Why You Need to Read Kierkegaard

"Desire is born and sustained only by absence, and the more strongly the absence is felt, the stronger the desire. Thus the impossible striving toward the missing object . . . But the demands of faith are different. If God is transcendent and inaccessible, then perhaps God is simply the name we give to the absence that is desire. Which would mean that attempts to grasp God, so to speak, are folly." 

Jake Romm in Absence and Desire: Kierkegaardian Silence in Hlynur Pálmason's Godland

According to Jung, religion is anything that provides escape from egocentricity, relief from the mundane. As humans, we exist within our rituals and traditions by projecting our inner desires into a physical routine rather than confronting our conscious awareness. Our rituals guide us through modes of perception, it is in our inherent nature to soothe our restlessness with repetition. 

In The River Between by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, there is an eerie passage of the devout Christians shaming the Gikuyu tribe for failing to cover the corpse during their ancestral burial rites. The idea of leaving one's deceased physical form to be left ravaged by nature's course was barbaric, it was a horrific shame to equalize their neighbors who chose not to cover their dead. The rites of funeral ceremonies are so important to us humans, they help us acknowledge the reality of death, maintain identity through crisis, and most importantly, encourage an expression of grief that lies consistent with cultural values. Our personal traditions, rituals, and coping mechanisms are so wonderfully intricate, that they mold us into who we are. Loss is so tragically mysterious, that the way we understand such mysteries is influenced by how we choose to continually restructure ourselves. I understand how the Christians could scorn the Gikuyus for having their own burial rites, they simply did not hold the mental capacity to understand that our different rituals are simply varying interpretations of universal questions that continue plaguing us, even today. 

Who can we be without our rituals?