120
Priestley continues,
Burning wax lights in the daytime was used in many heathen ceremonies for which they are ridiculed by [the early Christian author] Lactantius. “The Heathens,” says he, “light up candles to God, as if he lived in the dark; and do not they deserve to pass as madmen, who offer lamps to the author and giver of light?” But not long after this, these very wax lights were introduced into Christian worship.
Joseph Priestley, A History of the Corruptions of Christianity (London: The British and Foreign Unitarian Association, 1871), p.188
We can take it then that Priestley was not a fan of ritual in worship and seems to have had a particular hatred of candles. I wonder what he would think of our chalice lighting rituals that mark the start of almost every Unitarian service?
I disagree with Priestley on this somewhat. Yet I will concede one point to him – Priestley is quite right to mock us for our ritual if our religion both begins and ends with it. The good Pagans of today not only collect rowan berries and conkers at equinox but fight to save the trees that bring forth fruits and nuts the world over – not just on one day a year but for the whole of their lives.
Likewise, if the only light we offer to our community and our world is that that stems from our lonely chalice flame that we kindle but once a week, if those in our churches offer praise and thanksgiving for the food they have received at harvest time but neglect to fight for fairness for those who labour to harvest and distribute the crop – when our religion is confined to its rituals rather than spurred on by them – that is when our religion has become corrupted.
Let our ritual be our cue to worship rightly.
Amen.
