Spiritually Sterile

On Reclaiming our Spiritual Selves

We’ve all heard of a marriage “ceremony,” though I’d venture none of us have heard of a divorce “ceremony,” much less participated in one.

I’ve been pondering this since the Eclipse, and while the Eclipse on April 8th, 2024, shook me deeply, it’s not in the way you might expect. One might think a “psychic medium” would talk about the “energies” of the event, how the frequencies of this once-in-a-lifetime event affected me, and perhaps what it meant for the world at large. 

I’m not here to talk about those topics, though. My husband and I had a very powerful experience, but that experience was meant for us, and as much as I want to share it with the world (it was really, really cool), I understand that it was meant for him and me. Also, there are plenty of people out there who can speak the language of energies, frequencies, portals, and transitions.

I won’t be doing that today. My first intention with any of my writing is practical: what can you do with what I’m sharing today? The first rule of thumb for interacting with spirits and spiritual messages is also practical, in the way that I search for - and ask others to search for, as well - anything actionable.

What can you do with it? How is it meant to make your world better? That’s how I understand legitimate spiritual encounters, and I hope to share that with you here.

The Eclipse of April 8th, 2024, though? What an amazing event on so many levels. It truly was a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence and such a cosmic event to celebrate. I wasn’t taken aback by the day or those few moments of totality on a psychic level. I had my own stuff going on, nothing that was meant for public consumption, but the day brought into focus a feeling I’d carried for some time.

The feeling that, collectively, we suffer as humans because we are spiritually sterile. 

We are collectively spiritually sterile, and the absence of ritual and ceremony in our lives is to blame. The Eclipse was amazing to me because so many people came together in this grand, ritualistic fashion. For a brief moment, we didn’t have political or religious ideologies to cling to, to prop up our identities. We gathered together and stared at the sky.

Something we haven’t done for a very long time.

I am disheartened daily because of the divide in the United States, and sadly, I don’t see that divide narrowing anytime soon. I think of how our country came together after the 9/11 attacks, where everyone saw each other as American and not on either side of some ideological divide. I think of what would happen if we faced some sort of alien invader from a distant part of our Universe and how we would (mostly) band together to face that threat. The Eclipse made me consider all of these realities, possibilities, and more. Still, it made me truly sit with the idea of ritual and how spiritually sterile our lives are, and all because we have so little ritual and ceremony in our lives.

The people who are conjoined in marriage move through a ceremony. If those people should ever dissolve that marriage, a ceremony on the other end is just as important.

Maybe more so.

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There isn’t a day that you won’t participate in some kind of ritual. Most of us won’t see these processes as ritualistic, but truly, they are. Your morning cup of coffee, your evening bedtime routine, or even the random birthday party you might attend. Our day is made up of small rituals and ceremonies. 

Merriam-Webster defines “ritual” as the following:

• Definition of ritual adjective

  • 1: of or relating to rites or a ritual : CEREMONIAL

    • a ritual dance

  • 2: according to religious law

    • ritual purity

  • 3: done in accordance with social custom or normal protocol

    • ritual handshakes

    • ritual birthday cakes

• Definition of ritual noun

  • 1: the established form for a ceremony

    • specifically: the order of words prescribed for a religious ceremony

  • 2a: ritual observance

    • specifically: a system of rites

  • 2b: a ceremonial act or action

  • 2c: an act or series of acts regularly repeated in a set precise manner

You may not have considered it before now, yet you have participated in other rituals over the course of your days and each day leading up to this one. Brushing your teeth and washing your face before bed is a ritual, and making coffee in the morning is a ritual. Winter holidays like Christmas and Hannukah, graduations, funerals, and weddings are all familiar in our day-to-day lives. Rituals have been part of our collective human existence since the beginning of our history. Even so, ritual isn’t exclusive to humanity as we can identify many examples in the animal kingdom, so it’s been with us, really, since the beginning of life itself.

