Ritual or Relationship?

We can (and should) have both

I recently drove past a Protestant church in my town that featured a sign advertising the upcoming Sunday sermon topic. The sign said, “Ritual or Relationship: What do you have with God?”

As a former Protestant, I understand where this is coming from: rituals can be empty, rote, and fail to change our hearts. It’s possible to have a religion of rituals but have no meaningful relationship with God.

But as a Catholic convert, I see that ritual and relationship are not mutually exclusive. In fact, ritual is often a necessary means by which we establish, express, and deepen our relationships with others, including God.

Within my family, we observe all sorts of rituals. These rituals are not substitutes for real intimacy with my wife and children, but rather ways in which we show our love for each other and draw closer together.

Some of our rituals aren’t explicitly religious in nature. The things I say to my children when I wake them up every morning, the way we prepare meals and eat together, the traditions we observe around birthdays, even the places we go on vacation, all have a kind of ritualized routine built into them. Do we not have a relationship with each other because I have a certain set of phrases or terms of endearment I use when I wake each child up in the morning? Of course not. These little rituals are the way we realize and live out our love for each other.

On the other hand, some of our family rituals are overtly religious, because as a family we understand that our primary responsibility to one another is to help each other live a life of holiness and get to heaven. So, we attend Sunday Mass and other liturgies together as a family. We pray before our meals. We observe various holidays in the Church calendar. And each night my children come to me for a prayer and blessing before they go to bed.

Do any of these rituals get in the way of our relationship with God? On the contrary, they are the principle means by which we learn, live out, and grow ever deeper in our walk with the Lord.

For Catholics, our liturgical life is an earthly participation in the worship that is taking place in heaven by the angels and saints around the throne of God (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1139). We are invited to participate in that worship through the various sacraments of the Church, especially the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, which the Vatican II document Lumen Gentium called “the source and summit of Christian life.” According to St. John Chrysostom, “When Mass is being celebrated, the sanctuary is filled with countless angels who adore the Divine Victim immolated on the altar.”

As the Catechism puts it in paragraph 1146, “In human life, signs and symbols occupy an important place. As a being at once body and spirit, man expresses and perceives spiritual realities through physical signs and symbols. As a social being, man needs signs and symbols to communicate with others, through language, gestures, and actions. The same holds true for his relationship with God.”

God uses the visible creation to speak to us, save us, and sanctify us, and therefore we are privileged to use elements of the visible creation – signs and symbols, bread and wine, water and oil, fire and incense, bells and chants and more, in ritual ways to participate in and respond to God’s grace.

The rote features of liturgy are actually one of its benefits, because these routine elements give us a way to pray and celebrate our communion with God and each other even when our hearts aren’t feeling especially motivated to do so, or we personally lack the words for expressing our feelings or desires. We can lean on the routine of ritual to stay in and deepen our relationships. The liturgy actually forms us. It shapes our attitudes and beliefs into paths of deeper holiness. In the same way, the rituals that my family observes are meant to form my children – and my wife and I – into people of faith and virtue, even on the days one or more of us aren’t feeling especially faithful or virtuous.

So let’s put aside the notion that we must choose between ritual and relationship, whether with God or other people. God gives us the gift of ritual forms to win our hearts and draw us to Him. Let’s not reject that gift.

Image: Mass of St. Gregory the Great, Adriaen Ysenbrandt, (1510-1550), public domain