Of Ritual and the Sacred

Saturday is definitely a better day for a day of rest than Sunday, in my book. If I live my life right, by the time Saturday comes around, I've pretty much exhausted myself and I really need a rest. But Saturday's when all the stores are still open, and it's when the transfer station is open for me to take my trash, and I've got a lot of Saturday rituals I do... like poking around outside... like looking at the basement and contemplating what I need to move/get rid of/re-shelve/bring upstairs... like running around and doing things that I don't get the chance to do during the week. Of course, taking time off this past month or so, I've had plenty of time during the week to get things done, so the old paradigm has shifted a bit. But still, Saturdays are the days I find it easiest to rest and take time off. It's as though my internal clock were wired for the old-style Sabbath.

Anyway, Sundays are often when I do my best thinking. Probably due to having been raised in a church-centric family and taught early on that Sundays are a day of rest. When I was a kid, we were forbidden to do work like homework or other chores on Sundays. We were to read, study the Bible, and do other restful things. I can't remember exactly how I spent my time, aside from wishing I could set my own schedule and not be bothered with this Sabbath business. I guess, even as a kid, I was keyed into Saturdays being my Day of Rest.

Anyway, it's Sunday, today, and I'm slipping into my reflective self again. I woke up thinking about ritual and the sacred. How ritual is such an important part of our lives, and we all have it in evidence, somewhere or another. Twylah Tharp talks about rituals in her "Creative Habit" book -- she has exercises where she asks what your first-thing-in-the-morning rituals are, and she talks about her own (which is rising at 5:30 each morning and hailing a cab to go to the gym to work out).

All of us have our morning rituals... our daily rituals... our weekly, monthly, annual rituals. As individuals, as communities, as a nation, as a planet. But in talking and thinking about rituals, I think there is an element that often gets overlooked about rituals, that qualifies a series of motions that we go through on a daily basis, as more than just motions. There's a quality that our actions need to have, to qualify them as rituals, rather than just rote routine.

That quality, I believe, is a connection to survival. I believe that in order for a set group of motions or gestures or actions, performed on a regular basis in a predefined way, to qualify as "ritual", they need to be imbued with an importance that is directly linked to our survival. We can't just go through the motions. We need to believe that those motions will keep us alive. We need a sense of the mysterious, a sense of the universal, a sense of the awesome and intimidating, in order for our "practice or behavior repeated in a prescribed manner" (as my Random House Dictionary defines 'ritual'), to be more than just habit. The minute we lose the sense that our actions are directly related to keeping us or a part of our existence alive and intact, our ritual becomes meaningless. Our ritual becomes a rut.

Think about it. For eons, people have been doing ritual to appease and appeal to the gods of their land, to assist with crops, weather, everyday logistical issues, pregnancies, marriages, deaths... the whole of life. When people lived a lot closer to the land, and much more was out of their control, than today (if the weather went bad and the crops were destroyed, it could mean half your children died... if illness raised its dread deathskull above a community, even the strongest and hardiest of workers and hunters could succumb, and threaten the survival of everyone).

Ritual, when people still believed that the gods had sway over the elements, had a dominant element of survival to it. It wasn't about getting together on a weekly basis and singing hymns that people all knew. It wasn't about going through the motions to prove you were a good person. It was about ensuring your survival -- the survival of yourself, your children, your spouse, your family, your benefactor, your community, your land. It was about appeasing elements and pleasing deities, to stay alive another year. Ritual wasn't some nicety. It was essential.

Even after basic essentials were put in place by overlords of medieval manors in Western Europe, essentially industrializing mechanics of the land by instituting systems of serfdom and calculated plunder and other management mechanisms which weren't so far removed from what we practice today in the western world, religious ritual was as important as ever.

