take comfort in rituals

I see that the good folks at Starbucks have a new advertising campaign: beneath a steaming cup of joe, they’re inviting us, “take comfort in rituals”.  It’s a characteristically clever idea.  My early weekday starts are certainly made less dreadful by the presence of fresh coffee, luring me from a warm bed when, frankly, not much else does at that precise moment.

My pre-6am coffee has the added bonus of building into my routine a space – albeit brief and sleepy – for reflection before the day begins.  I value that too, in my new, and already favorite, armchair.  Yes, I take comfort in rituals.  Indeed, it seems to me that that’s partly their point.

In that respect, I wonder whether the Starbucks people are reminding us of an important religious principle too.  Our religious rituals ought to offer us comfort: places in which we feel connection, enjoy reflective space, encounter divine grace and peace, re-order and recalibrate ourselves and our lives, and maybe even allow ourselves to be opened up to a wider world and bigger truths than we’ve so far encountered.  Of course, spiritual practices are a discipline – whether going to the synagogue, dragging ourselves to church, praying five times daily, fasting, meditation or whatever – but a discipline with a comforting, purposeful end in view.  Parting with our five bucks at the coffee shop is worth the pay-off, right?

John Betjeman wrote a deeply-felt and deeply moving poem about an old nun in the British port of Felixstowe, the last surviving member of a religious order.  As she reflects on her utter loneliness, left abandoned by her dead sisters and now a sad relic of a vanished world and a faded zeal, she makes her solitary way to evensong at the parish church, while the seaside town closes down for the night.  It is the most profound reflection on taking comfort in rituals that I know:

“Thou knowest my down sitting and mine uprising”

Here where the white light burns with steady glow

Safe from the vain world’s silly sympathizing,

Safe with the Love that I was born to know,

Safe from the surging of the lonely sea

My heart finds rest, my heart finds rest in Thee.