Fr Robert Hendrickson

Dear Friends in Christ,

I was pondering something a friend of mine told me. He said, “My morning ritual is to get up, make coffee, and get on my phone to scroll the news.”

I’ll be honest, this would probably be my morning ritual too but we have some rambunctious kids with a different set of their own rituals — today’s involved a harmonica for some reason!

But it made me reflect on the word “ritual” and how it was being used. A basic assumption of ritual is that it’s immediate practical benefit is secondary to what it communicates. For example, in the Eucharist, we generally do not rely on it to feed us as we would a burrito or the like. It’s immediate presenting benefit, as food, is subsumed by the meaning and reality it mediates — it becomes the Body of Christ. So it’s primary meaning and purpose shifts in the ritual.

Back to coffee and news on the phone.

if we take my friend at this word, that coffee and news are ritual, then what deeper real thing is happening as the primary practical benefit is subsumed? What is the coffee in this ritual? Is it the jolt of energy we need in a sleep-deprived world? Is it the stimulant we need to get us to pay attention? Is it telling us something true about our dependence on it to get us through too crammed, too exhausted days?

I’m not judging — in fact the comments came up because we were talking about our respective love of coffee. If you’ve been in meetings with me you know I tend to down it by the gallon!

It does bring me to the second bit of the ritual — the news. I wonder how much we need that immediate hit of news-stimulation? If we waited 30 minutes to listen to the birds and watch the sunrise before we dove into details about the infrastructure bill or whatever the controversy of the day is, would we be woefully less informed? I fear the news piece of that ritual is the subsuming of the obvious practical benefit of being informed for the delicious benefit of being right — of being righteously annoyed or enraged.

It may not be coffee or news for you — but I feel like we’re all, myself included, letting rituals of sometimes pernicious effect control how we see, how we hear, and how we even begin our days. Let’s all keep asking questions about what’s really important, what truly gives wisdom, and what binds us together in love. Then let’s hold to rituals that make that a live and living reality. 

Fr Robert