But attendance at church was more a matter of spiritual life and death, than physical survival. When Church and State were inexorably linked, and the lords of the land had to answer to the representatives of the Lord on High for everything that they did -- and they could be excommunicated (e.g., consigned to the eternal damnation of the flames of hell) -- if they stepped out of line, the participation of the common folk in church services was an essential part of calibrating the depth of local commitment to Church doctrines (not to mention determining how many battle-aged men would be available to fight in wars arranged by either the local lord, or someone's interpretation of the Lord On High). I know I'm simplifying things a bit, and there are many grey areas to medieval history and the relationship between Church and State, but I just want to get to the bottom line, for the sake of making a point.

Even in more modern times, say, the past 300 years or so, in the western world, when science replaced religion as the explanation of How Things Work, and our machines took the place of ceremony in moving the wheels of creation, religious ritual had its place, in that it determined who was a Good Person and who was a Bad Person. It could mean the difference between life and death, for some folks, as being a Bad Person put you in a class of people who were last in line for the proverbial fresh bread and clean water... it put you in a class of people who couldn't get access to the good schools, the good neighborhoods, the good "stuff" that put you at the top of the pecking order. Being a Good Person, or a Good Christian, gave you a status that magically protected you from suspicion ... suspicions that could mean the difference between a rap on the knuckles or jail time... suspicions that could mean the difference between a good education and a good job and adequate nutrition and health care, and being left behind when the train of the American Dream left the station. In short, the difference between being a Good Person and a Bad Person translated to the difference between good teeth and bad teeth, straight bones or rickets, and a life expectancy of 75 or 45). Clearly, religious ritual, as empty as the ritual itself may have become for people, was still an important component of people's survival, up until the time when people stopped thinking that Christianity necessarily equated with innate goodness, or the promise of Everlasting Life.

Now, I'm not saying that Christianity (or adherence to some other organized faith) *won't* ensure your Eternal Survival. What I'm saying, is that people have stopped believing with the same fervor that Eternal Life is in fact a likelihood, if you follow certain rules and conduct yourself in a "Christian" manner. A lot of grey areas have crept into our perceptions of religion, and while there is greater freedom in that for some (and less freedom for others), the main area in which we've lost ground, is the significance of our religious rituals.

The old hymns don't have the same significance for us, anymore. The act of going to church doesn't hold the same allure for us any longer. The words and motions and activities we associate with Church don't have the same depth for us anymore. We crave ritual, and we crave the kind of ritual that is inexorably linked to our survival. But fewer and fewer of us believe, anymore, that the rituals handed down to us really, truly, will ensure our survival, either in this world, or in the next.

Enter web development. Now, don't get me wrong -- I'm not saying that computers and the world wide web are the new gods of our age (though some could argue it, and win the debate). What I'm saying is, web development in the late 1990's took on the flavor of religious ritual in ways that no other ritual could.

If you look to the old orientation of religious ceremony enabling you to create the world around you, in terms of affecting weather and crops and the lives of your loved-ones and community, and you consider the significance of ritual to be that of literally creating the world around you, by the appeasement or manipulation of the elements/mysteries, then web development totally fit the bill.

What happened was, a bunch of folks who delved into the mysteries of emerging technologies figured out how to make them work. We figured out how to design and code and test and tweak. We figured out how to create this whole new world that was nothing like anything we'd ever seen or experience before. We figured out how to create applications and platforms and pages and whole sites, that had never, ever existed before. We figured it all out, and people learned about our creations. They came to see what we were up to, we devotees of this Divine Creative force, and they liked what they saw.

Suddenly, the geeky nerd outcasts of grade school, the kids who had to hire dates for the prom or didn't bother going, at all, the queers and the oddballs, were members of a new priesthood. We liked the experience. We liked it a lot - not just because suddenly we were imbued with a wonder and a mystery that others could only begin to imagine, but because we suddenly had the kind of power to create the world around us that had eluded us all our lives, in the social milieu.

