Rituals

The first thing I do each morning is head for the coffee pot. Every morning, without fail, making coffee is the first order of the day. Then I read a Bible passage. Actually, the very first thing is a prayer of Thanksgiving to God that I am able to get out of bed and experience the joy of a new day. I hope that springs more from a thankful heart than from habit. Making that first pot of hot, black coffee, though, that has become a ritual.

I remember my niece and her two sons from Minnesota coming to visit my mother, way down in Oklahoma. The boys had sleeping bags and the little boy came prepared. Inside that sleeping bag with him he put all the toys he had brought along for the trip. He might have been in a place that was strange to him but those toys , they were familiar. They gave him a connection with home as he lay down for the night.

Some rituals are like that…they give us a sense of comfort, of the familiar, a sense of continuity. The last thing my dad did every night was wind the clock. Every night, I could count on it. Well, no, the very last thing he did before climbing into bed was drop his shoes on the floor with a loud clunk. His reason for doing that remains a mystery but he did and it was a noise I listened for,  that meant Dad had turned in for the night.

On the farm at Etta many years ago, the children had a morning ritual. After Ma Latty had set breakfast on the table, the first child to reach the table could sit beside Ma and put their cold bare feet in her warm lap. Now that was a ritual that would bring comfort to a shivering youngster.

And then each Sunday morning, there is the ritual of going to church. Some people frown on calling church attendance a ritual because we need to go out of love for God, not because it is a habit. Well, why not call it a ritual? It brings comfort, a sense of belonging and in the process, we hear a message from the Lord.

My solar lights and the lights of my neighbors are winking out now that night is giving way to the dawn. Aren’t rituals rather like lights in the darkness? They are familiar actions that give a sense of familiarity to our days. They bring us comfort like my nephew’s toys in his sleeping bag. Spontaneity can be good; positive change is refreshing but those small things that I do at certain times in certain ways, they bring order to my day. Whatever would I do without that first pot of coffee?