One’s Soul Turned Inside Out
On the Evolving Values, Gods, and Rituals of Mormon Culture
One can find a very helpful (and concise) definition of ritual in one of The School of Life’s latest productions, A Replacement for Religion:
“Religions have always understood that one of the greatest problems of our minds is that we know so much in theory about how we should behave and feel but engage so little with our knowledge in our day-to-day conduct.
“We know — in theory — about resisting perfectionism, accepting melancholy, embracing an ordinary life, keeping room for the idea of tragedy and looking beyond anthropocentrism. And yet, in practice, any such ideas have a notoriously weak ability to motivate our actual behaviour and emotions. Our knowledge is both embedded within us and yet is ineffective for us.
“We forget almost everything. Our memories are sieves, not robust buckets. What seemed a convincing call to action at 8 a.m. will be nothing more than a dim recollection by midday and an indecipherable contrail in our cloudy minds by evening. Our enthusiasms and resolutions can be counted upon to fade like the stars at dawn. Nothing much sticks.
“The ancient Greeks were unusually alert to this phenomenon and gave it a helpfully resonant name: akrasia, commonly translated as ‘weakness of will’. It was, they proposed, because of akrasia that we have such a tragic proclivity for knowing what to do but not acting upon our own best principles.
“There is a solution to these fragilities of mind that religions knew to draw upon: ritual. Ritual can be defined as the structured repetition of important concepts, made resonant through the help of formal pageantry and ceremony. Ritual takes thoughts that are known but unattended and renders them active and vivid once more in our distracted minds. Unlike standard modern education, ritual doesn’t aim to teach us anything new — it wants to lend compelling form to what we believe we already know. It wants to turn our theoretical allegiances into habits.
“It is, not coincidentally, religions that have been especially active in the design and propagation of rituals. It is they that have created occasions at which to tug our minds back to honouring the seasons, remembering the dead…
