People love to celebrate and create rituals and traditions around those celebrations. Modern Paganism utilizes rituals for holy days, lunar observances, magic, and for personal rites such as coming of age, initiations, and weddings. For some, the word ritual will evoke images of some sinister practice being performed in a dark, out of the way place in the woods. For others, ritual is one way to interact with the divine in all things.
Repetitive Actions
All of us have daily rituals whether we are of a spiritual bent or not. We wake up, bathe, dress, and perform our usual daily activities. This repetition of actions over and over is the basic definition of ritual. The order in which we perform these actions may change, but the rituals themselves will generally stay the same. What transforms a ritual act from mundane to spiritual is adding ceremony or carrying it out in a sacred way.
Repetition is sometimes seen as boring or not open to new expression. However, many faiths utilize repetition in honoring their gods and traditions including such things as praying upon awakening or before bed and saying a blessing over food before partaking of a meal. These repetitive acts can become a strong foundation upon which to build a personal practice. In fact, many religious groups will encourage their members to begin daily ritual and meditative practice. In this small way, we can eventually train ourselves to tune out the daily mind chatter that invades our thoughts and begin to listen to the divine.
Many Pagans use repetition in order to attune themselves to certain energy or bring it into their lives. For instance, honoring a nature spirit or a deity opens a doorway of communication between them and the entity. A single ritual such as a food offering can be performed to open this doorway. But repetition can prove our sincerity to the spirits we honor and trains our minds to be receptive to the interaction we seek.
Celebratory Rituals
Rituals also take the form of celebratory rites. Handfastings, baptisms, sabbats, and esbats are all events that have rituals and traditions created around them. Even if a group changes the way it celebrates one of its holy days, the fact that it continually celebrates that time of year creates a tradition for its members to count on. By creating sacred space for these special events they experience the sacredness of even the most mundane tasks and begin to see the divine in all things.
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