The relationship of religion to theater has cropped up multiple times in the past few weeks. For one of my other classes, we’ve been reading and discussing not only about the relationship between religion and theater, but also the relationship of those things and video games. Each have similiarities in that they create an alternate set of rules that are different than mundane day-to-day life, and in that each of them are interactive through imagery.
Madeline L’engle’s quote (“When we lose our myths we lose our place in the universe . . . the only way we have to grope toward the infinite is through myth.”) is an interesting one that illustrates a method of interacting with the world – not the world of religion or theater, but our mundane day-to-day one. The way I interpret her meaning in this context is, every human being has aspirations that differ from their current reality. Those aspirations, she says, are desires that are “mythical” in the sense that they don’t exist, at least not yet.
What theater, or religion, or video games do, is help us to move closer toward achieving our mythical desires by illustrating stories or practices that have worked for others. Through interactive imagery and rulesets, one’s idea for a myth can become reality in a helpful and inspirational manner.

Slightly differing from the description offered in this article, I classify a “ritual” as a common act or series of unimportant tasks that, through ceremony, are elevated to have higher meaning than they would normally. I agree that it does not typically communicate any sort of “statistical sense of information”, but I’d have to add that it does have a purpose. Through ritual, one venerates a space or action, even elevating the status of something normal or common to be more important, at least for a short while. Rituals are important because, through the veneration of a space or action, a purely emotional (not informational) signal is sent to all those who watch or interact with it.
A couple of rituals that I practice include: (usually) wearing in-ear earbuds before I go out the door. This prepares myself mentally to interact with the outside world that is immensely different than that of my apartment. Another: before I go to sleep, I browse Reddit for memes. This calms my brain, winding down my thoughts and emotions, taking me into a different world than the stressful one of work.