By: Alan Seaver, Sept 3, 1998

"Every man must climb a mountain."

"Because it was there."
. --Sir Edmund Hillary

Security comes in many packages. Material security: a career; a nice house; a reliable car; or maybe a big fat bank account wrapped up in blue-chip stocks and bonds. Spiritual security: family; a list of accomplished goals; christening your child with a long-held family name.

Rituals also come in many packages. Material rituals: well, there are no material rituals, really. Anything can become a ritual. What turns a simple act into a ritual is that it makes you feel good about yourself. So by that definition, all rituals are spiritual: weddings; bar-mitzvahs confirmation. First car, first cigarette, first lay. Burning the mortgage, lighting the anniversary candle. Even singing "Happy Birthday" once a year as you extinguish candles representing the fire of your youth. Rituals are all around us, and we all probably participate in several each day without realizing it. (There is a fine line between ritual and obsessive/compulsive disorder, but that is for another time.)

Ritual and security. At first the two seem complimentary: participating in a ritual gives us a sense of security; of belonging, doing the right thing. But ritual is the paradoxical tangent where security and insecurity join.

To back up a moment, security and insecurity are two parts of the same whole. Just as shapes would not exist without empty spaces to define them, or as the concept of light could not be without the darkness to create its boundaries, we would have no security without a constant flow of insecurity. Insecurity breeds security, and security breeds insecurity. So... How does this happen?

Mystery requires ritual to overcome insecurity... but on the other hand, a world of security and no mysteries leads to a different form of insecurity which causes people to create mysteries to be insecure about! In one way, rituals are a shield to maintain the mysteries behind them. No one participating in the ritual penetrates the shield to expose what lies behind it.

But at the same time, the ritual is used to ease our fear of those mysteries. In ancient times, a community made sacrificial offerings to tempremental gods. "We'll give you this goat if you don't flood our fields again." They gained the security of a good crop, but added the burden: fear of the gods. And should the crop fail, the lurking anxiety of wondering what they did wrong. And at no time--that we know--did anyone examine the mechanics behind why the fields flooded in the first place. They "knew" they had angered the gods, and that was all anyone needed to know. Orthodoxy.

We live out this paradox daily. You get in a car for a trip. If the car is a newer one, it probably has air bags. Very safe! You drive to the next town, most likely via the interstate, where the pavement is smooth, not many steep hills, and no sharp curves. It's so safe that you drive very, very fast. Suddenly you've made this road unsafe; you've reversed the reason you took this route to begin with.

Once in the next town, you drive in to the same fast-food that's available every three blocks across the country; in fact, you ate at an identical restaraunt in your home town the other day, and ate the same thing.

A little farther down the road, you park your car in a lot monitored by security cameras, then walk down a smooth, safe asphalt path and get on a roller-coaster.

You have made a journey filled with consistency and safety, the hallmarks of security. Yet you effectively and deliberately short-circuited each system by driving dangerously fast, eating food that you know is heart-clogging, and by deliberately summoning your greatest fears on an amusement park ride.

People don't like security; yet they enjoy the ritual. Individually, it probably makes them feel more important by giving them the sense that they're onto something that few other people know about. And insecurity is a wilder, bumpier ride with more scenery. Security is for people who like the interstate.

Basically, everyone's always goin' in circles. We've turned the search for insecurity into a ritual itself. Nature abhors a vacuum, and human nature abhors an absolute. We like loopholes. Loopholes are our true security--secure in the knowledge that there's always an escape clause. We can find insecurity when we want it.