Quotes About Ritual

Any ritual is an opportunity for transformation. To do a ritual, you must be willing to be transformed in some way. The inner willingness is what makes the ritual come alive and have power. If you aren't willing to be changed by the ritual, don't do it.

The way that I feel about my Jewish identity has been really radically changed by events in life. Like, becoming a writer is one. Having children is another. And getting older and watching, you know, my parents and grandparents get older has been another, the seasons of - being witness to the seasons of life and wanting to have some kind of infrastructure to deal with it, to cope with them. Ritual has become more important to me as I've gotten older. It's not always religious ritual, but it often borrows from Judaism.

The preparation for the ritual is the ritual.

Chinese restaurants have long been a weekly or monthly ritual for many Americans.

I see God in a sunrise, not in repetitious ritual.

It's easy to see golf not as a game at all but as some whey-faced, nineteenth-century Presbyterian minister's fever dream of exorcism achieved through ritual and self-mortification.

It's something that exists on a daily basis on practically every street in India. You have people who are Hindus, Muslims, Christians - not just Catholics, but Protestants, you name it, all kinds of Christians - a hundred other religions, living side by side. And the kind of personal religion that people end up practicing is a bizarre concoction of ritual drawn from each other. So everybody ends up celebrating everyone else's festivals.

Amnesia may well be the highest sacrament in the great gray ritual of existence.

The difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one. A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape. It is not destructive. It is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around.

Loneliness is random; solitude is ritual.

The ritual of our daily lives permeate our very bodies.

The true, the genuine worship is when man, through his spirit, attains to friendship and intimacy with God. True and genuine worship is not to come to a certain place; it is not to go through a certain ritual or liturgy; it is not even to bring certain gifts. True worship is when the spirit, the immortal and invisible part of man, speaks to and meets with God, who is immortal and invisible.

In meditation take care not to impose anything on the mind, or to tax it. When you meditate there should be no effort to control, and no attempt to be peaceful. Don't be overly solemn or feel that you are taking part in some special ritual; let go even of the idea that you are meditating. Let your body remain as it is, your breath as you find it, and remain in your natural condition of unchanging pure awareness.

Those of us who preach religion: Preach the meaning of "ritual," and stop burying the people and enslaving the people by religious rituals, and then showing them a hypocritical example in leadership!

When our spirit tells us it is time to weep, we should weep. It is part of the ritual, if you will, of putting sadness in perspective and gaining control of the situation. . . . Grief has a purpose. Grieving does not mean you are weak It is the first step toward regaining balance and strength. Grieving is part of the tempering process.

In Japan, I took part in a tea ceremony. You go into a small room, tea is served, and that's it really, except that everything is done with so much ritual and ceremony that a banal daily event is transformed into a moment of communion with the universe.

As a non-Catholic, and since I was a child, I have been obsessed with the ritual and the beauty of Catholic art. I look at Renaissance art all the time.

I'm not sure how each one of us sees ourselves in the band, but we're being part of this ritual of identity where people see Café Tacvba as something Mexican, as a representation of the Mexican. The songs, the music, the energy given in a concert. Sometimes I question that there's not much decision from our part, like there's something that leads us to this. Something beyond.

When you live a life devoid of ritual and convention, with honesty and self-effacement, then you are on the road to freedom.

Moments like this act as magical interludes, placing our hearts at the edge of our souls: fleetingly, yet intensely, a fragment of eternity has come to enrich time...When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things.

Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.

I had the chance to play with a ghost of the museum. The function and the institution are gone - it's closed - but there is still the building. I was looking for something between an experiment and an extended ritual. I asked 15 actors to be in this museum and take the position of the museum's personnel. I put this small group under certain conditions and influences, interpreted by another group of actors or by real professional performers, like a magician, a psychic, a model, a hypnotist, a singer, a psycho-dramaturge.

Now that I have a 16-month-old son, my weekend ritual has changed - but it's better than ever. We get up early and go for a walk on one of the hiking trails near my home in Los Angeles, then meet up with friends at a diner. There's nothing better than sipping coffee, eating scrambled eggs, and taking three hours to do it.

Lying in bed, half-covered by the blankets, I would drowsily ask why he had come to my door that night long ago. It had become a ritual for us, as it does for all lovers: where, when, why? remember...I understand even old people rehearse their private religion of how they first loved, most guarded of secrets. And he would answer, sleep blurring his words, "Because I had to." The question and the answer were always the same. Why? Because I had to.

We don't have too much ritual in our life anymore. And these life symbols which people rely on to keep their feeling of well being, that life is not too bad after all are required more and more.

I suppose that the scope and implications of such forces have rendered my personal accounting ritual pretty much obsolete. That's how things sometimes go.

If war stems from unmet needs related to male adolescent ritual, that's something that we need to examine. I'm interested in the possibility of simply getting rid of war. I'd be no more willing to let go of that than to let go of the possibility of eradicating cancer. That's not to say I'm certain we can, but I am willing to use any energy at all in the quest.

My telephone calls and meetings and decisions were now parts of a prescribed ritual aimed at making peace with the past; his calls, his meetings and his decisions were already the ones that would shape America's future." (On transfer of power to Gerald R Ford)

Wine, like food, is so emotional. If you think about it, so much of the courting ritual is surrounded by wine and food. There's a built-in romance to wine.

I think we as people struggle for what is meaningful in our lives, and I think that modern, contemporary life is as easy as it's ever been, for many, many people, and the amount of physical exertion, for most people, is less than it's ever been. I think that there is something about the ritual of making things more difficult that people find meaning in.

If theater is ritual, then dance is too... It's as if the threads connecting us to the rest of the world were washed clean of preconceptions and fears. When you dance, you can enjoy the luxury of being you.

A prayer couched in the words of the soul, is far more powerful than any ritual.

I think grief is a huge subject; it's one of the things that everybody is going to confront in one way or another. There's been a lot of books written about how Americans have an odd way of trying to defer grief or minimize the need to grieve. People used to have a lot more ritual grief in their lives. For the most part, we think of it as a strictly temporal process: you grieve for a time and then you're over [it], but it's also a spatial process. It travels across a map.

Like dogs who sniff each other when meeting, chess players have a ritual at first acquaintance: they sit down to play speed chess.

I would, if I could, always feed to music. The singularly graceless action of thus filling one's body with roots and dead animals and powdered grain is given some significance then. One can perform as a ritual what one is shamed to do as a utilitarian action.

Repetition and ritual and their good results come in many forms: changing the oil filter, wiping noses, going to meetings, picking up around the house, washing dishes, checking the dipstick . . . such a round of chores is not a set of difficulties we hope to escape from so that we may do our practice, which will put us on the path. It is our path.

The ritual of exorcism is not practiced by an ordinary priest. An exorcist requires specific training and must be thought to have a personal sanctity. He can be exposed to dangerous behavior and personal threat. His prayers often cause a violent response as he attempts to shine a beam of light into the darkness.

History is the enactment of ritual on a permanent and universal stage; and its perpetual commemoration.