Sabbath Devotional :: Rituals, Invitations, and Ordinances

A few months ago, my husband and I received a startling message from a friend with a chronic illness. They requested that we visit them that day or the next, for about 45 minutes, without children. We prepared our hearts for whatever we might hear. The suspense was weighty; even through pleasantries and catching up, our hearts were heavy until our friends announced that they’d invited us over to tell us that they’d gotten engaged! They hand-delivered a beautiful invitation and asked us to be part of their special day.

That wedding, and another significant family wedding around the same time, sent me back to my time as an ethnomusicology student, during which I became very interested in rituals. Music is often part of rituals, so it’s a natural flow. Rituals in our society include things like fireworks on the 4th of July, baby showers, graduations, funerals, weddings. . . and religious ordinances. Knowing that people often swear by the importance of rituals without being able to explain why they’re so important, and with theology on my mind, I started asking why our compassionate Creator prescribed rituals — ordinances — as part of our spiritual journey.

About rituals, UNESCO says this: “Social practices, rituals and festive events are habitual activities that structure the lives of communities and groups and that are shared by and relevant to many of their members. They are significant because they reaffirm the identity of those who practice them as a group or a society. . . .” Similarly, The book Ritual by Barry Stephens notes, “Rituals play an important function in binding groups together. . . .” Stephens describes religious rituals as repetitive, patterned behaviors, prescribed by or tied to a religious institution, belief, or custom, often with the intention of communicating with a deity or supernatural power.

The sacrament is the ordinance that comes to mind most readily after reading the above definitions. It is a regularly occurring group activity with expected behaviors, including specifically worded prayers. 3 Nephi reminds us that it is for believers who gather together to remember the Savior. Taking the sacrament together can help us feel like a community, like people who have something in common. I suspect I’ll be holding onto that this election season.

In an NPR interview, Dimitris Xygalatas discusses rituals that are painful, dangerous, or stressful: Even these create positive community bonds. For example, in the context of a fire walking ritual in Spain, researchers found that people’s heart rates synchronized — this was true of both those walking and those watching, providing physical manifestation of emotional connection.

LDS rituals are not quite like fire walking. (Unless, of course, you’ve brought small children with you to church.) But, these examples explain why a habit of attending church can feel helpful, healthy, ‘right’. It also made me think of times when we use the phrase “borrow my testimony” or “lean on my testimony.” Perhaps simply by taking the sacrament together, we are continually leaning on one another’s testimonies, week in and week out, holding each other up. We so often use the word sustaining — perhaps it is simply by participating in church together that we sustain one another’s decisions to follow Christ.

In a BYU Religious Studies Center essay, Robert Matthews talks about the ordinances and covenants as an illustration of the plan of salvation: spiritual rebirth, death and resurrection, Lord’s Supper, authority, atonement, and so forth. Ordinances help us to know God through a predetermined plan of salvation, looking to Christ for atonement. Matthews makes the case for ordinances as a part of the plan of salvation and then says, “It is understood that each person must also live a moral, honest, and faithful life in addition to receiving the ordinances.”

This brings me back to the weddings I mentioned at the beginning. Both couples were in healthy, established, long-term relationships. They were doing the daily things to live in commitment to each other, but they still felt the need for a ceremony, a ritual, to make it official. The invitation to join the ceremony let us know we were important to them, and after that, we really wanted to be there! It was an honor to be invited, and an honor to be involved.

Heavenly Father’s plan for the ordinances is an invitation to us. The ordinances, the rituals that bind our community, are also specific moments in the plan of salvation to meet with God, intended to connect us to one another and to heaven. Coupled with daily faithful living, they sanctify us.