Rituals, Remembrance & Rhythms for Emotional Health
We humans can be walking balls of emotion. I know lots of us keep it under wraps, behind walls or other forms of restraint. God’s been teaching me the difference between healthy and unhealthy ways to process & control emotion. I didn’t know how much I needed that! But God knows we do. He always has. I believe this is one of the reasons he gave his people holy days, festivals and seasons.
God cares for the entirety of each person, our physical, spiritual and emotional selves. He made us to be all of those things. In the garden, when God made man, he made them whole persons and called them good. And humans were in communion with God, body, soul and heart.
Ever since mankind cheated on God and chose a lesser love, we have seasons of elation and grief, highs and lows. When God chose a special people to help him rescue mankind, he gave them daily, weekly, monthly rhythms to help guide them through those seasons. He gave them days for working and days for resting. He set aside days for mourning the brokenness of sin and days for celebrating bountiful blessings. If you look a little closer, those festivals are appropriately reflected in the seasons as well. It’s interesting; I was recently on a writer’s zoom call and the ladies got to talking about their astrological signs and how the seasons effect them. No matter how people explain these things, it always brings me back to our Maker. The ebb and flow we feel is there by design.
Nowadays, there’s a lot of talk of processing your feelings, not hurting other people’s feelings and even how you are and aren’t supposed to feel. I think this has a lot to do with the fact that much of our world has moved away from whatever their ancestral celebrations looked like. Ancient societies couldn’t write a quick tweet or big long Instagram post to try and publicly process their grief, pain, anger or their joy, peace and love. So they developed (or were given) rituals to serve this purpose.
Everywhere the Christian church spread, they found those rituals already in place. Often, they tried to pull a Paul and put God’s name on something the local culture already had in place. (Hence Easter, from Eostre, celebrating the goddess of spring and fertility in Europe.) Now, our holidays are greatly focused on consumption. Stay with me here, I promise I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water.
For any given holiday or celebration, a person’s to-do list might look something like this:
Get the house “guest ready”
Prepare a feast
Make, purchase, prepare gifts & cards
Decorate house/yard depending on season
I’m sure you could add some more, but you get the idea. We need to get things “just so” so we make for good celebrations. The things is, we can check off this list and never once let the holiday do it’s work in our hearts. We don’t find the time to actually participate in the ritual of celebration or mourning, honoring or remembering.
I bet if we remembered what beautiful gifts these times were meant to be, we would still find time to check the things off of our list. But instead of “I have to get it all ready.” we would find our selves saying “I want to (decorate, plan, invite, clean…) to help us prepare our hearts.” And once we have entered into that posture of celebration (or maybe something more solemn), we would find ourselves feasting, dancing, weeping, sharing to express it.
I’m writing this on Good Friday. When I explained to my children that we’re remembering the Crucifiction, I thought it sounded silly. Shouldn’t we remember that every day? But there’s a difference when we view this week as Passover was meant to be. We remember our brokenness, our unworthiness and our separation from God. It’s sad to think of a spotless lamb dying in sacrifice. But it’s heartbreaking to think that the perfect Son of God had to die for you and me and everyone. It leads us to heavy gratefulness for his sacrifice.
And the more we take time to mourn the death of the Son of God, the better we can understand the grief, confusion and devastation the disciples felt at his death. Then when Sunday comes, our exultation will be all the greater. He’s alive! He is risen!! Our hearts will rightly desire to celebrate, feast and bless one another with gifts, the same traditions but with immensely greater meaning.
So yes, every day we remember the cross with gratefulness. But today we set our hearts in a posture of grief; we shed tears with the saints as we wait with heavy expectation to see what God will do.
