Being at home in the world.  A homily for the Gloucester UU Church. -Karl Frank, July 31, 2022

 

 

This title came to me when I read a book, “The disappearance of ritual”. The author is Byung-Chul Han, born in South Korea, now the head of a University in Berlin, Germany.  His book is as unusual and (I think) admirable as is his achievement in becoming the first Asian born person to be awarded a chair in philosophy in a German university.

 

(On a personal note, Professor Han was awarded a Ph. D in philosophy at the University of Freiburg, where I was also studied philosophy.)

 

As I write this, I hear from across Gloucester harbor, a bugle playing Retreat.  I recognize it from the summer, a half a century ago, when I worked at a summer camp, where the day was decorated with recorded bugle calls issuing from a loudspeaker by the flagpole.  This particular bugle call meant then, in that context, go back to your cabin.

 

The next bugle call in the daily cycle would be Taps,  Most everyone is familiar with Taps: it is the bugle call played at military funerals, but in the everyday cycle of camp life, it meant go to bed.  Even mundane ceremonies marking a time in which something should happen, are the sort of things Han calls rituals.

 

I am not now outlining Professor Han’s book, I am introducing his topic, by reminding you of things you already know, to establish a context in which to discuss his book.  It’s about culturally specific practices that structure time in human experience.

 

It’s title is The disappearance of ritual. By ritual he does not mean the anything like the steps for celebrating communion or marriage. As he uses it, ‘ritual’ encompasses any performances that give significance to culturally significant occasions.  For example, April 14th, Income Tax day in the US, is the sort of thing Han might call a ritual but because of complex things of cultural importance are associated with that time.

 

His book expects the reader to know that, In the centuries before everyone had a wrist watch or cell phone, and in the time before private homes had pendulum clocks, city dwellers had bells in towers to signal the occurrence of religious services.  The bells could also announce the unpredictable public emergencies: fires and war.

 

Time to the people of those centuries was marked, not by numbers on a clock or days on a calendar, but by meaningful events, ceremonies with associated rituals. These rituals gave human life a structure in time, just as places give an emotionally important structure to space: , For example as Gloucester is a place with a name and a character, it is not just a set of numbers, to designate a spot in the infinite space which constitutes the universe.  Gloucester as a place has a meaning to us, it is not equivalent to so many degrees north latitude and then the degrees of longitude west of Greenwich.

 

In the days before time was ruled by writstwaches, there was going to church on Sunday, for them as could, to mark the week, and Christmas or Mid-summereve and the like.  The reason this church, the one we meet in now, survived the COVID years as well as it did, is that for our congregation, it made the otherwise featureless time of quarantine into a structure in which we felt at home.

 

Professor Han’s first  point, a point that takes all the above for granted, is this, and here for the first time, I quote his own words (as translated by Daniel Steuer) rituals are symbolic techniques, created by us, as techniques for making ourselves at home in the world.  Rituals are to Time what Home is to space.  They render time habitable.  They structure Time, furnish it, and make it accessible. And they enable communication through which we can create community.

 

Professor Han writes, as a preface to the book, “The present essay is not animated by a desire to return to ritual.  Rather, rituals serve as a background against which our present times can be seen to stand out more clearly.

 

I however, see his book as showing how we might steer the direction of our lives, by thoughtfully choosing to come together to give ourselves meaning.

 

Now, American senators, of both parties, seem to have forgotten what AM and PM means: before and after the the Meridian, in other words when the sun is overhead, as experienced by a human person standing upright.  They seem to think that it means whenever their watch hands point to 12., nor have any regard for high noon.  They think they are creating more light, by moving the hands on their watches from 11 to 12.

 

In the workday today, some workers get interrupted after dinner by urgent text message about some new thing that needs doing before the next work day begins.  The current and next workday are hard to tell apart.

 

When I moved to rural Vermont from suburban New Jersey I discovered there was a special time, every summer, called “Old Home Week”.  Ham and Bean Dinners were staged in church basements, and the younger generation, who had moved to the cities, came.  The house they assembled at before the bean dinner was known as “the old home place”.  People in that time and place had homes in both time and space.

 

Homemaking is how we make space habitable.  I’m not recommending that we revive rural America’s “Old Home Week”, but that we thoughtfully nurture meaningful events, inspired by Byung-Chul Han’s insights into how ceremonial events render time “habitable”.

 

Return now to  Pascal, and what pushed him into a sense of homelessness within the universe as the science of his time portrayed it.

 

Our first reading, Le Silence eternelle ce des espace infini m’effrai has stuck with me for some 60 years, as an expression of a sense of being lost in a world without meaing.  I had a friend who had that depressing sense of life, and he adopted Pascal’s motto, in French, and often repeated it, it was his trademark idea.   He stopped going to class, then over the summer I learned he had dropped out of college. After finding himself, even getting married, he returned and graduated.  He had stopped repeating that French sentence.

 

The despair of the man who first wrote my friend’s motto, Blaise Pascal, was brought on by revelations of newly invented telescopes and mathematics which in the hands of the astronomers Kepler and Galileo, proved that the earth was not center of our universe, that we lived on a wandering planet, just one among many, going around the sun which itself is not special in any way among thousands of stars.

 

Pascal addressed his dysphoria, the opposite of euphoria, a general malaise, by writing an exhaustive proof of the existence of God and the truth of Christianity.  I hope he felt better for it.  In any case, I commend him for taking it in his hands to address hi dysphoria, as best he could, by writing his thoughts, and joining a religious community.