Easter memories and the importance of ritual: column

My paternal grandmother was concerned that I had attended far too many funerals for one so young. She wanted me to have other experiences so she took me on the train from High Point, N.C., where we lived, to Greensboro. I don’t remember how we got home. Did someone pick us up in a car? All I remember was the passenger who had a germ phobia and wiped down her seat and put a handkerchief between her hand and anything it touched. I was fascinated. We were told she was the widow of a railroad employee and could ride for free anytime she chose.

Then there was a wedding. It was out in the country, and my grandmother was related to the bride’s family. I had never been to a wedding, and she thought it was about time I saw someone getting married instead of buried.

My clearest memory was of an Easter sunrise service at Floral Garden Park Cemetery. The cemetery would not have impressed anyone who lives in Staunton or Augusta County. It wasn’t particularly old because the town wasn’t particularly old. High Point, home to hosiery mills and furniture factories, was established at a high spot on the railroad about 1900.

Floral Garden Park Cemetery had its charms, however. It had trees and flowers, sunshine and shadows.

It was just the two of us, my grandmother and me. We stood during the brief service just after sunrise. It isn’t the service I remember. It was getting up in darkness and going with her on an Easter morning. It was the ritual of it.

I think we only went that once. Why does the memory linger? My grandmother has been gone for nearly 60 years. Why is it that never an Easter comes without my recollecting that one morning?

I am not sure, but I think maybe participating in a ritual resonated with me. I would not have known the word “ritual,” but it struck a chord.

There was no tradition of going to sunrise services in my family. After I married and had my own family, rarely did anyone take me up on the offer of accompanying me to sunrise services. Too early. Often cold outside. But I kept doing it. Not every year, but even in the years I did not go, I would get up early to watch the sunrise and make up my own ritual.

“After the sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb.” Matthew’s words: as the first day of the week was dawning. I would get up as Easter morning was dawning.

Much emphasis is put on the rational; do you believe that Jesus Christ “was crucified, dead and buried, and on the third day he rose again from the dead,” as the Apostles’ Creed puts it.

But rituals aren’t about rational formulas and creeds. Rituals reach us in a different place in our being. People who are intellectually challenged can participate in rituals, and people whose brains have been damaged by time and disease can be moved by them.

There is a place for analysis, for critical thinking. And there is a time and place to let go and simply be, to listen to “Taps” being played at the graveside, to stand in a cold cemetery on Easter morning, to allow tears to come when we hear the “Wedding March” or “Pomp and Circumstance.” There are national rituals and religious rituals. Most of us have our own little rituals maybe known only to us. Humans have always had them, and even animals seem to engage in behavior that to us looks a lot like ritual, elephants gathering around one that has died, touching and trumpeting their anguish.

We are a very individualistic society. We don’t have as many communal rituals as people once did, and I suspect we find them somewhat embarrassing. (Unless they are related to sports.)

We need them. We need them in ordinary times and in times of deep distress. We need to chant and light candles. We need rituals, not for their intellectual content, but for times that are beyond the reach of the rational.

We shouldn’t have to explain or apologize any more than should the elephants as they circle the body of one of their herd lying lifeless on the ground.

Rituals are not the decorations of life, the accessories added to more important things like paying jobs and dirty laundry.

They lie as deep as the invisible roots of ancient trees, spreading underground to nourish the grand canopy extending above us.