Ritual and ceremony have a place in our human condition, especially in providing us with connection to each other and the Unseen World. Sadly in our modern world, we’ve fallen drastically out of relationship with the art of ritual. Ages ago, our ancestors would have participated in rituals to increase the fertility of the land, to help the seasons continue their onward march, and to help harvest wildlife and animals for food and nourishment. As we’ve lost our overall connection to Nature and Spirit, we’ve also lost our connection to ritual.

Rituals were conducted to help not only with seasonal concerns but everyday concerns as well. The reasons we would have some sort of ritual in our life vary from situation to situation, yet here are some of the most common reasons:

~ BEGINNINGS: Rituals around beginnings of any kind can help us to transition into a new phase of life and even life itself. Across every culture, there are rituals for babies and their births, and rituals for beginnings are even appropriate for mundane everyday life concerns, like starting a new job.

~ MERGINGS: When two entities come into relationship with one another for an extended period of time, it’s always appropriate to bring ritual into the ceremony to help ease both parties into that arrangement. The most readily available example would be marriage, but merging can be considered something as basic as two roommates coming to live together in the same space. We can also see divination practices as a merging of ourselves with the world of the Unseen or the world of Spirit.

~ CYCLES: Honoring places in a cycle, as one would do around the Winter and Summer Solstice, is an example of a ritual that honors a cycle. These cycles can be seasonal, yes, but we can also honor the cycles of one’s life, as well as the cycles of the land upon which one lives. A celebration of Yule during the Midwinter season exemplifies how we can honor cycles within and around us.

~ ENDINGS: We may honor the ending of a relationship with a ritual as well. This can be seen in the form of a graduation ceremony, though there are certainly elements of endings and beginnings to be found in those traditional ceremonies. When people end their marriages, it would be mutually beneficial for both parties to participate in a ritual, just like they did to begin their marriage.

~ HEALINGS: Finally, rituals can be used to help instigate the healing of an individual, as well as a community or the Earth itself. 

In addition to all these reasons for bringing ritual into your life, there’s also a simple act of gratitude; sometimes, ritual is simply a means to celebrate a spiritual energy you want to venerate and thank. The idea of gratitude, or simply going through the motions of a ceremony or ritual to express gratitude, brings us to another concept we should hold dear, not only when we bring ritual into our lives but in general. 

Human history has always contained some essence of ritual and ceremony, and we can see that in animistic and indigenous societies. These animistic perspectives include, at their very core, the idea that everything in the Universe is alive and has consciousness; it clearly removes us from the center of the Universe and places us among the trees, animals, clouds, and oceans -- where we belong. 

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To understand why ritual has so much of an impact on us as humans, we should touch upon the idea of “locus of control.” This is the general idea that our lives and outcomes depend on and benefit more from our own efforts rather than outside influences like fate, karma, luck, or the influence (or power) of others. This idea of “locus of control” highlights the difference between someone who feels they are a victim of circumstances and influences outside of them (external locus of control) versus someone who feels they have a great deal of control in their lives (internal locus of control.) People with an internal locus of control feel they have power over their lives and relationships.

Ultimately, ritual and ceremony should help you “be at cause,” or the idea that you are connected with your center, balanced, and purposeful. This is a shifting understanding of where your locus of control resides. 

To Make Whole Again

Our collective locus of control is distorted and corrupted in this modern world. Generally speaking, our locus of control is externalized based on fear of scarcity, leading to a transactional mindset. As we’ve moved into a modern world of civilization and industry, we’ve moved away from ritual as a means to highlight that interconnected web of which we’re all a part. 

Ritual doesn’t just make us whole again. It can make the world whole again, as sanctimonious as that may sound. Ritual can help us find comfort in an externalized locus of control rather than fearing it. Ritual can help us see that there is enough to support this great web of life rather than always fearing there won’t be enough to sustain it, causing us to gather and horde.

In 1929, anthropologist Arnold van Gennep wrote in his book Rites of Passage about ritual, and it was in this book that he coined the term “rite of passage” to describe the universal method of ritualizing life’s major events. These rites of passage were seen in many of the phases of life that we all go through collectively: 

• Birth: when we experience birth into this world or are thrust into a state of newness.

