Quotes About Ritual

Beauty and perfection do not guarantee grace and fulfillment and are always sacrificed. Life itself seems a ritual of sacrifice, and the world the alter on which plants and animals lay down their own lives for the sustenance of others, and on which we lay our youth, our well-being, our loved ones, and finally our lives. I am an ignorant woman who has sacrificed all of these things but the last, and cannot say for whom or what I perform this unrelenting ritual.

Rather than seeing a contest between druid and Christian, I see a kinship between stone chapel and stone circle. One encloses and protects the spirit; the other exposes it and joins it with the elements.

That'll be one gold coin per passenger," he said. "Living gods, hand the coin directly to me. Dead mortals, have a relative slip it under your tongue.

People don't seem to make Smoking Bishop nowadays: it's a fragrant concoction of red wine, port wine and spices, and my beloved Matt was very fond of a glass directly after a chilly Matins; you must first stick a lemon with cloves and sugar-lumps, roast it beside a medium fire until caramelized, then place in your pan of wine to simmer gently for twenty minutes.)

He realized that the ritualized world he had dismissed as feminine was in fact civilization.

All who have come to me must have enema each day.

He is folding cranes so that your mother can string them. This is marriage.

Last year, that Fischer idiot threw a black-and-white cookie at me, and I started to wonder if every principal exited this school with a ceremonial baked good fling.

When the water boiled, Michiko poured it into the pot of green leaves and we both waited in the thick silence. I felt strangely calmed by this simple ritual I had seen my mother do many hundred times before. It was all that seemed to make sense in this place and I held on to it as if I were drowning.

A good ritual facilitates, first and foremost, not only engagement with the Holy but the receptivity and vulnerability of head and heart space that makes that possible.

it's a structured way of engaging with the sacred. It's a container for such engagement to happen. It's a protocol by which we can maintain right relationship in our direct engagements with the sacred.

Durkheim be damned, those of us who actually honor the Gods believe that there is more to religion than social mummery.

Civilization begins with soap.

Thomas Hieke puts the matter: "This dramatic narrative dispels the misunderstanding that one can compel God to behave in a certain way through human—or more exactly—ritual action.

The next step was to remove the brain. The priest took a long iron rod with a hook on it. He pushed it up through Tut's nose, broke through the bone behind the eyes with a squick sound, and twirled the rod around like a whisk to break up and liquefy the brain. Again, they believed the heart was the location for thought, so the brain had no purpose.

There are three elements of the traditionalist pathway: ritual (or liturgical pattern); symbol (or significant image); and sacrifice. Evelyn Underhill, a popular Christian writer in the early part of this century, calls these three elements "sensible signs of supra-sensible action."9 They are ways we use the physical world to express nonphysical (spiritual) truths.

Dancing as if language had surrendered to movement - as if this ritual, this wordless ceremony, was now the way to speak, to whisper private and sacred things, to be in touch with some otherness. Dancing as if the very heart of life and all its hopes might be found in those assuaging notes and those hushed rhythms and in those silent and hypnotic movements. Dancing as if language no longer existed because words were no longer necessary...

These elements of the high priest's garments, as well as the other Levites' wardrobe were for the purpose of glory and beauty. But on this Day of Atonement, there was yet more glory and beauty at work. Eleazer first washed himself at the brazen laver that stood before the Tent of Meeting to cleanse himself for the ritual.

the sacrifice." Eleazer took a bull and killed it for his own sins, letting the blood drain into a bronze basin. He would then clean the animal and burn it on the brazen altar of sacrifice that stood before the bronze laver. Caleb quizzed Achsah some more. "And what is the purpose of the high priest sacrificing for himself first?" She said, "He too is in need of forgiveness of sins to be able to represent his people.

Human sacrifice empowered the gods with the spiritual life source of their victims.

The Wedding March has a bit of a death march in it.

Magic enables man to carry out with confidence his important tasks, to maintain his poise and his mental integrity in fits of anger, in the throes of hate, of unrequited love, of despair and anxiety. The function of magic is to ritualize man's optimism, to enhance his faith in the victory of hope over fear. Magic expresses the greater value for man of confidence over doubt, of steadfastness over vacillation, of optimism over pessimism.

Often, the King would dance himself, rolling his scapulars and weaving his steps around the skulls of his favourite victims. Or he would amuse himself by teaching little boys to chop heads, and when they made a mess of it shout, 'Not that way, you fool! Think of chopping wood!' 

chair under the doorknob of her bedroom door and found some cans to put around the door. The next morning she tied those cans together and hung them from the door. And, every night for the rest of my days living with my grandmother, the cans were on the door and the chair was up under the knob. I would try to sleep while listening to make sure the cans didn't move.