How to Do Ritual in Virtual Space?

Fun and interesting fact: recent research shows that 46% of Gen Z (so MS and SS age range) have tried a religious or spiritual practice that is new to them since the COVID outbreak. 

Let that sink in.

Rather than a hindrance, COVID has offered a unique opportunity, and an urgency, to undertake a serious exploration of spiritual values. The ritual space provided by regular worship services is the traditional way churches have gone about pursuing this aim.

However, the very need Gen Z is having for spiritual and religious meaning has been caused by the very thing that makes traditional worship services impossible, namely the pandemic. The pandemic prevents the key element of ritual--being present together in a physical space for a fixed length of time that is set aside and apart from 'normal' activities.

Ritual gatherings can't be blithely dismissed. The practice of ritualized worship has survived for thousands of years because it is inherently well-designed to fulfil the very needs being expressed by Gen Z. Ritual worship has lasted for as long as it has because it's trusted and compelling and has adapted over time, to things as obvious as electricity, audio/video technologies, etc.

So just rub some new technology on it and it will be fine, right?

To be blunt: the technological tool at our disposable--Zoom--is not designed for ritual gathering, and it's hard to see it ever becoming adaptable to ritual gathering, and therefore to meeting the needs ritual gatherings address. Gatherings of human bodies do not occupy a grid-frame in constant surveillance, facing perpetually front-on like martinets. In ritual gatherings, we move our gaze around, we look to the peripheries or the ceiling. We are not always 'on'. We need not 'perform' attentiveness as we are compelled to on Zoom. In ritual gatherings, we can mentally check in and out, directing our attention into ourselves and out into the shared sphere as we feel moved to. The best we can do in Zoom is turn our camera off--which sends a message that may be interpreted as anything from boredom to active resistance. 

So we can't just map onto Zoom what we've loved about gathering in ritual space. What can we do to make the most of the substandard tool we currently have?

Some practical research is being done in this area to make the best use of the wrong tool. Emerging principles include:

1. Preparing the physical space, and marking the time as out-of-the-ordinary

2. Finding ways to 'lean into' the reality of where we each are

3. Finding ways to 'lean into' the fact that this is new and only partially adequate

4. Acknowledging that people feel safe at home in ways they would not in public spaces among strangers--thus a higher willingness to risk engaging with big questions with new people

5. Finding ways in the technology to help people connect--assign break out rooms, briefly check-ins from everyone.

Any thoughts? 

Feel free to comment or PM me.

It is possible to do things badly with great love

Chaplains and ministers are meant to embody a certain quality, called ‘pastoral presence’. Part of our role is the expectation to be a calm, non-anxious person in the crowd, the still point by which the community can get is bearings, a firm post we can lash our moorings to ‘til the rough weather passes. 

This quality of presence may sound like some mysterious, arcane power acquired by monk-like habits, but in fact it doesn’t require wisdom necessarily, or even squeaky-clean moral goodness. All that’s required is being reliably around and available to hold safe and meaningful space for people when and as they need it. We need to know certain people will just be there, even though we may never use them--kind of like church itself has become. 85% of Australians don’t go to churches except for rites of passage (the hatch, match, and dispatch), but need to know they’re still out there, gamely waiting like an eternally patient dog, loyally there to offer companionship when called. 

What it feels like.

We reach for church and chapel (and its ministers and chaplains) in the same way we reach for poetry--mostly in times of nerve-jangled distress or big transitions--death and birth and thoughts of these, such times as can only be framed, shared, and transcended through a language that’s at rather a higher pitch than one’s everyday chit-chat, or, in the case of ministry, by a person who’s in a role that’s something other than one’s everyday associates. So how about this analogy: a chaplain is to lay staff, as poetry is to conversation. We seldom need or want poetry or religion, but at those times when we do, we badly do, and nothing else will do. 

Here’s poem from a minister who’s a poet and songwriter, my colleague Rev. Lynn Ungar, which I get the feeling some of us might badly want or need to hear: 

Badly

Anything worth doing

Is worth doing badly

No one ever did something well

Without doing it poorly first.

But if we’re going to get real,

The chances of your ever getting

really good are slim at best.

The Olympics and the Pro leagues

Flee with the end of your puberty.

Maybe the Nobel or Pulitzer

Is out there waiting. But

I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Even on our best days,

Most of us are merely competent,

And much of the time, adequate is a stretch.

Appearances aside this might be

One of the happiest things I know.

I hereby absolve you

Of the need to be better

than anyone else. Poof.

It is possible to suck at things

With great love. Grab your Uke

And I’ll get my mandolin.

Meet me on the porch.

We’ll play together, under tempo

And ever so slightly out of tune.

Most of the time, I feel like I'm getting chaplaincy wrong, though I care about it and feel like I'm giving it my best shot. It's frustrating, because the last time I was in a school setting, I was a rather popular, even beloved, teacher--liked and respected in equal measure by my students. I still count many of them among my most precious relationships  after 30-odd years.

But that was in my 30's and 40's, and the work I was doing then was more central to the core business of schooling. Maybe now I'm in my 60's the gulf between my life experience and theirs is too wide, and the human man seems to be disappearing inside the marginalized clerical role I have to wear, leaving only the outer shell of it to do duty for the whole person. Maybe I have become less open-hearted that in youth, but it doesn't feel that way. Maybe the gap is cultural--Australian private school kids are not identical to international expat schools. There is this...distance I constantly feel, and I can't tell if it's in them, or in me, or just what we've collectively become since mobile telephony and social media have so rearranged the inner lives of everyone. 
Maybe this role can only be done in a way that's less satisfactory than my teaching used to be, and holding my new self to that old standard is unfair. 


I am hereby absolved of trying to be as good as the old me. Poof!