Mundan Ceremony Quotes

Well, there aren’t any graves in mundane wedding ceremonies,” said Tessa. “Though your ability to quote the Bible is impressive. Better than my aunt Harriet’s.” “Did you hear that, James? She just compared us to her aunt Harriet.

That, I think, is the power of ceremony. It marries the mundane to the sacred. The water turns to wine; the coffee to a prayer.

...Tea. There is nothing saner than tea, he thought. ... Tea was the great leveler. It brought calm, quiet, contentment, warmth. And it was something to do. .....Tea-- so normal, so mundane, so hot... ...The heat and scent of it permeated his head and cleared his mind. He understood completely the attraction of ceremonies grounded in the ritual of drinking tea. It required both caution and abandonment of the senses. It demanded that you move into it slowly and savor the moment. And it rewarded you with warmth and delicacy of taste and refreshment. And after you were done, it could parse out your future.

That, I think, is the power of ceremony: it marries the mundane to the sacred. The water turns to wine, the coffee to a prayer. The material and the spiritual mingle like grounds mingled with humus, transformed like steam rising from a mug into the morning mist. What else can you offer the earth, which has everything? What else can you give but something of yourself? A homemade ceremony, a ceremony that makes a home.

The last time I saw you, you were wearing a white cotton shirt. You were standing upright with your wife on the lawn, in the sunlight, in front of the chateau, at my brother’s wedding. You shared in the enthusiasm of the ceremony. For my part, I felt distanced from it. I didn’t recognize my family in this mundane get-together. You didn’t seem put off by the bourgeois ceremony, or by my brother’s choice to have his love approved by third parties, even when these were distant third parties. You didn’t have the sad and absent look you normally took on at public gatherings. You smiled, watching the people, a little tipsy from the wine and the sun, chatting on the large lawn between the white stone façade and the two-hundred-year-old cedar tree. I often wondered, after your death, if that smile, the last one I saw from you, was mocking, or if instead it was the kindly smile of someone who knew that soon he would no longer partake in earthly pleasures. You didn’t regret leaving these behind, but neither were you averse to enjoying them a little longer.

Story cannot be “studied.” It is learned through assimilation, through living in its proximity with those who know it, live it, and teach it—more so through all the day-to-day mundane tasks of life, much more than the clearly ceremonial times. The

That, I think, is the power of ceremony: it marries the mundane to the sacred. The water turns to wine, the coffee to a prayer. The material and the spiritual mingle like grounds mingled with humus, transformed like steam rising from a mug into the morning mist.

We need ecstasy, which in its Greek sense (ek-stasis) means to be outside the ego. The ego is a prison, caught in time, space and rationality. We need to leave this mental prison behind from time to time, and on a regular basis. What can get us out? Poetry, love, sex, therapy, passion, nature, ritual, ceremony, music, empathy, compassion, and ‘feeling with’ the world. All of these things Jung calls ‘religion’. Religion is anything that provides escape from egocentricity, relief from the mundane, and as such he gives a Dionysian spin to religion, that seems almost contrary to what an archbishop, for instance, might mean by this term.

Ceremony is the intentful construction of the bridge which spans the barriers that we’ve created between our soul and our mundane life. Through the creation of ceremony, we allow the free movement of our soul into the mundane and of our consciousness in the realm of soul. It’s a two-way bridge.

The profane includes all those ordinary, mundane and monotonous activities of everyday existence: laboring, procuring food and going about one’s daily life. In contrast, the realm of the sacred, which is created through ritual, is dedicated to those things that are deemed special. The performance of collective ceremonies allowed people to set their everyday worries aside and be transported, albeit temporarily, to a different state. And as a ritual must always adhere to a rigid structure, participation in collective ceremonies established the first social conventions for early humans, by coming together to enact their ceremonies, practitioners ceased to be an assortment of individuals and became a community with shared norms, rules and values.

