"There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes." - Doctor Who

This looks like a photoshop job. Nope. It's the Sundin twins, Swedish players for two different NHL teams playing some keep-away at an unofficial scrimmage. Spooky, huh?

After over 41 years of marriage Pam and I have rituals - behaviors that gradually became patterns and then progressed to something like a liturgy in our daily lives. I'm sure that's true of all couples who stay married long enough. The specifics will vary from one couple to the next, but small things have become fixed points in the course of our day. If something disrupts the ritual it just doesn't feel right. Our two-person cosmos is off kilter.

On the days Pam works she leaves the house about 6:20 a.m. We exchange the same two or three sentences as she walks out the door to the garage and it ends with me saying, "Have fun."
Some nights we go to bed at the same time and other nights one of us goes to bed before the other. We have a "goodnight" ritual for each, patterns that developed unintentionally and are now standardized behaviors we do without thought.

I like that. Because our rituals are uniquely ours they give us a sense of "us" that's different from all other married couples. That's why I've described only two of them, and those obliquely. Our rituals belong to us, and while there's nothing at all remarkable the words we exchange, describing them in detail would feel somehow inappropriate, almost like a violation of our us-ness.

I value the rituals for their role as markers of our connectedness and our daily routine. But as nice as they are those rituals don't describe and can't replace our relationship. I can imagine there are couples who don't love or even like one another, but who still have their rituals. I wonder if for some couples the presence of rituals is the only glue holding them together. As much as they hate each other the routine behaviors provide a stability they can't be without.

The contemporary evangelical church has almost no rituals, no fixed patterns. That may be an unfortunate development. The formal liturgy of each week's service has been replaced by a constantly changing format that varies from week to week. The introit has been replaced by an informal welcome, the kyrie is gone, and the benediction has turned into a closing prayer, a final opportunity for the preacher to mention the three points of his sermon and, in a uniquely passive-agressive way, urge the people to obey.

I grew up in a church where the same one-verse song, "Bless Be the Tie That Binds," was sung at the end of every Sunday evening service, expressing the bond that held us together even as we parted company for our week's activities. It was a ritual, an exchange that helped define who we were as a congregation and marked a fixed point in our weekly life. It was the corporate equivalent of my words to Pam on work days.

At the beginning of my ministry I pastored a small church in Prunedale, CA and I introduced them to that same song. We also sang it at the close of every Sunday evening service. I got a great big smile when I read a comment recently on the Facebook page for people who were in the church back then (we live all over the country now). One of the gals wrote about singing "Bless Be the Tie That Binds," referring to the value of that fixed part of her life and the life of our congregation. Thirty five years later the worth of that ritual remains with her.

Those rituals, as valuable as they are, do not constitute the relationship I have with the others in my church or (especially) with my Heavenly Father. Ritual cannot replace relationship. How sad if, like the couple held together only by their routine, my only connection with God is liturgy. Like my union with Pam my relationship with the Father goes far beyond the routines that mark my daily and weekly passages.

Can you identify rituals in your relationships? Are there routines at your church that provide a sense of fixedness?