Quotes About Ritual

Ritual he liked, but compulsory routine he hated. Thus, he resented every minute that he now had to surrender to showering, shampooing, shaving, and flossing and brushing his teeth. If mere men could devise self-defrosting refrigerators and self-cleaning ovens, why couldn't nature, in all its complex, inventive magnificence, have managed to come up with self-cleaning teeth? There's birth, he grumbled, there's death, and in between there's maintenance.

on Sundays because of an archetypal psychological response to menstruation.

Besides, what kind of pilgrimage would it be if it didn't contain some element of hardship and enigma? The quest is essential to the ritual. To orient ourselves at the interface of the visible and invisible worlds - which may be the purpose of all pilgrimages - we must embrace the search as well as its goal. If our journey into the heart (or vagina) of meaning resembles in any appreciable manner our last trip to the shopping mall, we're probably doing something wrong.

these sacrifices sustained the cosmic cycle: Maize became blood, and blood was then transformed back into maize. Sacrificial victims were referred to as "tortillas for the gods.

Give us this day our daily mask.

Carefully they replaced the soil and covered the entire grave with uprooted grass. Neither one had spoken a word.

So holy water really does work?

God is looking for righteousness over ritual. He wants our lives and our hearts and our actions. Jesus warned us that, "These people draw near to Me with their mouth, And honor Me with their lips, But their heart is far from Me" (Matt. 15: 8).

Buster emptied his pockets of the pennies he had taken earlier and lined them up in two equal stacks. He and his sister then took turns tossing them back into the fountains, each making wishes that they hoped were simple enough to come true.

Death brings with it a duty and devotion that cannot be explained to those who don't know it. Why, after all, would you keep his crummy plaid shirts and give his good suits away? Why do material things matter at once less and more? Why, in the void, does ritual, both inherited and invented, rush in?

It is re-enactment of the ritual feast, in which the eating of an animal's flesh, or a piece of cake shaped like a breast, signifies the coming together of human and divine, individual with collective, tribal ancestor with member of the tribe, human community with nature, or a woman with her own body and feelings.

We share in grief and ritualize letting go and moving on, but at heart, all true grief is private. There

It was dramatic, as it should be. Without drama, what is ritual?

tasting the four elements (yoruba) In a ritual adapted from a Yoruba tradition, the bride and groom taste four flavors that represent different emotions within a relationship: sour (lemon), bitter (vinegar), hot (cayenne), and sweet (honey). By tasting each of the flavors, the couple symbolically demonstrates that they will be able to get through the hard times in life and, in the end, enjoy the sweetness of their marriage.

In the fighting that we do, one time we fight over the wheat and all the other grains, another time over the livestock, and at other times over the vineyards. And so, on four occasions we fight over all the fruits of the earth and for those things won by the benandanti that year there is abundance.' Thus, at the core of the nocturnal gatherings of the benandanti we see a fertility rite emerging that is precisely patterned on the principal events of the agricultural year.

And it seems to me that life, this brief life, is nothing other than this: the incessant cry of these emotions that drive us, that we sometimes attempt to channel in the name of a god, a political faith, in a ritual that reassures us that, fundamentally, everything is in order, in a great and boundless love—and the cry is beautiful. Sometimes it is a cry of pain. Sometimes it is a song.

Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day.

For some, religion is the cement that seals shut their door on the world

Nervously I looked around, but most of the audience joined in. They seemed unaware that they were praying. They didn't realize they were invoking and praising an Indian deity.

...I maintain that one strong cup of tea is better than 20 weak ones. All true tea-lovers not only like their tea strong, but like it a little stronger with each year that passes....

On December 1, 1947, the Great Beast died, aged seventy-two.

I swear it by earth and water,"said the boy in green. "I swear it by bronze and iron," his sister said. "We swear it by ice and fire," they finished it together. Bran groped for words. Was he supposed to swear something back to them.-- "May your winters be short and your summers bountiful,"he said.

A true knight is cleanly as well as godly," the old man always said, insisting that they wash themselves head to heels every time the moon turned, whether they smelled sour or not.

Summer Islanders. That's how they mourn. They answer death with life.