Rituals “help you live”. Louis-Vincent Thomas, French anthropologist and sociologist, known in particular for having grouped under the term “thanatology”, all the disciplinary knowledge which is devoted to the study of the links between humans and death, put it this way. Faced with finitude, in fact, as the pandemic has clearly shown us, rituals allow us to elaborate absence; that of the other, but that of meaning, too, which seems to us to flee in all directions in times of crisis.
Faced with the absurdity of existence, they replant us directly at the heart of this irrationality necessary to our lives, providing us with the materials of significance which put our bodies back in motion, in gestures which are beyond us, but which we make all the same, because it is necessary; hold a lit candle in front of a coffin, read a farewell text without your voice breaking before the end, offer and receive condolences, eat “sandwiches without crusts” in the basement of the church among people who We haven’t seen him for many moons throw a handful of earth or even kiss a photo placed on an urn with his finger, before closing the little glass door that will imprison him for eternity.
It is one of the strengths of ritual to place ourselves in the living, to take this further step in a direction that still eludes us, as if we were throwing ahead the foundation stone that we will need to continue to live.
Faced with these effects observed on us, a whole professional discourse hastened to recover the thing, encouraging everyone to “practice the ritual”, as if, in a natural way, we were not inclined to it. In certain magazines dedicated to the good of children, for example, we even offer banks of rituals to do with them, as if we were giving a cake recipe, arguing that the ritual helps to structure the child’s world and make it secure. , Above all.
In doing so, we unfortunately too often shed this layer which gives us something to think and breathe – that of the intimate impulse, which requires no advice – and sometimes create this slippage between “ritual” and “routine”. Daring to tell a parent that routine does not take precedence over the feeling of being in an authentic connection with your parent, even if the latter is sometimes more chaotic, is to risk being reassured by a speech that seems close to the dogma.
If rituals help us to live, they have also today become disconnected from the great collective myths which previously surrounded their deployment. Postmodernity advances on the century by secularizing it, first in its political structures, but also in its private lives. But fragments remain, like luminous remains scattered in as many configurations as there are people, groups and stories, acting as attempts to say together something that holds together and which also holds for us, by the fact even. Among them there is giving, charity, remembering that others exist and that they deserve this thing that seems to evaporate from so many of our sidewalks, our subway halls and other corridors of all our big cities: dignity.
As the Holidays approach, there will therefore be, on the one hand, these families who, in a certain opulence, will perhaps face routines, from which we will have removed the “thickness”, the third dimension which binds at the same time a certain truth of affects, a particular presence to oneself, to the other and to “greater than oneself”. There may be hastily unwrapped presents, looks of disappointment on the faces of children who have not received exactly what they “ordered” from Santa Claus, a Christmas “performance”, for the photos, for the networks, to move on. The routines will be respected to the rule, but the ritual may have been lost along the way.
On the other side, there will also be those families where the depth will not be there, but because the lack of everything will have come to dictate the moment, swallow up hope and widen even more these unacceptable gaps between ” those who have” and all the others. As in the old Christmas stories, I would like to believe, to maintain something of a naivety that I refuse to lose, the poorest could be the richest, depending on what we mean by the word “wealth”. I would like to believe that the capacity to reinject meaning into our lives is the only dimension of our postmodern existences which does not follow the curve of socio-economic factors and even that it could be reversed, here.
Between these two extremes, there will be, I also know, magnificent rituals, which will unite families in rare moments when it is the invisible which will be materialized in gestures. The grandfather may be asked to offer his paternal blessing, which will place a usually silent, even withdrawn, patriarch in a position where he will try not to cry while expressing his love for all his children.
Perhaps we will all go outside at midnight on December 25 to look at the sky while drinking mulled wine for the health of everything beyond us. For others, it will be the opportunity to spend 24 hours without a screen, which will constitute, in itself, a ritual, for its originality in space and time.
Yes, rituals help us to live, but they have no meaning, it seems to me, without connection with our community. So, if the opulence of the hardware is lucky enough to have fallen upon us, I wish us to escape from our contemporary routine rigidities, to add to the last games console ordered on Amazon a few dollars or a few hours devoted to meeting the the other who stands right next to us and whom we no longer see.
To start somewhere, contact your local voluntary action centers, or consult government sites dedicated to the fight against poverty and social exclusion, you will find there more than ready-made recipes, and probably a good chance of living the ritual of giving in a way that will enrich everyone.
I will see you again after the holidays, with this inestimable joy of writing and reading you.