Sanctifying the Profane
When you enter an Eastern Orthodox Church, you cross yourself, and immediately approach the icons of Christ and the Virgin Mother. You press your lips to the warm wood that portrays the image of the divine. It’s the first act of every worshipper in the Divine Liturgy, and it serves the purpose of shifting you from the profane outside world to the ethereal inner world of the church.
I asked a priest once what it would mean if we stopped all this kissing, if we just let the Protestants win. He shrugged and said, “we’d find another thing to kiss.”
There is nothing special in the act of venerating the icons specifically. Instead, there is something critical in the ritual act of beginning, the slip from one state of being into another.
In modern life, we don’t slip between worlds or expand into inner life. Instead, we shrink into a fraction of ourselves. We don our uniforms, our button-ups and dresses, our coveralls, and then toil for the masters of wealth. We present faux realities on the internet, hold back the realities of our day-to-day from our friends and family. We are a thousand fractions of our full selves, all locked into the same world and mode of being together.
This shattered self is visible if you know to look for it. You can see them in our vices. We struggle to phase shift with all sorts of welcome hedonism, but there is only so much that drinking, sex, and occasional travel can do, and these tools are mere shims compared to Saturnalia, midnight Pascha, and psychedelic Santa passing out aminitas as remedy to seasonal depression.
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In “A Prayer to the Tiny Gods”, I call us to make the profane sacred, to ritualize our connection to the commonplace, to create little wedges in our everyday that allow us to slip out of the material world and into something far greater than ourselves, where every object and idea has hidden mystery. I’m asking that you adopt an even more ancient stance than orthodoxy; I’m asking you to adopt an orthopraxic stance toward your spiritual behavior
The orthopraxic stance declares that you don’t need to believe that the object of ritual, (here bamboo), has a spirit or agency. You don’t need to think it’s more than what it actually is, in this case, an invasive grass species, because it is still an invasive grass species, regardless of what additional qualities we think it has. Instead, for ritual to work its magic, you need structure and action. You need a rite, an order, a behavior, a disposition, a respect. And through practice of the ritual, connection to the spiritual arises, even in the absence of belief.
The ancient Romans knew this. In Cato’s De Agricultura, he describes rites needed to prepare the land for purification, but despite many lines describing sacrifices to the gods, Cato never declares that the practitioner must believe in the gods or trust in the gods or any sort of fidelity to the gods. Never does Cato declare “We do this because we believe the gods are good and just and real.” The mere idea of requiring orthodoxy would have been foreign to the Romans, who had many gods from many lands.
Furthermore, having right belief or certainty in the gods was in many ways antithetical to Roman practice. How can you capture and define a god? If you make the gods less fickle, less emotional, more rigorous and rulebound, are you really worshipping a god? Or have you merely tied down the stale and dead version of the god, killing them by making them safe?
The ancient Romans and many other societies before and since, centered their religious activity on orthopraxy, ambivalent about the psychology of belief. It doesn’t matter what you think about the gods, you still need to prepare the land. This notion of orthopraxy is foreign to our modern sensibilities. In our religious and political ideas today, we are asked to have faith, to believe that God will take care of us, that the Democrats or Republicans are evil and we know the truth. For the ancients, that’s not the point. The gods will do what they will–if they even exist! The rituals are for us. They allow us to express those other ways of being in the world beyond the secular and profane, to reach out into the weird mystery of consciousness and into the living world.
The goal, then, of “A Prayer to the Tiny Gods” is to create a bridge between the modern sensibilities of orthodoxy and the traditional view of orthopraxy. It does this by playing on the intense, emotional, outsized feelings we have toward some commonplace objects. Who has not wished genocide on mosquitoes? Who has not relished the smell of cooking garlic? Don’t these things hold special places in our hearts?
Yet these little objects and organisms are not ritual subjects in modern life. We don’t perform liturgies to our cuts and scrapes, don’t write hymns to spices (even if we should!), and we don’t allow for divine inspiration in the cutting of our lawns. For us modern people, the sacredness of these activities is entirely absent because we imagine that the sacred must be oriented toward right beliefs and high morality, and holy sacraments. What a waste of holy objects!
We can get outside ourselves when we decide to take these special objects and sanctify them with a special rite. Suddenly, bamboo, and blood, and oil and garlic become something otherworldly, but still recognizable. And in the practice of this rite, we too become something else. The transformation of these everyday objects reflects back on us. We ourselves are transformed from the commonplace into something sacred, just as the subjects of the ritual are. This process of sanctifying the profane reaches further still: if garlic and oil can be sanctified by ritual, what else might become holy? What other tiny gods are there around us and in us that are worthy of spiritual attention? And just like that, we begun to sanctify the world, are now looking for the rites to make nearly every part of our lives a little bit sacred. The ancients understood this: by preparing the land for purification, we purify the whole world and ourselves.
