Rituals

M told me this (true) story of a friend which, in my eyes, really captures the essential idea behind all the ritualism that exists in religion today.

This friend was cooking a dish with ham (or some other form of meat, the details are irrelevant) one day, and was being watched by her little daughter. She started out by cutting off the 2 sides and the dropping everything into the pot. Her daughter, out of curiosity, immediately asked her "Mom, why did you chop off the 2 sides?" She thought about it for a moment, and then said, rather perplexed, "Oh, I don't know - that's just how my mom used to do it!"

So they called her mother and asked her why she had always made the ham that way. A moment of silence on the phone line was followed by, "Hmm, I don't quite know - that's how my mom always made it."

Thankfully the grandmother was still alive and well - and so they immediately gave her a call and asked her the same question. Pat came the reply, "Oh, that was just because my pot was too small to fit the entire ham by itself - so I always used to cut the sides off to make sure everything fit in!"

I find that a very telling story - and a truly apt commentary on the ritualistic nature of most of our lives (particularly religious lives). There are so many things we just take for granted, because we've always learned it a certain way - and we never stop for even a moment to question why it evolved to be that way. Instead we just continue blindly following certain traditions, customs and rituals with little knowledge of what they really meant in the first place. I suspect that much of the rituals we hold on to so dearly, when subjected to close scrutiny, would turn out to have been started in a manner very much like cutting the sides of the ham.