A Spirit that Suffers. The Role of Suffering and Ritual in Experiencing Crises through the Example of the Waldorf School

Abstract

The text is devoted to the role of ritual and art in overcoming individual suffering and social crises. Although unpopular in the contemporary culture of analgesics, focused on achieving quick results, the ritual process (as Maria Mendel and Tomasz Szkudlarek show after Turner) is essentially identical to the experience of crisis. Therefore, going through rituals has the potential of transgression, and solving difficult situations for individuals and societies. I discuss this with examples of the changes in birth narratives and also showing the ways of dealing with trauma of Martin Miller, son of the famous psychotherapist Alice Miller.

Another feature of contemporary culture is the rejection of the sacrum, as illustrated by the removal of theosophical threads from Maria Montessori’s biography and the marginalization of Rudolf Steiner's Waldorf schools, which stem from the crisis of Western rationality. Reproduced and mediated by art, rituals are used in Waldorf schools for educational and developmental purposes, and, according to the theories above, they may have the potential to overcome adolescence crises.