Recovering Our Mythology: Ritual Participation

Technologies of Relationship: Recognizing the Love of Agential Participation

 The second movement of This Spiritual Life emphasizes what the Dagara people of West Africa call technologies of relationship. These are the practices and arts by which communities cultivate belonging, navigate meaning, and sustain life together. Far from being peripheral, they are central to human flourishing. Spirituality is not only about what we believe or perceive; it is about how we belong, how we participate, and how we weave meaning together in community. 

Cultures across the world have developed rich repertoires of such technologies. Elemental cosmologies are cross-cultural, giving orientation and order. Whether in the four elements of Greece, the five phases (wuxing) of China, or the pañca mahābhūtas of India, elemental theories can be found in almost every culture. Divination practices open windows into hidden patterns, from West African cowrie-shell readings and Yoruba Ifá, to the Chinese I Ching, to the Roman casting of lots and augury. Rituals mark thresholds of life and death, binding communities across generations: Hindu pūjā, Catholic Eucharist, Native American sweat lodge ceremonies, or the Dagara grief rituals. Mytho-poetic storytelling carries wisdom in forms that shape both imagination and memory, from the Homeric epics and Sumerian myths to Indigenous creation stories and the parables of the world’s religions. Communal festivals and rites — such as the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece, the Jewish Passover seder, or Buddhist Vesak celebrations — create shared spaces of joy, mourning, and renewal. 

Taken together, these technologies of relationship embody what I call the Love of agential participation — the binding force that holds us in relation to one another, to the natural world, and to the unseen. They remind us that spirituality is not an abstract pursuit of truth alone, but a lived practice of weaving and reweaving the fabric of belonging.