Dr.

So I haven't really blogged about the final PhD milestone - the graduation. I went back to visit Wollongong for the first time since I moved in July, largely because I wanted to go to my graduation ceremony.

Anyone who has been to a graduation ceremony (your own or a loved one's) knows it isn't exactly riveting viewing. It's crowded, and long, with lots of "you can achieve anything you set your mind to" speeches. I'm not one for pomp and ceremony. Traditions in which I can no longer see the point irritate me. I remember being quite critical of my first graduation ceremony, and just wanted to get in and out. It was a "for the parents" moment.

But this time I really wanted to go. Not because I thought it would be any more entertaining or any less pompous, but because I really needed to enact the ritual. I needed to go through the motions to feel like it was all properly over. To know, or even to convince myself, that I was really finished. And because I had this different attitude going in, I noticed and appreciated far more about the ceremony. I realised, feeling somewhat daft, that many completing their undergraduate degree felt as I did - exhausted, and ready to shut the door on that chapter of life. Rituals help us do that; they give us a pathway through which to move on. Perhaps the pomp and ceremony has a place after all, I thought (though I'm still not comfortable with the 'status' and 'improving your worth' rhetoric that goes along with it).

It reminded me about some thoughts and discussions I had shared with the Wollongong girls a few years back about ritual and ceremony as it relates to faith. I remember us talking about (probably inspired by Rob Bell) God giving the Israelites rituals to enact not because he needed them in order to feel worthy, but because it helped them worship and understand smething of who God is. Rituals and traditions are often enacted for others - for their benefit, to meet their expectations. But this is when they are empty. When rituals and traditions are enacted because they help you understand something, process something, celebrate something of value to you, or to move forward, they can be quite beautiful.