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Ritual Analysis

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When it comes to the topic of sacred rituals, my perception of this topic discussed in the chapter five of our text prior to taking this course was I knew that this was simply what takes place in religion in terms of activities, the things people preform all the time for specific reasons. These would be activities that are connected to an important date such as a religious holiday or a time frame of the day such as no eating after 6pm or simply a certain place such as a temple or church that requires particular actions to be performed all the time in this location. Rituals are in our daily lives as well, as we do things for specific reasons all the time, for instance when I wake up every morning before I do anything else I grab a water bottle …show more content…

Plainly put this means sacred rituals or what we would refer to more commonly as religious rituals are done with an intent to communicate sacred meaning, this means that its purpose and result are for religious reasons and not any other reasons that we may have to carry personal rituals in our lives. I was not however aware of the three distinct forms of sacred rituals which are the Life-Cycle Rites, Life-Crisis Rites and the Calendar or Seasonal Rites. Learning about these three forms added on to my knowledge of what sacred rituals are and allowed me to see how they could change in terms of spiritual meaning, which is why I chose to focus on them for my reflection paper, I was able to see that often times it is not so simple to see that something is ritualistic in nature as what makes something a ritual does not require it to be done frequently. It is also not easy to identify if something contains sacred context as it can be closely linked to culture and we often assume it is simply a cultural tradition or practice rather than religious in …show more content…

I think the reason why is, I associate rituals with things done frequently and for specific reasons that occur frequently, but not just once in the lifetime, however I soon realized with the different life stages of a person, that it was true that when we pass from one point to another in life, we are constantly being supported by religion in ritualistic ways and we mistake this for cultural tradition. For instance, the text referred to social puberty and the fact that many religions have ceremonies for such occasions that happen only once in that person’s lifetime as we cannot repeat such a ritual for natural reason of continuing to pass the different stages in life. These ceremonies in my mind have always been cultural traditions, this chapter taught me how to see the essence of sacred ritual in such activities. I learned that in some societies such as East Africa and Western Asia they have circumcision rituals for puberty, which I had not known still occurred and was aware occurred in ancient cultures. I had believed such transitions were a cultural phenomenon and now understand if they carry sacred context which all cultural traditions tend to then it is a sacred ritual. I had also known about the bar mitzvah celebration, which is the puberty transition for boys

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