Making the Sun Come Back

When discussing primitive peoples we too easily fall into the habit of understanding their rituals as simplistic and mechanistic.  They would offer sacrifices or engage in particular rituals at the Winter Solstice "in order to make the sun come back," or a similar wording such as "insure that the sun returned that year." I imagine some of them did see it that way, but collectively, we are doing them a disservice. There was a right order of nature, maintained by gods or spirits, and they engaged in the rituals in order to participate in it. While it was true that if rituals were performed wrongly or gods not fed things could start to go bad, it was not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence. Checking the boxes only got you so far. The important thing was that the spirits were placated, the goddesses happy. It was relational rather than contractual.

Christians of all people should understand this, as we endure decade after decade of people who try to make prayer mechanistic and simplistic. It is a partial truth, but the Scriptures are full of additional explanations that the requests should be made in accordance with God's will, or in the name of Jesus, another phrase packed with meaning but sometimes reduced to mere form.  We are to pray with the congregation, or at least two or three others; we are to pray under the influence of the Holy Spirit. It is relational rather than contractual.

God himself sometimes makes it sound unashamedly contractual, so there is something allowed or even encouraged about our thinking and behaving that way.  Perhaps we are not to get too far above ourselves making it too complicated. Yet the relationship not the answer is ultimately the point, at least according to the various catechisms. I tend to trust those, similarly to creeds, of people who were greater saints than I, acting collectively to explain what is said.