Religions know full well about these tendencies and recognize that if communities are to function, they must be dealt with, but by being artfully purged and exorcized rather than simply repressed. Religions therefore present us with an array of rituals, many of them oddly elaborate at first glance, whose function is to safely discharge what is vicious, destructive or nihilistic in our natures. These rituals don’t of course advertise their brief, for to do so would bring a degree of self-consciousness that might make participants flee from them in horror, but their longevity and popularity prove that something vital has been achieved through them.
The best communal rituals effectively mediate between the needs of the individual and those of the group. Expressed freely, certain of our impulses would irreparably fracture our societies. Yet if they were simply repressed with equal force, they would end up challenging the sanity of individuals. The ritual hence conciliates self and others. It is a controlled and often aesthetically moving purgation. It demarcates a space in which our egocentric demands can be honoured and at the same time tamed, in order that the longer-term harmony and survival of the group can be negotiated and assured.
2.
We see some of this at work in the Jewish rituals attendant on the death of a beloved family member. Here the danger is that the mourner will be so overwhelmed with grief that he will cease to assume his responsibilities vis-à-vis the community. The group is therefore given instructions to allow the bereaved fulsome opportunity to express his sadness and yet it also applies a gentle and ever-increasing pressure to make sure that he eventually gets back to the business of living.
In the seven days of shiva that follow the funeral, there is allowance for a period of cataclysmic confusion, then a more restrained thirty-day period (shloshim) in which one is absolved from many group responsibilities, followed by a whole twelve months (shneim asar chodesh) in which the memory of the deceased is commemorated in a mourner’s prayer during synagogue services. But at the end of the year, after the unveiling of the headstone (matzevah), further prayers, another service and a gathering at home, the claims of life and the community are definitively reasserted.
3.
Funerals aside, most religious communal rituals display outward cheer. They take place in halls with mountains of food, dancing, exchanges of gifts, toasts and an atmosphere of levity. But beneath the gaiety, there is often also a kernel of sadness in the people at the centre of the ritual, for they are likely to be surrendering a particular advantage for the sake of the community as a whole. The ritual is in truth a form of compensation, a transformational moment when depletion can be digested and sweetened.
How can sadness be expressed without becoming all-consuming? The impulse might be to give up on life and the community altogether. The unveiling of a Jewish headstone a year after a father’s death. (illustration credit 2.15)
It is hard to attend most wedding parties without realizing that these celebrations are at some level also marking a sorrow, the entombment of sexual liberty and individual curiosity for the sake of children and social stability, with compensation from the community being delivered through gifts and speeches.
The Jewish Bar Mitzvah ceremony is another ostensibly joyful ritual which endeavours to assuage inner tensions. Although apparently concerned with celebrating the moment when a Jewish boy enters adulthood, it is as much focused on trying to reconcile his parents to his evolving maturity. The parents are liable to be nursing complex regrets that the nurturing period which began with their son’s birth is drawing to a close and — especially in the case of the father — that they will soon have to grapple with their own decline and with a sense of envy and resentment at being equalled and superseded by a new generation. On the day of the ceremony, mother and father are heartily congratulated on the eloquence and accomplishment of their child even as they are also gently encouraged to begin to let him go.
Religions are wise in not expecting us to deal with all of our emotions on our own. They know how confusing and humiliating it can be to have to admit to despair, lust, envy or egomania. They understand the difficulty we have in finding a way to tell our mother unaided that we are furious with her or our child that we envy him or our prospective spouse that the idea of marriage alarms as much as it delights us. They hence give us special days under the cover of which our pestiferous feelings can be processed. They give us lines to recite and songs to sing while they carry us across the treacherous regions of our psyches.
Would we ever need ritual festivities if there wasn’t also something to be sad about? A Bar Mitzvah ceremony, New York State. (illustration credit 2.16)
In essence, religions understand that to belong to a community is both very desirable and not very easy. In this respect, they are greatly more sophisticated than those secular political theorists who write lyrically about the loss of a sense of community, while refusing to acknowledge the inherently dark aspects of social life. Religions teach us to be polite, to honour one another, to be faithful and sober, but they also know that if they do not allow us to be or do otherwise every once in a while, they will break our spirit. In their most sophisticated moments, religions accept the debt that goodness, faith and sweetness owe to their opposites.
4.
Medieval Christianity certainly understood this dichotomy. For most of the year, it preached solemnity, order, restraint, fellowship, earnestness, a love of God and sexual decorum, and then on New Year’s Eve it opened the locks on the collective psyche and unleashed the festum fatuorum, the Feast of Fools. For four days, the world was turned on its head: members of the clergy would play dice on top of the altar, bray like donkeys instead of saying ‘Amen’, engage in drinking competitions in the nave, fart in accompaniment to the Ave Maria and deliver spoof sermons based on parodies of the gospels (the Gospel according to the Chicken’s Arse, the Gospel according to Luke’s Toenail). After drinking tankards of ale, they would hold their holy books upside down, address prayers to vegetables and urinate out of bell towers. They ‘married’ donkeys, tied giant woollen penises to their tunics and endeavoured to have sex with anyone of either gender who would have them.
To stay sane, we may need an occasional moment to deliver a sermon according to Luke’s Toenail. A nineteenth-century illustration of the medieval Feast of Fools. (illustration credit 2.17)
But none of this was considered just a joke. It was sacred, a parodia sacra, designed to ensure that all the rest of the year things would remain the right way up. In 1445, the Paris Faculty of Theology explained to the bishops of France that the Feast of Fools was a necessary event in the Christian calendar, ‘in order that foolishness, which is our second nature and is inherent in man, can freely spend itself at least once a year. Wine barrels burst if from time to time we do not open them and let in some air. All of us men are barrels poorly put together, and this is why we permit folly on certain days: so that we may in the end return with greater zeal to the service of God.’