• Entry: making contact with others

• Initiation: willingness to learn something new and be tested on it

• Marriage/Partnership: capacity for commitment, integration, and unifying opposites

• Demonstration: the ability to facilitate, heal, teach, guide

• Attainment: inner contentment, modeling a skill or talent

• Death: letting go and moving out of the old and into the new

These transitional points mentioned above are certainly part of all of our lives; we will all be born into this world, and we will all exit it through the process of dying. However, these are not the only births and deaths we experience in this world. We go through these processes often, even daily. We can see going to sleep as a figurative death, as well as waking each morning as a figurative birth, and the small acts of regularity we perform before going to bed and upon rising can be seen as rituals.

Essentially, ritual is an integral part of our health as a species and as individuals. This has been true since the first of us were born and will be true until the last of us die. In this modern world, however, change happens at a much more frequent, often much more chaotic, pace than ever before. We are living in a society that moves faster than it ever has, and we are surrounded by natural disasters that are increasing in frequency and ferocity. As we move through transition after transition, and as they gain intensity, it is vital that we incorporate ritual and ceremony into our lives, not only for the health of us as individuals but for the health of our entire world. 

To not only survive this modern world but to thrive in it, we will have to handle change more masterfully than we ever have as a species. In his book Future Shock, author Alvin Toffler offers us the following:

“We have the opportunity to introduce additional stability points and rituals into our society, such as new holidays, pageants, ceremonies, and games. Such mechanisms could not only provide a backdrop of continuity in everyday life but serve to integrate societies, and cushion them somewhat against the fragmenting impact of super-industrialism.”

Transitions happen to us collectively and as individuals, and we’ve all seen how these transitions can slip easily into the territory of being an actual crisis. These crises, again, can be individual or collective; they are often, if not always, emotionally significant and can often bring about a tremendous change of status in a person’s life. We have seen this in the scourge of COVID-19. When COVID-19 arrived to affect us all, people collectively and on an individual basis suffered through that transition. 

While I’m not a sociological or spiritual expert, I can only imagine that we would have benefited greatly from ritual and ceremony to help us find a “new normal.” In the introduction to Rites of Passage, contributor Solon Kimbala noted that it’s possible “that one dimension of mental illness may arise because an increasing number of individuals are forced to accomplish their transitions alone and with private symbols.” 

Think of someone you love who has lost someone they love dearly, like a child, a spouse, a sibling, or a parent. In our modern world, we have the ceremony of a funeral and wake, yet don’t these rituals (as powerful as they may or may not be) seem like they’re lacking something fundamental? Imagine your Grandmother who lost her husband of five or six decades; doesn’t it seem more appropriate that this woman should receive something more than a simple funeral, though we may not know with our modern sensibilities what that may entail?

Ritual and ceremony are universal human experiences that help bring us back to wholeness when we’ve been shattered.

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The afternoon of April 8th was quiet for me and my husband. We made our way to a sacred spot known to the public and were amazed to see we were the only ones there. We had a quiet afternoon of observing the Eclipse, all while appreciating how small we were at that moment. Above us, the mechanics of the sky were unfolding in ways that we may never see again in our lifetimes!

Ritual and ceremony are a large part of our lives, my husband and I. I could sense how people were benefiting, though, from the great collective ritual of observing the April 8th Eclipse. We were collectively moving through a transition, and we were coming together to do so. This event caused me to appreciate the times when communities would come together for other events, like winter carnivals or county fairs. 

It made me miss those times when people would gather together to celebrate a successful harvest or the foundation of a new family through a marriage ceremony. It made me realize what an incredibly difficult time people can have when forced to move through great transitions by themselves. I’ve done plenty of clunky transitioning myself, from non-parent to parent, from closeted to out of the closet, and have been all the more poor for it. I’ve benefited in my life with community rising around me, helping me move from one place to the next. Sadly, outside of religious communities or small spiritual groups doing their best, we are left to our own devices.

But not entirely. Unfortunately, we are left to our own devices in this spiritually sterile world, but it doesn’t have to be that way. 

It shouldn’t be that way. 

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Next week, please joine me as I share how we can create ritual and ceremony in our lives and be all the better for it.