Ritual is a fascinating aspect of human life. Since Grandpappy observed the rituals of the culture within which He was raised, I’m prone to assume that He enjoyed and was edified by ritual and tradition. Rituals can be moving, inspiring, and downright fun. They can connect us not only to the Divine (however we choose to define It) but also to one another across space and time.

Ritual emerges out of the human affinity to habit. Through the periodicity of life, humans typically develop specific ways of doing things that eventually become taken for granted, automatic, and even unconscious. We must sleep. We must eat. We must see to a variety of other needs on a daily basis. The things we do to accommodate, facilitate, and satiate these needs become the rituals of our daily life. No matter what other rituals we take into our experiences, these are the ones that all of us share on some level.

Like everything else in human life, these rituals are mediated by symbols. In fact, the objects employed in these rituals (the beds we sleep in, the food we eat, the showers we bathe in, the "dress clothes" we wear for special occasions, etc.) become imbued with meaning, as do the places where the rituals take place.

When these rituals and symbols are taken as a whole, they form the narrative that becomes the foundation of the stories of our lives and communities. And these stories consist, essentially, of the whole of human experience.

This is even how the community of science works. In science there are traditions and rituals and heroes and a special symbolism (mathematics) that holds it all together. There are even "gods" in the form of fundamental forces and "myths" that tell us how these gods relate to one another. ("The god Energy is equivalent to the Goddess Mass and her consort Speed-Of-Light-Squared.") All of these things come together to create the grand narrative of "science".

Even our sense perceptions of objects are more story than direct reality. For before we hear, see, feel, taste, or smell anything, our brain interprets the sensory data we’ve collected and presents to us a version of the reality, not the actual reality. Now, the brain’s version of the reality is usually quite accurate, certainly accurate enough that we’re safe to take it as the real thing. But sometimes the brain doesn’t know how to interpret a sense perception, and so it takes liberties to fill in the blanks. This is what makes optical illusions possible. The brain is given visual stimuli that it doesn’t understand, so it makes something up. Everything you think you know is a story told to you by your brain or by the brain (via language) of somebody else.

And so it goes with all of human experience, each person exploring the story of her-or-his existence and the stories of others and blending them all together into the stories of communities of many sizes and kinds. The symbols and rituals we use to participate in all of this shape the stories as much as they are shaped by them. And in time they evolve and new forms appear where old forms disappeared and there are epochs of many forms following epochs of only a few. And if any alien life form ever visited our planet they would undoubtedly conclude that the nature of the planet’s sentient species (or at least the humans anyway) is ultimately shaped by its stories.

Some communities, like the community of scientists, are sparing and systematic in their repertoire of rituals and symbols, while others, such as the Catholic Church, are rich in rites and relics with deep histories and multiple levels of meaning. But all communities have a grand narrative buttressed by the rituals and symbols of those who accept that narrative as truth.

As I’ve often noted elsewhere, the only danger in embracing rituals and symbols is in taking them as equivalent to the things to which they are trying to point, represent, or reference. So long as rituals and symbols remain the means of conveying meaning and don’t become the meaning itself, then they will be allowed to evolve freely with the needs of humanity and constantly aid in our progress as a species.

Grandpappy said that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. What He meant was that the particular weekly ritual of the Sabbath was meant to facilitate the communion of Humanity with God (and, indeed, the Sabbath can still achieve this when it is rightly observed) rather than being a burden to people or a day whose meaning is obscured by a plethora of rules and regulations. If one cannot observe a ritual with the proper attitude of communion, then she-or-he is really better off not observing it at all.

But when a person is in the right attitude for a particular ritual, she-or-he quickly finds that she-or-he has no need for instruction in how to observe it. What needs to be done is obvious, and one is eager to do it. And this is precisely the spirit in which Grandpappy wanted His followers to do all things as He told them, "If you love me, you will keep my commandments."