So, in case you didn’t know, today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. This is the 40-day period that mirrors Jesus’ sojourn of fasting in the wilderness; in the early Christian church this would be the time, leading up to the celebration of Easter, when new members learned the matters of faith that they needed to in order to be baptised, and those who were estranged from the church could re-enter it through public penitence and reconciliation. Today, we go to church on Ash Wednesday and the priest makes a cross of ashes on our forehead; we might fast–apparently it’s mandatory for Catholics? and optional/encouraged for Episcopalians–and we “give up” something for Lent, usually chocolate or desserts.

What this has me thinking about today is the intersection of ritual and rationality. Ironically enough, the single concept I have the most “faith” in is rationality. I think Aristotle was totally right (not that I’ve actually read Aristotle): reason is what makes people people. And I think that the free exercise of reason is both the essence of freedom and our bounden duty. And one thing that I absolutely believe about God is that God wants us to use our reason without fear or limitations, even and especially when it comes to matters of faith. These are my premises.

So you might naturally think that I would not see the value in doing something that doesn’t have a reasonable basis behind it; that rituals without a firm rationale would not fly in Mary’s world. You would, however, be wrong.

I have, as a teenager/adult, always loved the Eucharist, even at times when I don’t actually believe in the divinity of Jesus, or in the crucifixion as atonement for my specific sins, or even in the afterlife. I just like doing it: saying the words, the call-and-response prayers, the formality and cadence of the language, the sharing the bread and wine, all of it. Luke has, from time to time, asked me about this, and I don’t really have a good response. In fact, there’s a real cognitive dissonance at play: why do I place so much value on a rite that is, apparently, predicated on a complex of ideas that I can only accept partially, at best? That, even if it makes sense to other people, doesn’t make sense to me?

This time around I decided to do Lent right. (We’ll see how it plays out.) I am in sore need of the kind of self-discipline and self-reflection that the season encourages–mostly just to get my head out of my own ass. I don’t give up food products because that just makes Lent a diet, and I diet anyway, and it has nothing to do with penitence and everything to do with the kind of narcissism I’m trying to avoid. (For me, not necessarily for anyone else.)  So I give up unnecessary spending–something that imposes self-discipline and makes my budget happier.  (If I really want to avoid narcissism, I should give up blog posts and facebook status updates. But let’s not go TOO crazy.) So far, pretty reasonable–I can explain the reasons why this self-denial is a good thing, the virtues I hope to inculcate thereby, etc.

I also, however, decided to fast today, and I can’t really tell you why I did that. Okay, the diet might have contributed–but apparently fasting shuts down your metabolism like woah and doesn’t actually help you lose weight unless you do it all the time, and then we call it an eating disorder. So it’s not reasonable on those grounds. I didn’t really expect it to remind me of God and my own mortality but so much. My friend Scottie once memorably noted that after a day of fasting, all she thought about was (surprise) food. I guess peer pressure had something to do with it? Like I said, apparently it’s mandatory for Catholics. Mostly I think I did it because it’s something the bible tells us to do that doesn’t make sense to me, that doesn’t seem like it would work for me in the way the biblical authors seem to picture it working, and I wanted to find out if it made sense when I did it. I wanted to see what meaning I could find in the practice done for its own sake.

Well, it worked and it didn’t work. It didn’t work in that I was basically either hungry and thinking about food, or not hungry and thinking about other things. I didn’t think, “my stomach is rumbling…and that reminds me of GOD.” But I did come to this hypothesis in the car on my way home (wow, that was a long lead-up to one mediocre idea):

I think that maybe ritual acts are supposed to be unexplainable on some level. Was it Edward Albee who, when asked what he meant to say with “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”, replied, “If I could have said it in any other way I wouldn’t have had to write the play”? Maybe these are things that we do, actions we take, that fail to intersect with human reason on some fundamental level. And in performing the ritual, whatever it is, we experience or come to know or intersect with the great mystery of God, who is fundamentally inaccessible to human reason.

This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to figure out what the ritual “means.” I mean, I don’t think it’s possible anyway–trying to keep myself from investigating a problem usually just makes me grumpy. We are rational beings, and we need to reason in order to understand. So we should talk about soteriology and soma/pneuma and the second Temple communal meals and the Body of Christ and atonement and whatnot. But it’s like a good story, or a good book–you can write as many essays on the book as you want, or you can talk about the symbolism of the story, and that’s important and valuable, but the best part about a really good story is that it’s bigger than any of the essays written about it. It is irreducible. You have to, on some level, swallow it in a big gulp and let it haunt your memories for the rest of your life, and you’ll be closer to what the value of the story is. Maybe rituals are like that: you need to let your reason wrestle with it, but you also have to recognize that its chief value is its irreducibility, its refusal to make total sense. You do it for its own sake, because it reminds you (and I think there’s a stronger bond than that even) that God is both totally inexplicable and very, very near.

Thoughts? I suspect that this will be a problematic stance in several ways.