Thinking again about Agnosticism and spirituality. This time in regards to rituals.
About 6 months ago I started posting a Shabbat greeting each Friday. I do this not because I have become an observant Jew but rather because as an agnostic I can appreciate a symbolic end to the week and time of renewal.
I know that this is normally accompanied by a meal with family and/or friends. But I am and have been alone for some years.
So I conceived a new thing: Fancy Dinner Friday. Even if just for one. Maybe a fancy but simple meal like Salmon, fancy due to the star ingredient. Maybe a dish that takes a lot to prepare. Fancy by dint of effort required.
Like the Eggplant Parmesan I am planning.
From there I began to think of something else that has been so colonized by the organized Christians that it is simply not deemed cool anymore. Taking a moment to give thanks for food.
I know, it smacks of Little House on the Prairie.
But why does the gratitude need to be directed at God? As an agnostic I do not recognize a personal god who would require my thanks.
But I can still have gratitude for the work it took to bring this sustenance to me. The farmers, harvesters, and truckers of all stripes. And if it is animal protein it seems proper to thank the animal, if only in my own mind. A form of acknowledgment.
This was a common practice long before the Christians.
I don’t need a personal god to be grateful for my little span of years in a body on this great wild earth. I can direct my thanks to the life force and millions of years of evolution.
There are so many aspects of human culture it would be well to leave in the dust. Being grateful for our lives is not one of them.
A spiritual connection to the world does not require a personalized god because the quality known as spirit resides in us and in all living things.
The locus need not be an external force that acts upon us from above.
Spirit can just as well describe an internal locus that privileges the life processes on our one and only home: Earth.
Because we are meaning making creatures we require rituals to mark the times of our lives. We NEED a spiritual life. And so, I create my own. Or, more accurately, incorporate the best of our deep history of ritual behavior into something that is new again.
What are your rituals? How do you connect to spirit?
Annabel Ascher: Your spirituality is also expressed, I think, as in the art of Mark Rothko or reaching back to Vincent van Gogh.
Or the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop or Walt Whitman or HD (Hilda Doolittle).
Or in the work of Aeschylus or Sophocles or Eugene O'Neil.
Your spirituality has a Minyan!
Annabel, the threads you wove have such beautiful resonance with the most humanistic teachings I know of Judiasm and Christianity, synthesized with that which studies of Nature in the Universe have offered so far, moved me to tears. I think I received most every nuance you intended in your short, clear essay, and projected far beyond. Thank you. 🌳