The Rituals strand TELLING STORIES David Paterson and Ronald Pearse A religious tradition introduces its adherents to its collection of stories about religious experience - stories of its founder, prophets and holy people - and stories about historical events and their interpretation as_ spiritual events.
Within any one religious tradition there is a strong tendency to objectify these stories as historical and literal in their entirety - including the interpretation given them in the telling. Together with that goes an equally strong tendency to dismiss the equivalent stories in the other religious traditions as ‘‘merely’’ myths and legends.
The insight that religion is a human creation enables us to value our own and other traditions on an equal basis. We no longer have to claim that ours is God-given whereas others are not. If we are wholehearted in our conviction that all religion is human in origin, there is no diminution in its importance for us. On the contrary, the vastness and richness of humanity’s moral and mystical heritage is available to us all. It is perhaps no accident that such new thinking is happening now, when we have more access to other traditions than ever before.
This strand of the conference will explore what this means for our understanding of the traditions of our own church, if we have one, and for our use of the mystic traditions of all faiths.
What is worship? How do we use the traditional forms of collective worship, and how can we develop new forms?
Can we share in the forms of worship used by people of very different doctrinal positions from our own?
What rituals are meaningful for us, and how can we develop them to strengthen insight and collective action for the needs of our world? What unacknowledged rituals have we? What about the evolution of ritual? Can we create a meaningful ritual or can such come only by evolution? How does a received and once meaningful ritual lose its meaning? What unacknowledged rituals have we?
We can’t think without symbols. Participants will be encouraged to share the pictures, stories, actions and other symbolic material which they use in thinking, or in making decisions, and explore how they relate to the commonly held symbols of our culture and our religions.
How far do the latter speak spontaneously to the human psyche and how far do they depend on a received religious story tradition? We shall contrast symbols in the Jungian sense of an almost self-generating medium expressing the self, with mathematical or scientific symbols as devices with given meanings.
Perhaps for some (and emphatically not for others) the most important area is that of religious experience and the vast mystical tradition transcending the boundaries of world faith communities. Is this the most profound of all human voyages of exploration, or is it an example of human delusion? We shall explore what the mystical traditions themselves have to say about mysticism and human exploration.