respectfully
I withdraw my offer to lead the riutal.
By all means, given the complexity of the response.
To my mind, the reason that rituals persist across time in various settings is that they engage other parts of being beyond the mind. The reason things like incense or candles or moonlight or what have you are often enlisted as ingredients in ritual is because they circumvent the mind and directly impact your senses to tell you that you have entered are in a special space, not regular space. Ritual immediately enlists the body, which we so often neglect when we conceive of our brilliant ideas and debate, defend, implement, etc etc. Whether it is yoga or meditation or guided meditation as in the core of this paritcular ritual, it is all the same process of getting out of the mind and allowing conversations with the body and soul/spirit/heart to happen. And like yoga or meditation, the ritual I proposed involves mostly individual personal journey/ experience, not sharing or interacting, although there is one dance at the end. I’d envisioned doing it inside with a small interested group of perhaps 10-12 people, not processing through the town. But I would rather not, at this point. I certainly do not want to offend the people of Matera or cause tensions between the unmonastery and the town.
I have worked with many truly brilliant organizations and leaders over the last 10 years and it is often a challenge for them to step out of the intellectual mode and into a more visceral mode. Rituals work, that’s why we keep falling back on them or experimenting with new ones, and dogmatic atheists would do well, as de Botton notes, to embrace some, somehow or other.
I am an equal opportunity co-opter of rituals that work, whether they are originally Muslim or Native American or Christian or from my psychotherapist.
This whole thread pains my heart a little, but I’m releasing that and determined to just come to Matera and listen and offer my reflections, as ever.