It wasn't so much that we could suddenly impress girls (or boys) and be the most popular kids on the block. Oh, no. We'd tapped something far more appealing and significant. We could suddenly do more than chafe at our helplessness in the social arena -- we could actually leave the social arena behind, where we were at such a disadvantage, and create a completely different and new world where *we* were the ones making the rules, where *we* were the ones who held the keys to the kingdom, where *we* were the ones who knew How Things Worked, and we could make them work the way we wanted, just as the priests of old could manipulate the elements (and I do believe that some of them actually could).

What's more, our power came from following set steps, set protocols, set "practice(s) or routine(s) repeated in a prescribed manner). Each day that we stepped into our cubicles and turned on our PCs and/or monitors, fired up our e-mail, checked for messages, looked over our list of things to do, that day, we were in ritual space. Each day that we met with our other team members to plan and plot our trajectory or troubleshoot issues, we were in sacred space. We were "reverently dedicated to some person or object" (which how my Random House dictionary defines "sacred"). We were totally dedicated to the cause. We were lesser gods. We were but a little less than angels. We were the creators of the world of our choosing and design. We were the Ones Who Knew How Things Worked, and our actions were directly related to the creation and the survival of the world around us.

Now, this brings up an important point about the signficance of ritual. To this point, I've been talking about its importance in terms of survival. But there's another element to it, as well, that bears mentioning -- namely, the role it plays not only in staving off impending doom, but in creating anew that which we desire. Ritual isn't just for preventing death. It's for creating new life. And that, I believe, is where its greatest allure lies.

I spoke earlier of ritual being important in preventing crop failures and untimely deaths. But no people can sustain themselves on avoiding death alone. They need to have some element of creating new life through their ritual, as well. It's not just to keep spring hail at bay, that our ancestors prayed. They also wanted to ensure ample rains and fertile livestock. They didn't just seek to prevent their own gruesome and painful deaths. They wanted long and prosperous and happy lives. Ritual has always been an important tool to prevent bad things, but it's also been a vital took for creating good things.

And that creative aspect was what kept so many of us going, in those heady 1990's. It was the spark of joy that came from a well-executed routine... the rush of excitement from building something that Worked(!). It was the constant encouragement that came on the heels of one successfully deployed website after another. It was the thrill of exploration and the excitement that accompanied each and every aspect of this new way, when there were no best practices in place, when there were no standards available, when everybody was making it up as they went along, and things Just Worked, because we were smart enough and tenacious enough to hang in there till the job was done.

Of course, it took a toll on our health and our minds and our personal lives. Of course, it fried our systems and didn't leave us much to work with at the end of each day and week and month. Of course, it really did a number on our relationships, and a bunch of people I worked with, once upon a time, had a lot of domestic strife as a (direct or indirect) result of the web development frenzy of the late 1990's. But we were looking for something sacred in our lives. We were seeking out ritual. We were creating our own belief systems and our own mechanisms for manipulating and instigating the elements of our world. We were doing something as primal and as essential to human nature, as animal sacrifice once was. We were busy creating the new world from the confines of 6x6 foot fabric-covered boxes. And we loved it.

But something happened along the way, that changed things. It changed things for me, it changed things for a lot of people, and it turned our sacred rituals into rote routines that stripped us of power, rather than imbuing us with it.

We became popular. And that was the beginning of the end.

I write in "Fuel" about how, by 2000, my employer had figured out that the web was actually a force to be reckoned with, and the work of my team had become an essential part of business strategy. That fact, while it did ensure my continued employment, helped to turn the sacred rituals of everyday web development into a rut that sapped the life from me and everyone around me.

Our actions were no longer as powerful as they'd been before, because the things we were doing weren't unique and as innovative as they'd once been. What's more, the people who are In Charge Of Things, had come up with the idea that they could institute "best practices" to follow, and there was increasing managerial oversight to our work. Suddenly, people who had just found out about the web a year or so before (at the most) were in charge of making rules about how websites should be built, how they should look, how they should perform, and what purposes they should serve. Real power to create, based on technical expertise, was taken from the original creators, and handed to the looky-loos.

