Quotes About Ritual

This is the prevalence of ritual. To remember something that cannot be forgotten.

I tend to celebrate crossing over with a meditative ceremony where I print the book out and neatly stack its pages on the floor. When everything has been properly laid out, I take a few steps back from the work, close my eyes, and offer up my thanks to the writing powers for another bountiful harvest. At which point, I get a running start and dive headlong into my word-pile, rolling around and snorting like a pig. And then I fall asleep for three days. How you celebrate is up to you. But

Food is a gift and should be treated reverentially--romanced and ritualized and seasoned with memory.

Unwrapping the leftover currant bread at the Grotes' that evening, I tell them about my party. Mr. Grote snorts. "How ridiculous, celebrating a birth date. I don't even know the day I was born, and I sure can't remember any of theirs," he says, swinging his hand toward his kids. "But let's have that cake.

Ritual is the way you carry the presence of the sacred. Ritual is the spark that must not go out.

I like coffee so much that I have tea for breakfast. The first cup of the day in particular is so good that I'm afraid I won't be able to properly appreciate it when I am half-asleep.

A good old custom. Always fornicate Between clean sheets and spit on a well-scrubbed floor.

The bodhi tree has been converted into a marriage tree. The belief is that young women who die before marriage should have a husband in the next world. Their relatives bring a wedding dress and monks to this tree and perform a wedding ceremony. The spirit of the dead woman is married to a famous singer, poet or magician who died many years ago. Their families believe that he'll be a good husband will look after each wife as if she were the only one.

He honestly expected her to believe that she could make a bad offering and her ancestors wouldn't mind.

In olden times sacrifices were made at the altar, a custom which is still continued.

the ancient blood libel: that every year at Passover, Jews ritually slaughter Christian children and use their blood to bake matzo.

these instances bore none of the harrowing features of racially motivated torture, mutilation, and cruelty endemic to Euro-American lynching of African Americans. In Germany, the ritual did not culminate as it did in roughly five thousand cases in the United States between the end of the American Civil War and 1968—in actual human sacrifice.

Spoken in the context of the riots, the words did not kill but they enacted and performed, and what they performed was a murder: a ritual murder. Not the Jews but their Christian accusers performed the ritual murder.

Moritz Stern's Source Contributions to the Position of the Popes on the Jews, which gathered together the medieval papacy's impressive record denouncing the ritual-murder accusation

I mean, I do wear a wedding ring and take it off when I shoot.

There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.

Starting on time, with everything just right, and the surgical drapes placed in exactly the right way, the instruments tidily laid out, is an important way of calming surgical stage fright.

Culture is a sacred activity, an exercise in the sphere of religion.

A feeling such as she had known when about to take the first plunge in bathing came upon her, and she crossed herself. That familiar gesture brought back into her soul a whole series of girlish and childish memories, and suddenly the darkness that had covered everything for her was torn apart, and life rose up before her for an instant with all its bright past joys.

If you exchanged wedding vows, tape them to your bathroom mirror and read them aloud to yourself every morning along with the ritual brushing of teeth. It's not realistic to believe that you will live your promises as a daily practice -- unless you're a saint or a highly evolved Zen Buddhist. Not where marriage is concerned. But you can make a practice of returning to your vows when the going gets rough.

That's it?" "That's it. And then you jump in. It's all just tradition. I mean,

It's Christmas again, time to celebrate the transformation of Ebenezer Scrooge. You know the ritual: boo the curmudgeon initially encountered in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, then cheer the sweetie pie he becomes in the end. It's too bad no one notices that the curmudgeon had a point -- quite a few points, in fact.

The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender's inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for every one else the proper pleasure of ritual.

When our participation in a rite becomes perfect we think no more of ritual, but are engrossed by that about which the rite is performed; but afterwards we recognize that ritual was the sole method by which this concentration could be achieved.