Maybe it is not safe to be taken off-guard. Maybe it's better to be always in control, to have a switch to turn off, an alternative channel to connect to, a way out.
Maybe sitting still to absorb whatever is happening is truly a thing of the past. Hopefully not yet completely.
Once a week (sometimes more often) I find myself in an environment which is as formal as any I can think of in New York, a very high church Anglo-Catholic mass.* I have been stunned, more than once, by awareness of the human complexity on the basis of which its rituals deliver their ultimate message. What to an outsider might look like errors invariably are transformed into invitations to participate ever more profoundly in paying attention to the human realities, not merely to the prescribed formalities.
The person in charge, Andrew Blume, even occasionally pokes fun at his making it "as complicated as possible."
It seems to me the best kind of ritual.
*St. Ignatius of Antioch
