I recall watching King Charles III’s coronation last year at about this time and thinking how starkly that event contrasted with the majority of the ceremonial events held at around the same time on earth. I remember thinking that this impressive display of pomp and circumstance on display used to seem appropriate and expected, but now appears wholly outmoded.

People are also leaving churches in droves, many of them for the same reason. The stodgy rituals and rites that sustained the world’s various religions for millennia are now a turnoff to a broad swath of society. Such practices in churches and in other corners of society are labeled as excessive, hypocritical, and empty pageantry…in short, a pointless and prideful waste of time.

I’m currently reading C.S. Lewis’ “A Preface to Paradise Lost” in anticipation of diving once more into Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and “Paradise Found” and I came across this gem from Lewis: “The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender’s inability to forget himself in the rite and his readiness to spoil for everyone else the proper pleasure of ritual.” It may sound a bit harsh, but I am compelled to dig a bit further into what Lewis was seeking to convey for several reasons.

For starters, the mystery about who we are, why we are here, and where we are going is far from solved. The materialists may be convinced that “God is dead,” but significant evidence of a metaphysical or spiritual phenomena continues to nip at the heels of their dogma to this day. Ceremonial rituals have long been used to remind us of the possibility of and our connection to a larger, underlying, largely invisible pattern of reality. Through this lens and by virtue of these ceremonious activities that fit in but stand apart from our daily “earthly” activities, history is given a pattern, some kind of a design rather than being a pointless, repetitive drama filled with people coming and going fighting wars and propagating rumors of wars that cause civilizations to rise and fall.

Secondly, traditions, habits, rituals and rites bring a certain relief–a “pleasure” as Lewis put it–in the midst of the chaotic world we have created for ourselves. They are known, expected, and their presence in our lives is especially valuable when they are performed in a way that lifts us for a moment out of the quotidian, out of ourselves, and into the experience of the transcendent. If you don’t believe me, watch any group of people who share a disregard or disdain for tradition, ritual and rites, and you’ll start to see patterns in their interactions, their gatherings, etc. that could only be called ritualistic.

My impression is that we are throwing the baby out with the bath water in our era, and I am concerned that we do so with eyes wide open. Have organized religion and their churches used ceremonies, rituals, and rites selfishly to amass power and wealth. Well, yes. Have principalities and nation states done the same? Um, duh. Of course. Does that mean we should collapse the sacred into the secular, flatten society, declare everything to be equal and deserving of equality of outcome? That approach to me is specious at best.

There is a “proper pleasure of ritual.” There is value in having definition in society, in having sacred things and in not mixing those things with the mundane. This is as true in human relationships (both platonic or romantic) as it is in larger patterns of organization in society. Sacred things must be kept sacred or we are repelled from the pleasure of their presence. This, incidentally, is the allegory of the garden planted eastward in Eden. Humans repel themselves from the abundant pleasure of the garden through their daily choices, their inner attitudes and inclinations, and their general disregard of that which is sacred.

Fortunately, we cannot destroy that which is truly sacred. We can repel ourselves from the evidence of its presence in our lives and in the world at large, but we cannot destroy it; we cannot “kill” God. We can－through our thoughts, words, deeds, and in our listening－reacquaint ourselves with that which is sacred; we can draw near unto that which is sacred and as a result, magnify that which is sacred in our living.

When we do this, the rituals and rites that facilitate the reemergence of the sacred can once again find a home on earth, as well as in the “earth” of our circumstances.