Introduction Ceremony Quotes

A glass of water has no value on its own, but the moment it quenches the thirst of an exhausted person, it turns more valuable than gold. Be a glass of water and quench the thirst of others. A glass of water doesn’t need any fancy introduction to be hailed important, it doesn't need pomp and ceremony to be seen as significant, it doesn’t need any fancy attire to appear appealing, all it needs to do is be there for the thirsty.

The ever-present war in the background lent a pleasant informality to social relations, an informality which older people viewed with alarm. Mothers found strange men calling on their daughters, men who came without letters of introduction and whose antecedents were unknown. To their horror, mothers found their daughters holding hands with these men. Mrs. Merriwether, who had never kissed her husband until after the wedding ceremony, could scarcely believe her eyes when she caught Maybelle kissing the little Zouave, Rene Picard, and her consternation was even greater when Maybelle refused to be ashamed. Even the fact that Rene immediately asked for her hand did not improve matters. Mrs. Merriwether felt that the South was heading for a complete moral collapse and frequently said so. Other mothers concurred heartily with her and blamed it on the war. But men who expected to die within a week or a month could not wait a year before they begged to call a girl by her first name, with "Miss," of course, preceding it. Nor would they go through the formal and protracted courtships which good manners had prescribed before the war. They were likely to propose in three or four months. And girls who knew very well that a lady always refused a gentlemen the first three times he proposed rushed headlong to accept the first time.

Foreword Reviews Magazine. Foreword Reviews. Summer 2014 issue. "By way of introduction to Vivienne Kruger’s Balinese Food, bear in mind that eight degrees south of the equator, this modest-sized lava rich, emerald green island rests among the 17,508 remote, culturally distinct constellation of Indonesian islands. It is home to three million mortals who believe they are protected by an unfathomable number of Bali-Hindu goddesses and gods that inhabit the island’s sacred mountain peaks. The Balinese are unlike almost any other island people in that they are suspicious, even distrustful of the sea, believing mischievous spirits and negative powers dwell there—the underworld, as it were. Yes, they eat seafood, they just mostly let other Indonesians do the fetching. Fittingly, Kruger’s masterful use of language; dogged, on the ground conversations with thousands of Balinese cooks and farmers; and disarming humanity leads to a culinary-minded compendium unlike almost any other. Bali, you got the scribe you deserved. What made Kruger’s work even more impressive is the fact that almost nothing about Balinese food history has been written down over the years. She writes: “Like so many other traditions in Bali, cooking techniques and eating habits are passed down verbally by elders to their children and grandchildren who help in the kitchen. However, Indonesia has an old orally transmitted food culture because the pleasure of storytelling is entwined with the pleasure and effort of cooking and eating.” Balinese Food is framed around twenty-one chapters, including the all-important Sacred Ceremonial Cuisine, Traditional Village Foods, the Cult of Rice, Balinese Pig, Balinese Duck, and specialized cooking techniques like saté, banana leaf wrappers, and the use of bumbu, a sacred, powerful dry spice paste mixture. In the chapter Seafood in Bali, she lists a popular, fragrant accompaniment called Sambal Matah—chopped shallots, red chilies, coconut oil, and kaffir lime juice—that is always served raw and fresh, in this case, alongside a simple recipe for grilled tuna. An outstanding achievement in the realm of island cooking and Indonesian history, Balinese Food showcases the Balinese people in the most flattering of ways.

My introduction to the Roman Catholic world was a full immersion baptism in the heady milieu of an Irish—American wedding. The man I was dating, who later became my husband, had invited me to attend the wedding ceremony of a high—school classmate, consisting of a weekend of dinners, parties and, of course, church. It was one of our first dates, a fact that now seems rich with God’s good humor.

To those who fully open themselves to it, Yom Kippur is a life-transforming experience. It tells us that God, who created the universe in love and forgiveness, reaches out to us in love and forgiveness, asking us to love and forgive others. God never asked us not to make mistakes. All He asks is that we acknowledge our mistakes, learn from them, grow through them and make amends where we can.

But Spain in the immediate post-war period remained a place of frighteningly separate social worlds. Alongside savage poverty and widespread terror, there existed other milieux of ease, security, and order regained. As Republican women were shaved and dosed with castor oil by the ‘victors’ of their villages, or transported with their children across Spain in cattletrucks, or raped in police stations, women of the southern landed aristocracy or from affluent provincial middle-class families in Spain’s conservative heartland celebrated the redemption of their private family sphere and revelled in the upsurge of public Catholic ceremonial. As one woman who had been close to the conservative Catholic party, CEDA, commented resonantly many decades later: there was an absence of freedom, but logically for those of us who had well-ordered lives, those of us who were professionals and saw things from the personal viewpoint only, we felt very much at ease and happy.

The actual exercise of Israel's relationship with God began with the king and was managed by a hereditary priesthood. During the monarchical period, publics devotions took place at various shrines, and the Jerusalem Temple eventually became the supreme focus of state-sanctioned ceremony. The principal rite—public and private—was animal sacrifice. Tanakh glosses over the underlying rationales, but, at its root, such sacrifice was intended to repair divine-human relationship disordered by the supplicants' impure acts.

