Do we all need ritual?  In a dinner conversation I had over the weekend, one person stated that it seemed that the human being cannot do without ritual.  In particular, she said, people cannot do without some type of religious ritual.
     Addressing this statement requires that we first define ritual.  All of us, I wager, engage in ritual.  This could be something as simple as drinking a glass of water in the morning, any type of activity in which we almost instinctively engage each and every day. Moreover, some people might say that they do these simple "rituals" religiously, meaning that they do them consistently.  Indeed, the root of the word "religion" refers to the erection of some type of fence, boundary, or structure designed to shape or order some level of human activity.
     Clearly, however, "religious" rituals and rituals of religion, are not always the same. Most of us engage in personal rituals religiously, but not as many of us engage in rituals of religion.  On the other hand, religion, belief, or not, every person on this planet functions on the basis of various assumptions and presuppositions about what life is. Everyone begins with some type of belief.  We can call this belief religious, or we can call it secular, but we cannot avoid what it is:  a belief.  And adhering to any sort of belief demands adhering to some type of ritual.  In a very real way, we all begin with a degree of faith, a ritualistic faith, in something.  After all, we're thoroughly human.
     So do we need religious ritual?  We only need religious ritual if we need religion.  And we only need religion if we agree that we cannot understand ourselves and our world fully, if we agree that we must in some way live by faith.  For this reason, though we can dismiss religious ritual, we cannot dismiss that we would be hard pressed to make sense of reality without it.
     We're very little creatures in a very big universe.