The Titans had been replaced by the squabbling gods of Olympus.

Do I sound bitter? Perhaps. I'll try not to. But anyone who was in the position I was in, back in 2000, knows what I'm talking about.

But it wasn't the shift of power that ruined all the fun. It was the desecration of the religious rituals of web development by rampaging hordes of program managers and business partners who had dollar signs in their eyes. It was the violation of the creative forces by agents of command and control, who thought that the golden goose would be quite tasty for dinner. It was the secularization of technology, the dumbing down and standardization and process-development, that killed all the fun and turned what was once a deeply fulfilling practice into little more than a "salary continuation program" that supplied about as much inspiration and fulfillment as filling out your tax forms each year.

Actually, filling out your tax forms was more fulfilling -- at least, you could predict what would happen as a result, if you had your numbers all correct. With the folks who rose to power in the last 1990's and took the web by the horns, you never knew what foolishness or political chicanery would drive the initiative du jour.

God, how *stoopid* the sacred quickly became! I mean, you have the means by which to create an entirely new way of thinking and relating and being and working, and some MBA idiot shows up with some Big Idea about what's possible, when they haven't even scratched the surface of possibility. You've got these proverbial rushing streams of inspiration and drive and motivation, and some idiot with a backhoe decides to dam it up to feed their own personal power generator that sucks the life out of that river and turns it into a trickle downstream. You have these wild, raging winds that can move whole deserts for miles, and some goober builds a windbreak, so his shrubbery won't get uprooted. You've got this eternal flame of technical inspiration and genius, tended and fanned and served by a whole army of accolytes who would pay money to be allowed to serve that flame, and someone comes along and says, "Oh, I might get burned!" and snuffs it out.

That's what it was like around 2000, when wannage Idiots started to show up. And it's only gotten worse, as even more wannabe Idiots have queued up at universities to take courses and get degrees that they think qualify them for a "promising and secure career in information technology".

Well, I've got news for you. Not everybody is cut out for the work. And if you're more of a mechanic, than a priest, chances are you'll never attain true greatness in the field. You may find yourself esconced in a prestigious career, but true greatness will evade you, and you'll pass on to the next life perhaps wealthy, but ever mediocre.

You may be able to live with that prospect, but I never could.

Looking back on my trip to England in 2000, I'm struck that the thing that exhausted me so profoundly and that depleted me so completely, was *not* that I was overworked. It was that I was overseen by secularists who had no appreciation for the sacred rituals of web development. The difference between 1998 and 2000 was a whole world. It was the difference between being permitted the license to ply your trade on your own terms, according to the inexorable elemental laws of technology (all 0's and 1's, all binary, all yes'es and no's), and being subjected to the arbitrary, uneducated, uninspired, constantly shifting laws of individual men (and an occasional woman) who either supposed that authority equated with expertise, or didn't give a damn that it didn't.

There was such a dearth of sacred ritual in 2000, it surprises me now that I hung in there as long as I did. The sense of specialness, the sense of promise, the sense of the creative, were long gone, leaving on the shadows of memories. Those shadows kept me going. Along with the underbelly of sacred ritual -- the drive to survive.

Indeed, now that I think about it, the thing that wore me out, more than the fact that ritual had become almost a rut, was the manner in which that ritual was used. It was the base survival aspect of the ritual, that was so dominantly played out, that was the exhausting thing.

I talked, at the start of this piece, about how ritual needs to have an element of survival to it, to keep it going. You can't just show up in a place and go through the motions of your routine and expect that alone to hold meaning enough to sustain you. You need to have an element of survival to it -- keeping out of hell, keeping out of jail -- in order for the ritual to have significance.

