Ritual

In searching for appropriate educational models to enhance the spiritual development of children and youth, it is helpful to consider the learning model embedded in traditional ritual practices, particularly those that were used in coming-of-age ceremonies and other rites of passage in religious and traditional cultural settings. Rites of passage are cultural and spiritual ceremonies and practices used to mark changes in the station or status of persons in communities. They include ceremonies such as marriage, funeral rites, birth and naming, as well as coming-of-age rituals. They can include investiture or membership ceremonies, graduation rituals, and so on. In religious communities, ceremonies like confirmations, baptisms and their variations are combined rites of passage and investiture rites.

Ritual practices serve a variety of functions in a community, and are based on an educational or pedagogical model that assumes learning takes place through participation. Rites of passage are designed to make clear that one or more members of a community are changing their status or place in the community. The ceremony serves to make a public declaration of the change of status in order to affirm it for the participants, whose new status is ceremonialized, and to inform the rest of the community so that the new status is accepted and respected. A marriage ritual, for example, makes clear that two individuals have become a couple and that their choice is being acknowledged communally. The community is being told, through ceremony, that these two are no longer single and available. They will now be treated in light of their new status as a couple, assured that their choices and intentions are known and honored by the community. The ceremony also acts to remind others in the community of the commitments or promises that they have made in the past. The promises being made in the ceremony recall and renew the vows they made in the past.

Communal rituals usually include spiritual components that connect the participants and the community to powers beyond themselves and across time. There are often deliberate religious practices including prayer, singing, chanting, or drumming, invocation of the Divine, and a recall of traditional stories, teachings, texts, and ancestors. There is cultural wisdom in ritual practices that marks clear borders for people's lives that function, at the same time, as a conserving and renewing force within a community.