Church service reloaded

For several years now, people have been meeting every Sunday in an open church in Berlin-Neukölln to celebrate worship together - and to find out what new church rituals could look like in a “Church of Interbeing”.

evolve: What role does ritual play in “A Church of Interbeing”?

Sanya Manzoor: Attending our services or chanting evenings are a ritual act in themselves. There's regularity and consistency provided so that you can create a relationship with the movement of being at home and being at service. That includes making a little pilgrimage to a space where you can be in community and be guided through a ritual pathway. The intention is to deepen our relationship with life through a series of inquiries that are intended to support this deepening. Those inquiries can be mental, emotional, physical, or embodied. Through a constellation of inquiring and exploratory pathways a ritual is formed that facilitates a transformation of consciousness.

e: What would you say ritual is?

Adam McKenty: Rituals can create an arc of collective experience through entrainment, a shared context, symbolism, intention and synchronicity. In the way that musical instruments vibrate together when exposed to the same sound, a whole group of people can move through a state change over time. It may sound like a technical definition, but I think it's an interesting approach because it leaves a lot of things out that are normally included in potential definitions of ritual. Some people would say that brushing your teeth in the morning is a ritual, but that's not the kind of ritual that we're interested in. It also leaves a lot of room for the many varieties of what can happen under that definition.

Sanya: I would say, ritual is the structure through which spirit moves. And to a certain degree, you can say that everything is ritual, it just depends on the way in which you are approaching it. Consciously creating ritual spaces is an invitation to go through an experience within community. And we have certain practices that guide that experience.

e: Is this experience something about the realization of sacredness or how sacredness and community configure in a ritual?

AMcK: The spaces that we're creating have the intention to be an experience of the sacred, however that is defined by participants. We hold this word sacred as something like a cloud that we are moving through or toward without trying to pin it down in a definition. To do so would reduce the complexity of the multitude of experiences of what this means to something potentially too simple. Sometimes we used the phrase that the Church of Interbeing is a commons of the sacred. Each participant brings their definition, their epistemology, their belief about what is real in the world. And in a mysterious way, sharing a certain set of practices that tends to move people through an experience of what many would describe as the sacred seems to be possible – without pointing to a specific thing.

SM: Without ever saying that this is sacred, through care and curation we are opening individuals up to the web of a re-sanctification of life. Through taking them through various experiences of meditation, of dialoguing with one another, of exploring a certain topic they reemerge with the perception: “Oh! Even this is sacred!”

e: How does ritual help us doing that?

AMcK: As humans we are innately tuned to have the capacity to experience what people describe as sacred under certain kinds of conditions. Some of those conditions we can access coincidentally. Being alone in spectacular nature or crises and extreme stress can create conditions for an experience of sacredness. But we are also constructed such that certain kinds of patterns of collective activity are a doorway to the sacred. Since the beginning of human cultures we have been using these patterns to step through that door. In many ways the societies we live in now have lost the habit of doing this. We no longer inhabit our collective capacity for opening the doorway of ritual into the experience of the sacred together. We're taking little steps towards finding answers to the question of: Where is that door now?

Many churches are empty and culturally we are lacking the spaces of connection or sacredness that collective ritual can provide. This is a background hypotheses that A Church of Interbeing is stepping into. It's a territory that's not without some reasons for caution because historically ritual tools have been primarily used within traditions that set the norms and parameters of their use.

e: How did you select what to do as part of the service or the sharing at the church?

AMcK: We attempt to distill patterns out of the myriad traditions that have regular collective ritual as part of their practice. The most prominent source tradition is probably Christian church services, partly because that cultural metaphor is most available to people in the Western world. Each interbeing service usually includes singing, sharing food, meditating, conversation, and moving together. This comes from the sense that the strongest form involves both the heart, the mind and the body. There's an attempt to combine the key practices from historical traditions with a contemporary understanding of what an individual human organism can come into resonance with.

There's a combination of contemporary relational and meditative practices and  practices that are consistent among traditions going back thousands of years, like singing together or doing synchronous movement and breath, sharing food, using words and certain symbols like candles.

They're two ways that we approach ritual. One is through consistent elements that appear in almost every service, which let participants arrive into what they are familiar with. It lets the brain relax and allows us to step in more fully. And then there is the more experimental side where a thematic question in every service can inspire a larger ritual structure that is oriented around that question or theme.

SM: But the rituals that we are guiding are not teachings, we are not giving a sermon or telling anyone anything about their experience or what they're supposed to experience. There is guidance provided and people feeling into to what extent they wish to move into this guidance and move with this guidance. But there's full agency in different levels of participation that people are able to tune into and enter into an experience with themselves and with the community that requires a certain capacity to surrender.

When it comes to creating community ritual, there's the setting of the actual ceremonial space or through intention, prayer or creating cohesion amongst the people that will be guiding this space together. From the conception of the pathway to the drawing in of people that will co-hold this space to the closing of the experience, all of it is guided from a ceremonial inner posture or mindset. It doesn't facilitate a teaching experience, but more of an opening, enquiring experience with the potential for what can be experienced as a mysterious alchemy.

‍

‍