Embracing the Limits of Faith and Ritual

"Live without limits" may be the worst self-help advice anyone has ever given.  Maybe we need to look back toward the rules that formed us and bound us together as a caring society.

The lack of restraint exhibited by individuals is a main reason why cultural, artistic and political ideas have ceased to be new, and have ceased to inspire.  Left without some sense of authority and respect, society has begun to exhibit signs of bipolar disorder on a mass scale.  We're trapped in a cycle of exuberance and poor impulse control and plunges into despair and distrust, and a near total suspicion of traditional institutions like the church, the press and the impact of tradition have led us to forget community and communal responsibility and overemphasize individual rights that we insist someone grant us despite our behavior or our contribution, or lack thereof, to the group.

We have closed our minds to opposing points of view and have no faith in each other.  Hence we have no faith in ourselves.  We may want things to change, but we're unsure of what to change things into.

When so many people insist on change, it's worth looking at old ideas in an attempt to filter out what we should keep and what we must discard and grow beyond.  A good place to begin is the very notion of faith.

Those of us with mental illness often suffer from extreme alienation.  The word alienation, in its etymology, means to be separated from one's god.  Such lack of faith, such isolation and absence of solitude and ritual, can explain the increasing descent of so many into mental illness.

Why?  I believe we have an impulse to believe in something greater than ourselves, and when faith fails, we go looking for it somewhere else.  Faith, as practiced in time-honored religious traditions, requires great limits.  Perhaps our falling away from faith has led us to abandon the limits of behavior that are required for us to support each other.  Instead of the faith-based emphasis on charity and love, we look to people other than ourselves, other structures, to support those who are difficult to support.

These people who are difficult to support, like those of us with mental illness, are left as constituents without a structure to prop us up and help us heal.  Faith did this once.  Today's non-faith-based institutions are failing us.

In chapter 27 of Stephen Batchelor's The Art of Solitude (worth a read), Batchelor presents the arguments for faith without innovation made by the reformation era thinker Montaigne.  Montaigne resisted the new push away from the central authority of the church toward an individual's direct relationship with god.  He predicted a failing in society as people threw off the binding, unquestioning rule of the church for life rules based in reason.

Now I'm a devotee of reason, and think we can only look back on Montaigne and his Essays with nostalgia, but it is an opportune time to investigate what an adherence to ancient ideas and rituals can offer us.  When reason snaps, as it does in mental illness, perhaps faith and its rituals can help us recapture a sense of stability and lose the alienation that causes us to suffer alone.

Many people come to this space through the practice of mindfulness.  I think, paradoxically, the secular emphasis on personal, interior experience presented by people who teach mindfulness in an effort to alleviate suffering only increases alienation, and, with it, suffering.  Without ritual, without community, hell, without some religion, these formerly religious practices seem empty and lead to doubts and questions that require limits to properly answer.

Batchelor makes the point that, "creativity and freedom operate optimally under conditions of restraint."  Maybe the restraint of ritual, the stuff so many of us learned in church, can help us excel.  The limits we must adhere to to be productive, responsible members of society can be found in religious ideas, especially when the dilemmas we face are formed in practices that were once deemed religious.

I'm not advocating a return to the unquestioning faith of Montaigne.  Even the church later banned his Essays because of the books' distrust of reason.  But we should consider his assertion that, "There is a plague on man - the opinion that he knows something."  If we could find a practice we don't question, something greater than ourselves and our doubt, as I believe we can in ritual and faith, we might find a place of less suffering and less alienation.

To search for something to believe in, to be open to belief, and to share that belief with others can help us heal.  But to do that we must face the insecurity of admitting we know very little, and much of what we're sure of may be wrong.  Begin this search by imposing some limits on yourself.  The limits of ritual from a faith tradition can help.  I'll bet that leads to more new ideas than a lifetime of disbelief and negative cynicism.

In those new ideas, the ones forged within constraint, the ones respectful of tradition, one may feel less alienated and more connected to the best in themselves, and in others.


My book Resilience: Handling Anxiety in a Time of Crisis is available now.