Two debuted at Los Angeles: the introduction of the now familiar medal ceremony, with national anthems and a three-tiered podium; and the creation of an Olympic village, not just as a practical solution to an accommodation problem, but as a stage for the production of Olympic tableaux and messages. Berlin completed the curious evolution of the modern Olympics’ use of mythic fire with the staging of a torch relay from Olympia to the host city.

As early as November 1966, the Red Guard Corps of Beijing Normal University had set their sights on the Confucian ancestral home in Qufu County in Shandong Province. Invoking the language of the May Fourth movement, they proceeded to Qufu, where they established themselves as the Revolutionary Rebel Liaison State to Annihilate the Old Curiosity Shop of Confucius. Within the month they had totally destroyed the Temple of Confucius, the Kong Family Mansion, the Cemetery of Confucius (including the Master’s grave), and all the statues, steles, and relics in the area... In January 1967 another Red Guard unit editorialized in the People’s Daily: To struggle against Confucius, the feudal mummy, and thoroughly eradicate . . . reactionary Confucianism is one of our important tasks in the Great Cultural Revolution. And then, to make their point, they went on a nationwide rampage, destroying temples, statues, historical landmarks, texts, and anything at all to do with the ancient Sage... The Cultural Revolution came to an end with Mao’s death in 1976. In 1978 Deng Xiaoping (1904–97) became China’s paramount leader, setting China on a course of economic and political reform, and effectively bringing an end to the Maoist ideal of class conflict and perpetual revolution. Since 2000, the leadership in Beijing, eager to advance economic prosperity and promote social stability, has talked not of the need for class conflict but of the goal of achieving a “harmonious society,” citing approvingly the passage from the Analects, “harmony is something to be cherished” (1.12). The Confucius compound in Qufu has been renovated and is now the site of annual celebrations of Confucius’s birthday in late September. In recent years, colleges and universities throughout the country—Beijing University, Qufu Normal University, Renmin University, Shaanxi Normal University, and Shandong University, to name a few—have established Confucian study and research centers. And, in the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympics, the Beijing Olympic Committee welcomed guests from around the world to Beijing with salutations from the Analects, “Is it not a joy to have friends come from afar?” and “Within the fours seas all men are brothers,” not with sayings from Mao’s Little Red Book. Tellingly, when the Chinese government began funding centers to support the study of the Chinese language and culture in foreign schools and universities around the globe in 2004—a move interpreted as an ef f ort to expand China’s “soft power”—it chose to name these centers Confucius Institutes... The failure of Marxism-Leninism has created an ideological vacuum, prompting people to seek new ways of understanding society and new sources of spiritual inspiration. The endemic culture of greed and corruption—spawned by the economic reforms and the celebration of wealth accompanying them—has given rise to a search for a set of values that will address these social ills. And, crucially, rising nationalist sentiments have fueled a desire to fi nd meaning within the native tradition—and to of f set the malignant ef f ects of Western decadence and materialism. Confucius has thus played a variety of roles in China’s twentieth and twenty-first centuries. At times praised, at times vilified, he has been both good guy and bad guy. Yet whether good or bad, he has always been somewhere on the stage. These days Confucius appears to be gaining favor again, in official circles and among the people. But what the future holds for him and his teachings is difficult to predict. All we can say with any certainty is that Confucius will continue to matter.

The major festival was the ludi Apollinares (games in honor of Apollo), which lasted from the sixth until the twelfth day of the month. Drama and music performances, introduced in consultation with the Sibylline Books in 212 BCE, were given. The origins of the prophecy prompting the festival’s introduction were unauthorized utterances by a prophet named Marcius, which “the fifteen men in charge of the Sibylline Books and the ceremonies prescribed in them (quindecimviri sacris faciundis)” had deemed authentic.

Accepting a religion may be more like enjoying a poem, or following the football. It might be a matter of immersion in a set of practices. Perhaps the practices have only an emotional point, or a social point. Perhaps religious rituals only serve necessary psychological and social ends. The rituals of birth, coming of age, or funerals do this. It is silly to ask whether a marriage ceremony is true or false. People do not go to a funeral service to hear something true, but to mourn, or to begin to stop mourning, or to meditate on departed life. It can be as inappropriate to ask whether what is said is true as to ask whether Keats’s ode to a Grecian urn is true. The poem is successful or not in quite a different dimension, and so is Chartres cathedral, or a statue of the Buddha. They may be magnificent, and moving, and awe-inspiring, but not because they make statements that are true or false.

First we would receive an introduction to the art of tea ceremony from tea master Michael Sōzui. (Michael once corrected me: 'tea ceremony' as a concept doesn't exist in Japanese; the word is a product of Western imagination and projection. Its name is 茶道 sadō, the way of tea. For this, one does not just drink tea; one practises tea. Tell someone in Kyoto that you do tea, and the meaning is clear. Similarly, 'tea master' is a misnomer: they are 茶人 chajin, or 'tea person', a person who practises making tea.)