Why We Need Ritual

‘WHERE two or three gather in my name, I am there among them.’ Matt 18.20 We come together in prayer, conscious of Christ’s promise that whenever a group of people gather in prayer, he will be there with us.
The early Church took that promise literally. After his Ascension, they followed Christ’s invitation to gather in his name. They would come together around the word and the breaking of the bread, and there let Christ make his presence felt, and effect through them what they could not otherwise do.
As Christians today, we still need to take that same promise literally. Christian life is not sustained only by private acts of prayer, justice, and virtue. It is sustained in a community, by gathering around the word of God and through the breaking of bread. This kind of gathering is not simply a social one, capable only of doing what social gatherings can do.
To gather around the word of God and the breaking of bread is a ritual gathering and ritual brings something that normal social gathering does not: namely, transforming power.
Ritual is something that, for the most part, we find difficult to understand. Former cultures used ritual a lot more than we do. We tend today to be ritually tone-deaf, in that we distrust everything that we cannot rationally explain. For many today, all ritual is suspect and smacks of superstition.
How does ritual work? We do not know; but that’s the point. We cannot give ritual a rational explanation. It just works! Ritual works in the way a kiss, the most primal of rituals, works. Kisses do things that words do not. Something real happens in ritual, that carries a power beyond what we can rationally explain. Rituals can help bring about group unity and healing
Our ordinary church gatherings, and our times of prayer as a couple or within a family are meant to be this type of ritual

gathering,.. When we gather communally in
prayer, we need not look for novelty, excitement, brilliance, or family therapy. The words that we do use (a scriptural text, a psalm, the Lord’s Prayer, formula prayers out of a prayer book, or a hymn) are intended to create between us a kind of silence within which something happens between God and ourselves and among ourselves that novelty, excitement and brilliance are unable to achieve.
When we gather ritually around the word of God and the breaking of bread which Christ left us, we are coming together not to have a community meeting, or to discuss our emotions and problems, or to rally our faltering faith in a pagan world. We gather to worship God communally, and to let God do in us what we cannot do within ourselves, namely, deepen our faith and shape us into a community beyond our conflicting emotional pulls and personal limitations.
Christianity has sustained itself for two millennia through ritual gathering around the word of God and the breaking of bread – like a marriage or a family that keeps itself from falling apart by trying to all be home at regular times, and have at least one meal a day together, even if it is not exciting, even if no real feelings get discussed, even if everyone is bored, and even if half the family thinks it’s not worthwhile.
We do this because if we don’t, we will eventually fall apart as a family. As a human family needs to sustain itself by repetitive, predictable, unexciting rituals, so too does the Christian family.
Without ritual gathering we will, like any family, soon fall apart. To sustain faith, there can be no better advice than that of Christ himself: ‘Gather around the word of God and break bread together.’ Matt 26.26
We do not have to fully understand what we are doing and we do not have to be brilliant, imaginative, or stimulating. We just have to gather in Christ’s name around the simple rituals he gave us. He promised to do the rest.
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