"I personally, like the idea of ritual as a mediation between the gods and goddesses and man. In ritual we enact our relationship to the divine and bring the divine to the mundane just as we rise up to a divine level. That is, when it feels that Deity is too far away, in ritual I can meet with it and be comforted."

Walton Burns, Tuatha de Brighid Community e-mail list member

 

The word "ritual" is defined simply as "any formal and customarily repeated act or series of acts".

All religions, since time immemorial, have expressed themselves through ritual words and actions.  These may be quite simple:  a chant, a drum beat, a whispered prayer, a thanksgiving before a meal, a ribbon tied to a branch of a special tree that breathes with Power.  Other rituals are elaborate and involved:   ancient Egyptian funerals, great sacrificial Rites of classical Greece and Rome, Catholic High Mass, and many others.

The ageless Wisdom seems to be that religious ritual is a vital part of human experience - and a necessary one.

Perhaps this is because all life may be looked upon as a ritual:

Seasons turn in stately procession, repeating themselves...

Night follows day, and day follows night...

Life and death follow each other in an intimate embrace...

It is as if the Universe Herself lives an endless repeating Cycle, turning along the spiral of never-ending path which leads forward into the future, and yet follows along the markers of formal and customarily repeated series of acts.

And is not religion part and parcel of life? Indeed, is not life an image of religion?  Or, perhaps, life and religion are one and the same - images of each other, partaking of each other, like two lovers joined eternally in an act of creation.

An act of religious ritual is an expression of religious belief – and like life and religion, the two are not independent, but rather exist in symbiosis of creativity.  Ritual empowers belief.  Belief empowers ritual.  A thought becomes and act, and an act becomes a thought.

Ours is a Druidry of Kinship.  And, just as love, Kinship, which encompasses love, may not be limited to thought alone - but must be acted upon to become a way, a truth, and a life. 

Our ritual is then an act of love and Kinship - as necessary as a kiss between a husband and a wife, or an embrace between a mother and a child.  As necessary as an act of breathing.  Through breathing we take in the air of life.  Though ritual we take in the Spirit of Life.

In ritual we enter the state of mind that is different from our day-to-day existance. We suspend disbelief. We forget worry and doubt. We see with the eyes of the soul and speak with the language of the heart. It is the domain of faith. It is the domain of spirit. In ritual we forget words such as "symbol" – for in ritual all things are real, and what is possible and impossible changes places and flows differently from the ordinary life.