144 Quotes About Ritual

To the Catholic, including the quasi-Catholic and twice-a-year Catholic, all manner of actual and heterodox and lapsed Catholics, a church service is really about ritual.

To obey God is better than any observance of religious rituals

I'm not particularly in favor of doctrine or creed, ordination, the elevation of holy texts, the institution of church, or, for that matter, Christianity. Like most religions, it has irreconcilable shortcomings and an unforgivable history. What I do favor is the attempt to make sense of things by living within a story. The Christian story, for good or ill, is my inheritance.

Dr. Murray points to the Nazarite system as what he calls an external scaffolding supporting human efforts at righteousness, reminding the participant that he is set apart. Christ, he said, needed no external reminder that the Father was His joy and that wine was not, that He was Life and was wholly Other from death, that He bore on Himself the shame that long hair but vaguely pointed to.

The next day, the cycle starts again. We’re set out like decorative plates in this cavernous architecture, and such a craggy dining hall it is. Not exactly a Claude Monet cottage, more of a Medieval bastion—a vestige of Roman conquests. It still moans with the rickety sounds of age. I can almost hear the grumblings of ancient inhabitants.

We often assume the religious are superstitious, but maybe they are performance artists instead, embodying ideas which wander namelessly—dangerously—through the psyche.

Spiritual: Be ‘Spirit’ and leave the ritual.

That's what this book is all about--taking things we do every day and layering meaning and ritual onto them, even experiences as ordinary as reading or eating--by thinking of them as spiritual practices.

Every spoken sentence beginning with ‘I Am’ is a powerful spell exhaled into action. Describe yourself wisely.