When I started out in spiritual work, I really struggled with this one. Ritual. What even is it. I had this picture in my head – candles, robes, a circle of people who all somehow knew what they were doing – and none of it matched anything in my actual life, so I figured ritual just wasn’t for me yet. Totally wasn’t ready for that level of commitment. I needed to learn more first, get more serious, earn my way into it somehow.
Well, it took me a long time to work out that I already knew what ritual was. I’d been doing it my whole life.
So What Was I Missing, Orlagh?
I grew up Catholic. Still am, in my own way – pagan Catholic, I call myself, which tells you something about the in-between space I live in. And it took me an embarrassingly long time to connect the dots that the sacraments I’d been raised on – weekly Mass, confession, baptism, communion, confirmation, marriage – are rituals. Not “ritual-adjacent.” Not “a bit like ritual if you squint.” Rituals. Full stop. Never mind the “special” Masses that show up around specific points in the year, Easter, Christmas, all of that – that’s ritual wearing a different coat, tied to the turning of the year the same way Imbolc is.
What Else Counts, Then?
So then I went further. If Mass is a ritual, what else is?
Turns out: loads. Brushing your teeth every morning. Your (semi) regular – if you’re me – hair appointment. The weekly takeaway. Your daily coffee, made the same way, at the same time, in the same cup. None of these look like ritual cos none of them come with candles or robes or anyone chanting anything. But they’re regularly repeated actions that carry meaning beyond the action itself, and that’s the actual definition. That’s it. That’s the whole bar.
Ritual doesn’t mean massive. It doesn’t mean huge, elaborate, performed for an audience, done “properly” according to some rulebook you haven’t found yet. It can be that, sure, if that’s what you want and what you can sustain. But it doesn’t have to be. The Mass you sat through as a child and the coffee you make every morning without thinking about it are doing the same basic job – marking something as significant through repetition – even though one has incense and the other has instant coffee granules.
My First Ritual
Once I understood that, my first actual, deliberate, this-is-a-ritual ritual was almost insultingly simple. I lit a candle.
Surprising no one, if you know anything about Irish people and our relationship with candles. We’ve been lighting them for intentions for generations – a candle for a safe journey, a candle for an exam, a candle for someone who’s sick, a candle just because you needed to do something with your hands while you hoped for something you couldn’t control… I was following a very long tradition without even fully realising it at the time. No need for a script. I needed a match and something I wanted to hold in my mind while it burned.
That’s genuinely where I’d tell anyone to start, if they’re standing where I was standing – convinced ritual is a locked door they haven’t found the key for yet. It isn’t locked. You’ve been doing it for years, just without the label. Light the candle. See what happens.
