Rituals

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We all love a ritual, unless it is dragging on and on and has lost its meaning for us because our minds have already escaped. This last sentence reminds me of sitting in full academic doctoral regalia at a university graduation ceremony after having sat through an endless-seeming speech by some dignitary and trying to sit attentively while hundreds, if not thousands, of graduates walk across the stage to receive their degrees. Yes, it is a meaningful ritual. But sometimes what is meaningful gets buried in the enormity of the event.

Today the United States remembers 9/11. Rituals are being held all over the country in remembrance of those who died and in support of those who were left to mourn them. These rituals are necessary to support our healing as a nation. However, a nation is made up of individuals, so this morning my topic is going to be using rituals to enhance our spiritual journey. Of course, most of us have rituals embedded in our formal religious experiences that have and will continue to have given tremendous support to us as we grow spiritually. But, what about those rituals that can help us in this manner that we do alone or with a trusted friend?

Here is a list of "personal spiritual rituals" I have experienced:

* Writing your prayers on small scraps of paper, wrapping them in small bundles of cloth, and tying them to a tree or bush branch (Native American),

* Writing your problems on small pieces of paper and putting them in a "God Box" (symbolic of "Letting Go and Letting God")

* Praying my desires for self-growth over a few seeds, and planting the seeds with prayer (their growth is symbolic of prayers being answered)

* Sending prayers to God on/with the smoke of burning incense

* Writing down a self-study of my "wrongs," shredding it, and burning the torn document (symbolic of letting them go to God)

This morning, as I asked God to lead me to what he wanted me to write about, he led me to this story:

"'My grandmother, she was very wise, and she gave me a hat, and I told every word of hate out of me and into the hat, and then we buried that hat so deep you couldn't dig it up in a week. 'So much for that hate,' said my grandmother, and you would be surprised how right she was.'"(Doyle, B, 2012, Daily Guideposts, p. 408).

I love this story. I love its simplicity. I find myself wanting to find a big, big hat so I can stuff all of the world's hate into it and dig a hole deep enough to bury it without destroying the earth. But this morning, I am going to focus on a specific collection of "hates." My arthritic wrists dictate that I perform this ritual in my mind rather than in reality, so I am going to visualize putting this specific "hate collection " into a hat and burying it. Today's collection of "thrown away hate" will be all the hatred I see, hear, or read about connected to what happened on 9/11 and projected onto an entire culture rather than the individuals who planned and carried out the plot to harm our country on 9/11.

Writing that last paragraph helped me realize I can use this technique on a daily basis to focus on ridding my reality of each day's "encountered or felt hates". I cannot change the world, but I can change myself and send forth "ripples of change" across the ocean of our reality.

Please comment and share your thoughts about how you use rituals to support your spiritual journey. May God bless and keep you.