Quotes About Ritual

The third Hoel photographer keeps on taking pictures, just as he keeps going to church long after deciding that the entire faithful world has been duped by fairy tales. His pointless photographic ritual gives Frank Jr.'s life a blind purpose that even farming cannot give. It's a monthly exercise in noticing a thing worth no notice at all, a creature as steadfast and reticent as life.

Scholars say that ceremonies normally confirm and celebrate the status quo and deny the shadow side of things (think of a Fourth of July parade), whereas true ritual offers an alternative universe, where the shadow is named (think of a true Eucharist). In the church, I am afraid we mostly have ceremonies.

Your DNA is divine, and the divine indwelling is never earned by any behavior or any ritual, but only recognized and realized (see Romans 11: 6; Ephesians 2: 8–10) and fallen in love with.

Myth is, in fact, something that is so true that it can be adequately expressed only in story, symbol, and ritual. It can't be abstracted and objectified. Its meaning and mystery are so deep and broad that they can be presented only in story form. When you step into a story, you find it is without limits and you can walk around with it and inside it. It is natural to sing, dance, and reenact a story. It is too big and too deep to be merely "understood" or taught.

But eating with genuine good appetite is no easy thing when you are seated at the opposite end of a long table from a man who makes it a point of moral significance to subsist on half a grapefruit, eaten in under a minute so that the bowl could be pushed emphatically away, another duty done.

In the center stood a marble alter, where a kid in a toga was doing some sort of ritual in front of a massive golden statue of the big dude himself:Jupiter the sky god, dressed in a silk XXXL purple toga, holding a lightning bolt. It doesn't look like that, Percy muttered. What? Hazel asked. The master bolt, Percy said. What are you talking about? I- Percy frowned. For a second, he'd thought he remembered something. Now it was gone. Nothing, I guess.

He just summoned the dead with coke and cheeseburgers

She says a wedding is one of the most lamentable spectacles on earth.

Liturgy, literally the work of the people, is the intergenerational stronghold in Christian history.

each week, before they dealt the cards, my father presented his typed report on himself and my mother to Marika, who copied it in her hand, then burned the original.

Among the Yuit Eskimos of St. Lawrence Island, if an individual requested suicide three times, relatives were obligated to assist in the killing. The person seeking suicide dressed in ritual death garb and then was killed in a "destroying place" set aside specifically for that purpose. To save commonly held resources of food or to allow a nomadic society to move on unhindered by the physically ill or elderly, some societies gave tacit if not explicit approval to suicide.

We're not naked, we're skyclad!

We scarified a mosquito. I bet that's what did it. It was probably a virgin too.

I'd been staring at the search term for at least five minutes. One word. Necromancer.

The rottweiler stood his ground and waited for me to take the next step in the dance of ritualized intimidation. Instead, I leaped at him. Screw ritual. Now was not the time to stand on ceremony.

Ma and Pa had taught their sons to keep themselves fresh by bathing at least once a year.

The kiss of peace, which was part of the ritual of the mass, was the symbol of trust, and no contract, from a wedding to a truce, was complete without it.

One of the monks was doing something incomprehensible at the altar, and the others would occasionally chant a few phrases of mumbo jumbo.

aspergillum with which he was sprinkling the holy

That aunt of mine; boy, she used to wear make-up all week long so terrible thick that - well, she started about Wednesday layering it on, and she never washed, and every day she slapped down a new layer. Until Sunday. Then on Sunday she kind of peeled it off to go to church. *** Boy, she was a case; I used to hope she'd skip a Sunday - sleep through to Monday or something - because I knew two weeks' worth of make-up and she'd set up like a statue.

In North America, human sacrifice was practiced by the Heron and Pawnee tribes, although evidence now suggests that a particularly brutal form of ritual immolation was carried out by the Anasazi tribes of the Southwest, ancestors of the Hopi, Zuñi, and Pueblo. Like the Maya and Incas, the Anasazi have become a focal point for intense, especially New Age, beliefs.

The power of habit is very strong.

Nothing is more powerful than custom or habit.

The Shroud was old, and regarded as special, and people believed in it. That could be enough to give it a kind of power, all by itself.