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My mother was a bit like Mrs. May, a character in a Flannery O’Conner story who was described as “a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true.” Like many women back in the 1950s, my mother started dragging her kids to church so they wouldn’t grow up as heathen. She then attended services religiously for the next 50 years or so, long after the last of her four children left home – but without, so far as I could tell, being the least bit religious herself. I once asked my mother point-blank why she bothered going to church if she didn’t believe any of it was true. “I find comfort in it,” she said.
My mother started out in life as a Roman Catholic but wound up as an Episcopalian. The Episcopal Church was a notch or two down on the liturgical scale but still provided enough ”smells and bells” to give her what I think she was looking for. Christendom is roughly divided between those who come seeking God’s truth as revealed in Scripture and preaching and those like my mother who are primarily drawn to ritual and pageantry. Protestants generally fall into the first category and Roman Catholics and Orthodox believers into the second, with Episcopalians straddling the two. Now that neuroscience is all the rage, we might say that preaching and dogma appeal to no-nonsense left-brained types, while right-brained dreamers get off on smells and bells. This is a gross oversimplification, of course, but there seems to be pretty good evidence that the two groups are wired differently.
Ritual operates directly on the limbic system of the brain, triggering a range of emotions. Prayers, chanting and singing stimulate the arousal system, and there may also be a spillover effect with the quiescent system, which provides a sense of peace and equanimity. Meditation can produce a reverse spillover effect beginning with quiescence and ending with emotional arousal. These in turn may affect higher brain functions where we try to make sense of things.
Ritual is our way of bonding with one another. We say the same prayers, recite the same creeds, sing the same songs, go through the same motions – all in the service of a story that has been sanctified by endless repetition over the ages. The story may or may not have some basis in fact, but that is hardly the point. The point is that the story gives meaning to our lives and to our life together. As St. Paul expressed it in his letter to the church in Galatia, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Gal. 2:16)
Whatever the rituals of the Episcopal Church were doing to my limbic system as a child, my higher brain functions were decidedly unengaged. In a word, I was bored silly. So I stopped going to church as soon as my mother would let me, which was immediately after my confirmation at age 12. As far as my mother was concerned, she had done her duty, and the fate of my soul was now in my own hands. And apart from three years of mandatory church attendance in prep school, I did not darken the door of a church again until my late twenties. Given my unhappy experience as a child, I returned with great trepidation, afraid it would just be more of the same. And in a way it was, but my reaction was quite different this time. Starting on that first Sunday, I had an overwhelming sense that I was back home.
Soon after I rejoined the Episcopal Church, the Book of Common Prayer -- which had been in continuous use by the mother church in England since 1548 – underwent a major revision. Many Episcopalians, who tend to do everything by the book, were unhappy with the result. Although I agreed intellectually with many of the changes, I found myself siding emotionally with the traditionalists. Nobody likes to come back home after a long absence to discover that the premises have been rearranged while you were away.
After decades of use, the “new” prayer book has worn ruts in my mind at least as deep as the old one ever did. There are times when I find myself as unengaged with the ritual as I had been as a child. I fantasize about becoming a Quaker or a Unitarian Universalist like my sister – just cut out all the folderol. And yet another Sunday rolls around, and I am back in my same pew going through the same motions according to Episcopal protocol: stand to sing, sit to listen, kneel to pray. Singing the same old hymns out of the same old hymnal. Following the same old service out of the Book of Common Prayer. Listening to sermons on the same timeworn topics. I wonder why I keep putting myself through this, and all I can think is that I must find comfort in it.
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