Why Ceremony?

Throughout history, in all societies, human beings have gathered together and shared our lives through ceremony and ritual. Side by side, our ancestors wailed in mourning and sang in celebration. With music, art, nature, community, and ceremony, we find meaning and comfort as we go through the cycles of life.

Still today, we naturally long to mark our significant life moments, and to see their significance reflected back to us by others. While we deeply need the support of ceremony and togetherness, it can feel harder and harder to find. Our modern world sells us the fiction that meaning, purpose, and satisfaction will come from the endless cycle of buying and consuming. We as a culture have replaced community with individualism.

So many of us struggle with the side effects of modern society: the separation from nature, from deeper meaning, and from each other. This can leave us feeling burnt out, lonely, and disconnected.

These days, a few of our central life moments are marked by ceremony. But many of us still face profoundly important life events alone, or just with our individual family unit. We, as a society, have lost the sense of being witnessed and held by our community. We have lost most of the rites and rituals that our ancestors used to connect with nature, to heal from loss, and to bring meaning and comfort to seasons of change.

Many of our most important or emotional experiences don’t have any built-in ceremonies to mark them, so they get pushed aside in the busyness of life. Whether it is the achievement of a personal milestone, the end of a marriage, or celebrating the bonds of chosen family, or a more "invisible" life event, like the loss of a pregnancy or the anniversary of a loss, your life experiences deserve to be recognized.

To live our most fulfilled and meaningful lives, we need ceremony. We may think of ceremony as only religious - and it is an important and central part of religious worship and expression. But ritual and ceremony are deeply, profoundly part of what it means to be human. This life of meaning and belonging is our birthright.

Ceremony has always been an important way of connecting with ourselves and with the people around us. It allows us to find and express what is meaningful to us individually, and to find shared meaning in our universal experiences. Whether alone, or in community, ceremony gives us an empowering path for consciously, intentionally processing significant moments in our lives. This processing through rituals helps us to acknowledge what is present in our lives. By creating space to express (instead of suppress) our full range of our emotions, we care for ourselves in a holistic way - mind, body, and spirit.

There is plenty of science showing the many benefits of ritual (you can read about it here and here and here).

But you can feel the truth deep in your bones: the pull to be more connected to the land you live on and the cycles of the seasons. The desire to be more present to the things that give your life meaning. The longing to share your challenges and joys with others, who will see you for who you are, and accept you as one of Us. You can feel the thread, connecting you back to the beginning of human history, calling you to show up fully to honor the sacred miracle of your life.

Ritual is able to hold the long-discarded shards of our stories and make them whole again.

-Francis Weller

Ritual affirms the common patterns, the values, the shared joys, risks, sorrows, and changes that bind a community together.

Ritual links together our ancestors and descendants, those who went before with those will come after us.

-Starhawk

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