I’ve always said I didn’t want an ordinary life. Nothing average or mundane for me. But as I stared at the rather ample naked derriere wiggling two inches from my face today, I realized I should have been more specific with my goals. Definitely not ordinary, but not exactly what I had in mind. The Texas-flag tattoo emblazoned across the left cheek waved at me as she shifted her weight from foot to foot. The flag was distorted and stretched, as was the large yellow rose on the right cheek, both tattoos dotted with dimples and pock marks. An uneven script scrawled out “The Yellow Rose of Texas” across the top of her rump. Her entire bridal party—her closest friends and relatives, mind you—had left her high and dry. They’d stormed off the elevator as I tried to enter it, a flurry of daffodil-yellow silk, spouting and sputtering about their dear loved one, Tonya the bride. “That’s it! We’re done!” They sounded off in a chorus of clucking hens. “We ain’t goin’ back in there. She can get ready on her own!” “Yeah, she can get ready on her own!” “Known her since third grade and she’s gonna talk to me like that?” “Third grade? She’s my first cousin. I’ve known her since the day she was born. She’s always been that way. I don’t know why y’all acting all surprised.” I felt more than a little uneasy about what all this meant for our schedule. The ceremony was supposed to start in fifteen minutes. The bride should have already been downstairs and loaded in the carriage to make her way to the hotel’s beach. My unease grew to panic when I knocked on Tonya’s door and she opened it clad only in a skimpy little satin robe. “Honey, you’re supposed to be dressed and downstairs already.” I tried to say it as sweetly as possible, but I’m sure my panic came through. My Southern accent kicked in thick, which usually only happens when I’m panicked or frustrated. Or pissed. Or drunk. “Do you think I don’t know that?” she asked, arching a perfectly drawn-on eyebrow. “Do you think somehow when I booked this wedding and had invitations printed and planned the entire damned event, I somehow didn’t realize what time the ceremony started? And just who the hell are you anyway?” Well, alrighty then. Obviously this was going to be a fun day. “Um, I’m Tyler Warren. I’m assisting Lillian with your wedding today.” “Fine. Those bitches left me with my nails wet.” She held up both hands to show me the glossy, fresh manicure. “How the hell am I supposed to get dressed with wet nails?” she asked, arching both eyebrows now and glaring at me like I was somehow responsible for this. “Oh.” My mind spun with the limited time frame I had available, the amount of clothing she still needed to put on, and the amount of time it would take to get her in the carriage and to the ceremony. “Give me just a second to let Lillian know we’ll be down shortly.” I smiled what I hoped was my sweetest smile and stepped backward into the hallway. She slammed the door as I frantically dialed Lillian’s cell. “You’d better be calling to tell me she is in the carriage and on her way,” Lillian said. “It is hotter than Hades out here. I have several people looking like they’re about to faint, and I may possibly dunk a cranky, tuxedoed five-year-old

Does God expect us to be holy? In Leviticus 11:44, 45, God says “consecrate yourselves, and you shall be holy; for I am holy.” In all of this, God is teaching His people to live antithetically. That is, He is using these clean and unclean distinctions to separate Israel from other idolatrous nations who have no such restrictions, and He is illustrating by these prescriptions that His people must learn to live His way. Through dietary laws and rituals, God is teaching them the reality of living His way in everything. They are being taught to obey God in every seemingly mundane area of life, so as to learn how crucial obedience is. Sacrifices, rituals, diet, and even clothing and cooking are all carefully ordered by God to teach them that they are to live differently from everyone else. This is to be an external illustration for the separation from sin in their hearts. Because the Lord is their God, they are to be utterly distinct. In v. 44, for the first time the statement “I am the LORD your God” is made as a reason for the required separation and holiness. After this verse, that phrase is mentioned about 50 more times in this book alone, along with the equally instructive claim, “I am holy.” Because God is holy and is their God, the people are to be holy in outward ceremonial behavior as an external expression of the greater necessity of heart holiness. The connection between ceremonial holiness carries over into personal holiness. The only motivation given for all these laws is to learn to be holy because God is holy. The holiness theme is central to Leviticus (see 10:3; 19:2; 20:7, 26; 21:6–8).

