Why Does Ritual Matter for Social Change?

Ritual has power. I learned that lesson early on. Growing up in the English countryside, my family wasn’t religious, but we observed folk celebrations that gave meaning to each season and structure to our days. We danced around the maypole on May Day, gathered around a St John’s Fire at Midsummer and sang in the streets at Michaelmas. These rituals... See more

Ritual is essential because it is truly the pattern that connects. It provides communication at all levels – communication among all the systems within the individual human organism; between people within groups; between one group and another in a city and throughout all these levels between the human and the non-human in the natural environment.

The relationship at the heart of ritual is the relationship between life and death, mediated by elemental forces. The kinds of rituals that fall out of that might be a monthly day of silence, perhaps periodic fasting, perhaps singing around the fire. All such things need to be done as symbolic testimony to the joy and sorrow of being human, no... See more

Collective movement and music create a larger context for our lives, a meaning beyond our individual fate. Religious rituals universally involve rhythmic movements, from davening at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem to the sung liturgy and gestures of the Catholic Mass to moving meditation in Buddhist ceremonies and the rhythmic prayer rituals performe

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