Resources by Itihari Y. Toure

Many of us are familiar with the scripture from Jeremiah 1:5: “before you were formed in your mother’s womb, I knew you” (NIV). It reminds us of the immortal aspect of our human spirit.  In the context of West African cosmologies, it is our spiritual essence that is with the Creator before we become human. That is to say, the aspects of our personhood which are in alignment with the cosmic design for harmony, justice, reciprocity, and balance.  There are specific rituals that emphasize this immortal aspect of our being. Some of these rituals are commonplace in cultural expressions, like when we decide to name a child after a loved one who has passed away; remarking on that immortal aspect of that life that lives on and honors the family. So, we say to folks as ritual: “Say your name and say the names of the ones who named you!”  This is a ritual of introduction. We see it in the South African ritual of greeting, “Sawubona,” which means I see you. I see you, your spiritual essence and all those in your lineage who carry this same essence.  Libation is another ritual we find in the Bible and in multiple cultural traditions where the immortal aspect of our human spirit is recalled, elevated, and remembered as good for those who are in the present. In a libation, we invoke their name as a way of calling upon that immortal aspect of our being. We can construct rituals that remind us that we all come here with an immortal character.  A way of being that is not contingent upon where we live, our social or economic status, our physical abilities nor our ethnic or gender identity. Nothing about our social location was “known” by our Creator to determine our Divine Consecrated Identity. Surely, we can consider this when we think about the social location of Hagar or the young brother Joseph, Mary, or Paul. Our social location can affect our consecrated self, but it does not determine it. Ritual can remind us of who we are when our social location attempts to derail us. Ritual calls forth our consecrated identity, the divine self before we were in our mother’s womb. 

Part Four: Ritual is a Form of Activism Engaging ritual as an individual or as a collective act of embodiment challenges ideas about the source and nature of our intelligence and for some it challenges ideas about how we arrive at knowing. As a form of activism, ritual invites us into the process of restorying that counters colonizing stories which perpetuate cultural and gender hegemony. Rituals also take the diverse traditions of old narratives and gives them meaning for the present context or need. The restorying in ritual also centers diverse intelligences (bodily-kinesthetic, environmental, rhythmic, visual, auditory, social, etc.,) in a nonhierarchical manner. It affords us to remember our own story in relationship to the transcendent, to remember a people’s story in relationship to the unseen yet felt power of spirit. Our ritual restorying is another form of both our personal and collective agency. Ritual focuses on lived and innate capacities that are in operation to benefit us and community. Imagine that – using our intelligence for our personal and collective benefit, not for institutions or capitalizing agendas. We get to use our restorying in ritual to practice “being” while welcoming others into the same practice. This is primarily the role of community participation in ritual; to show our authentic selves. Whether it is the restorying of a grief ritual, the restorying of a ritual for renewal and rebirth, a ritual of covenant or a ritual of invocation; the community’s role is to authentically show up. Here is where ritual begins to counter models of acceptability, belonging, worthiness posited by dominant forces or groups that exclude, marginalize, and perpetuate othering. If the intent is transformation and ethical change, ritual can construct a valid and mutually beneficial pathway for creating community strong enough to hold one another’s truths. 

Part Three: Ritual Bring Us into a Divine Dance (the real-time, active participation in the transcendent, where the physical realm intercedes for the spiritual realm). A Divine Dance; ritual creates a divine dance between the guide and the participants, the teacher, and the learner. Ritual uses the spiritual nature of rhythm, coordinated actions and speech to invoke teaching and learning as a “divine dance.” A dance, between the life’s purpose and mission of both the teacher and the student is at the heart of the exchange. It goes beyond discrete knowledge or application of course content. Ritual, when it is intentional, steps into the spiritual realm to illuminate the lessons we came here to receive. Ritual recognizes that everyone of us comes into being to learn a set of lessons. The lessons that aid us in becoming (better) and in sharing our becoming with others so that we are all becoming (better) and belonging. Meaningfulness in learning is heightened when the learner can see and feel learning in alignment with purpose and the teacher sees and feels teaching as living-out purpose. Ritual not only pronounces this spirit work, but it also maintains this transcending dance while it seeks to intercede with earthly realities that would impede us from getting the lessons. Imagine this, a ritual lifting one’s life purpose and mission in ways that welcome, clarifiy, and situate the lessons as part of our Divine plan. Rituals create a Divine dance as expressions of wisdom and the gifts to be given as life’s mission are expressions of love. For both the student and the teacher, every teaching moment is an opportunity to learn a transcending lesson, or to give a gift.  What ritual does is enlist our active participation in the unseen as it negotiates what we can see, speak, feel, and touch.