That, I think, is the power of ceremony: it marries the mundane to the sacred. The water turns to wine, the coffee to a prayer. The material and the spiritual mingle like grounds mingled with humus, transformed like steam rising from a mug into the morning mist. What else can you offer the earth, which has everything? What else can you give but something of yourself? A homemade ceremony, a ceremony that makes a home.

Ceremonies large and small have the power to focus attention to a way of living awake in the world. That is the power of ceremony…it marries the mundane to the sacred. The water turns to wine. The coffee to a prayer. The material and the spiritual mingle; transformed like steam rising from a mug into the morning mist.

This wonder of life can overtake us almost anytime we move in unison: In more obvious contexts honed by thousands of years of cultural evolution—rituals, ceremonies, pilgrimages, weddings, folk dances, and funerals. In more spontaneous waves of movement at political protests, sports celebrations, concerts, and festivals. And in more subtle, barely perceptible ways in our mundane lives, such as when we’re simply out walking with others as part of the rhythm of our day.

The origin of the Pasch eggs is just as clear. The ancient Druids bore an egg, as the sacred emblem of their order. In the Dionysiaca, or mysteries of Bacchus, as celebrated in Athens, one part of the nocturnal ceremony consisted in the consecration of an egg. The Hindu fables celebrate their mundane egg as of a golden colour. The people of Japan make their sacred egg to have been brazen. In China, at this hour, dyed or painted eggs are used on sacred festivals, even as in this country. In ancient times eggs were used in the religious rites of the Egyptians and the Greeks, and were hung up for mystic purposed in their temples. From Egypt these sacred eggs can be distinctly traced to the banks of the Euphrates.

The second main argument to support the idea that simple living enhances our capacity for pleasure is that it encourages us to attend to and appreciate the inexhaustible wealth of interesting, beautiful, marvelous, and thought-provoking phenomena continually presented to us by the everyday world that is close at hand. As Emerson says: “Things near are not less beautiful and wondrous than things remote. . . . This perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries.”47 Here, as elsewhere, Emerson elegantly articulates the theory, but it is his friend Thoreau who really puts it into practice. Walden is, among other things, a celebration of the unexotic and a demonstration that the overlooked wonders of the commonplace can be a source of profound pleasure readily available to all. This idea is hardly unique to Emerson and Thoreau, of course, and, like most of the ideas we are considering, it goes back to ancient times. Marcus Aurelius reflects that “anyone with a feeling for nature—a deeper sensitivity—will find it all gives pleasure,” from the jaws of animals to the “distinct beauty of old age in men and women.”48 “Even Nature’s inadvertence has its own charms, its own attractiveness,” he observes, citing as an example the way loaves split open on top when baking.49 With respect to the natural world, celebrating the ordinary has been a staple of literature and art at least since the advent of Romanticism in the late eighteenth century. Wordsworth wrote three separate poems in praise of the lesser celandine, a common wildflower; painters like van Gogh discover whole worlds of beauty and significance in a pair of peasant boots; many of the finest poems crafted by poets like Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, and Seamus Heaney take as their subject the most mundane objects, activities, or events and find in these something worth lingering over and commemorating in verse: a singing thrush, a snowy woods, a fish, some chilled plums, a patch of mint. Of course, artists have also celebrated the extraordinary, the exotic, and the magnificent. Homer gushes over the splendors of Menelaus’s palace; Gauguin left his home country to seek inspiration in the more exotic environment of Tahiti; Handel composed pieces to accompany momentous ceremonial occasions. Yet it is striking that a humble activity like picking blackberries—the subject of well-known poems by, among others, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney, and Richard Wilbur—appears to be more inspirational to modern poets, more charged with interest and significance, than, say, the construction of the world’s tallest building, the Oscar ceremonies, the space program, or the discovery of DNA’s molecular structure. One might even say that it has now become an established function of art to help us discover the remarkable in the commonplace