Opinion | There Should Be More Rituals! - The New York Times - 1 views
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So great is our hunger for rituals that when we come upon one of the few remaining ones — weddings, bar mitzvahs, quinceañeras — we tend to overload them and turn them into expensive bloated versions of themselves.
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Between these lavish exceptions, daily life goes unstructured, a passing flow of moments. This means we don’t do transitions well
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Rituals often mark doorway moments, when we pass from one stage of life to another. They acknowledge that these passages are not just external changes but involve internal transformation.
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ceremony honors what has taken place. But ritual is a sequence of actions that symbolically walk you through the inner change the new stage of life will require.
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There should be a ritual for that moment, often around age 27 or 28, when the young adult leaves the wandering post-school phase and begins to get a sense for the shape and direction of his or her life
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Rituals encourage you to be more intentional about life. People can understand their lives’ meaning only if they step out of their immediate moment and see what came before them and what they will leave behind when they are gone.
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over 60 percent of Judaism’s 613 commandments involve physical ritual: lighting candles, ritual baths, etc. These deeds are a kind of language, a way of expressing things that are too deep for words.
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naming your limitations, befriending your inner life, realigning your central focus. For example, young adults might create a life map of where they’ve been and hope to go, and present it to their peers
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Maybe neighborhoods and towns could come together to make town compacts. They would vow to be a community together and lay out the specific projects
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It could be an occasion to tell a new version of the town story; a community is a group of people who share a common story
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Most of all, it would be an occasion for people to make promises toward one another — specific ways they are going to use their gifts to solve the common challenge
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we’ve shed old rituals without coming up with new ones. We’ve unwittingly robbed ourselves of a social architecture that marks and defines life’s phases