Part Two: Ritual Extends the Depth of Our Imagination. Ritual takes the familiar and enlivens it with our imagination.  Consider it this way, you have a favorite dance or song or prayer. The reason we can dance it, sing it, pray it, again and again is that each time our ingenuity takes the work to another dimension. Each time we feel, express, and see something new that we did not experience before. It is this aspect of ritual that makes it meaningful and alive and different from a routine.  Each time we engage in ritual it comes alive with the genius of our imagination. Ritual can even begin in our imagination and blossom through its application. We imagine a portal, a doorway in liminal spaces and to our delight, the ritual affords the opportunity to be in liminality and create. So, during the ritual there may be revelation, illumination and even inspiration that touches our spirit so that it becomes real. The ritual has moved from a familiar intent, or action, to the manifestation of our imagining.  With practice, we become fluid in ritual making and always expect our imagination to do what it does. In this way, ritual maintains the integrity of being in the present while reaching into the unseen (imagination). Because we are intentional in ritual, it also creates a kind of authority to dreaming and imagining. Ritual helps to declare that what we dream, what we imagine, is as much a part of our collective covenant in Spirit as the faith we have in our Creator and Ancestors working on our behalf.  So, do ritual; do ritual to imagine deeply!

Part One: Ritual Is Communal Learning. We might agree that “community” is a dynamic, divine dance among individuals who, at any given moment, can structure and normalize what might have begun as a spontaneous, enlivening interaction. Community, in the context of our classrooms, can either be a routinized structure of interactions, focused on a set of pragmatics (time allotted, prescribed lessons/topics, inherited answers to repeated questions), or a generative experience, full of imagery and ideas that are liberative to the spirit. In other words, we can create community to fulfill a set of accepted structures about learning, or we can create a space that courageously “touches the spirit.” This is the point of ritual, to touch the spirit, and it involves everyone in the space together experiencing the divine dance. Rituals, when seeking to connect meaningfully to the essence of our being, becomes a point of teaching and learning within the moment. I believe that there are such experiences of ritual in every culture because even as we are human, we are divine. Both aspects of our being desire existence. For those of us in theological education, we have the privilege to focus on both the human and the divine as a responsibility of teaching those called to do spirit work. Ritual invites the community of bearers and seekers to experience this transcendent work together and receive the benefits of communal learning to touch the divine within us together. Part of our challenge is operating in an ecosystem that pays more attention to rules and structures than the divine dance, trusting in our own aptitude and the genius of the spirit to decentralize oppressive rules and structures. My communities called me forth to be a keeper of the ritual. It was not until they gave voice to my “medicine” that I accepted it and began to develop it. Rituals became the first task when I settled myself into class preparation. I would find spaces to just listen. The listening would take even longer when I saw names of learners that I had in a previous class. It was much later that I realized that this listening was paying attention to ancestral voices whose “sight became my vanguard voice.” Ritual not only enlivened the purpose of the course beyond the accumulation of information, but it also afforded each one of us to sit with our individual social location in ritual as an opportunity for personal value in the communal space. With the ritual, we were measuring our worth based upon course content in relation to our lived experiences. We were adding value to the community by our existence and the value of being connected to one another. As I think about the adults who entered those classroom spaces and the complexity of their lives, the ritual space also became a moment of releasing and accepting without having to speak to the specifics of what was/would be going on. This is the healing aspect of ritual. Rituals create space for communal recovery and discovery. Rituals create space for rest. Do I require everyone in attendance to engage the ritual? I do not. Even for those who, in their own way, do not participate in the class rituals, they bear witness to it. And what we do know, is that you cannot unsee what you see, and you cannot unhear what you have heard. This is also the reason why ritual work is a deeply intentional and serious work. It is not an icebreaker or a gesture of novelty. This is an assurance: the presence of a person at the ritual affords them a chance to speak to the spirit.