Well, our rituals did have significance of that kind -- the "artificial urgency" that was first espoused by management at Hewlett-Packard was taking hold. I read somewhere, onetime, that at HP, one of their guiding principles is to imbue their workforce with an "artificial sense of urgency". In other words, tell them the ship is sinking, so they'll both bail and row harder. Faster! Faster! Faster! Onward! Upward! Unilimited potential! Endless growth! GO! GO! GO! GO! GO! It seemed to work for HP... for a while, anyway.

Well, other people in the IT world thought it might work pretty welll, too, apparently, because gradually and surely as frost in the tundra, that urgency took hold. Especially at my former employer, where we were constantly underfunded and over-committed, and there was precious little opportunity to unwind after one insane project, before the next one started up the following week. There was no cyclical aspect to it -- it was just constant work. And rather than allowing folks time to slow down and recharge, each subsequent project seemed even more demanding than the last.

It really was pretty stupid. Driven largely by people who didn't understand the development process, or who understood it well enough to think they could control it. And over time, our rituals took on more and more aspects of self-defense (preventing famine, preventing floods, preventing plague), rather than pro-active co-creation.

That's what you get, when you have people in charge who just don't understand the elements of the work they're managing. That's what you get, when you have people in charge who were taught in classrooms from books, rather than in the real world. That's what you get, when you haven't a clue how the creative forces of software development function, and you think that you can manipulate them all on the surface and judge them at face value.

Stoopid. Just really stoopid.

Not that I think anyone is really going to learn anything from this, in any way that will substantially change how web development is done in the world. Organizational dynamics haven't changed in eons, and there will always be those who see a good thing, don't have the faintest friggin' clue how that good thing was created or should be sustained, and they think they can package and sell it and get rich. They usually can.

The one person who I think has learned from all of this, is me. And I've learned plenty. Namely, that I'm a staunch and hopeless member of the Creative Class... that I do not suffer fools gladly... that the act of creating software and new technologies is a sacred, creative act for me that's full of ritual and meaning... that it's best if I find work so far out on the cutting edge, that nobody knows how to teach what I know, so there's not a glut of college grads who can bid for work at a fraction of my price... that creation is for me a deeply significant part of my life and it's best not to try to manipulate or control me, if folks want to get the best work out of me... that I belong firmly entrenched in the avant garde, the leading, bleeding edge, the foremost extremes of possibility, far beyond the grasp of people who Think They Know How Things Work, but are really more interested in making money from it, than learning about How Things Do Work. (The modern model of putting non-technical people in charge of managing technical projects, in my estimation, is the equivalent of having a river dam building project overseen by someone who's never actually been in or around water, but they've heard about it secondhand and they've read about water in books. Meanwhile, I'm swimming and rafting in the deep, wild currents of an undammed stream.)

I've learned that it's just no good for me to work with non-technical people who don't have a healthy respect for technology and its possibilities. It's no good for me to work with folks who don't have a depth of experience and tested expertise. And it's no good for me to be stuck in a permanent job that's run by people who don't know How Technology Works, and don't care that they don't know.

Contracting for such people is another story. That I can do. I can do just about anything for a limited amount of time, given the right money.

So, where does that leave me? Looking for work. Looking for technical contracts. Looking for What's Next -- what's so Next, that there's no book written about it, yet. There's no course available on it, yet, there are no "metrics" to determine success or failure in a standard manner. It leaves me where there are no standards, other than What Works, and the only true peers I have, are those who are as far out on the cutting edge, and as steeped in the sacred rituals of leading-edge technology development, as I am. It leaves me with the clear and true knowledge of who and what I am -- a priestess of the new faith, a conjurer of the new forces of a technical nature, a co-creator of the new realities that cannot help but change lives because intensely dedicated people like me are making damned sure that They Work As They Should.

It puts me out there, ahead of the pack. It puts me at a simultaneous advantage and disadvantage. And it makes my life worth living, with all of the sacredness and ritual that this life and this mind do crave.

Amen.