This paper explores the way religious experience is constructed through ritual performance. Many studies of rituals have devoted their discussion to symbols and the meanings symbols connote.
However, meaningful symbols alone do not explain how religion is able to clothe “these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic” (Geertz 1973:90). I am more concerned with the efficacy of the rituals in creating a religious experience that transforms the realities of individual participants. In a religious ritual, “what renders the performance compelling is not primarily the meanings embodied in symbolic material themselves … but the way the symbolic material emerges in the interaction” (Schieffelin 1985:721). Interaction in a ritual can take many forms. It can be the exchange of words and symbolic actions among performers of the ritual, or interaction among the sequences of events, or interchange of past and present realities. Those kinds of interactions are especially important for the spontaneous and open-ended charismatic Catholic prayer rituals where the fulfilling of individual moods and motivations are of central importance.
