Quotes about Ritual

Habit is a great deadener.

So much of what we do every single day is the result of habits that we have formed over time.

Corporate worship is to be orderly.

And I always do this aloud, or at least at a mumble level, making sure I am doing more than just glancing at the psalms or prayers. Glancing at prayers is the fastest path toward vain repetitions I know of. For that reason, the church has always advocated reading our prayers aloud so we will go more slowly and concentrate more on what we are saying. Prayer books are designed to be read aloud.

Purity is not the same as morality but is about who or what is fit for the temple, and so classifications are made.

For some it is tempting to use only set prayers, while for others it is almost a solemn requirement to use only spontaneous prayers. We need both,

If God welcomed newborns into Israel by means of ritual circumcision for two thousand years, why would He suddenly close the kingdom to babies because they could not understand ritual baptism?

It is a curious thing that in whaling vessels the Church of England Prayer book is always employed, though there is never a member of that Church among officers or crew. Our men are all Roman Catholics or Presbyterians, the former predominating. Since a ritual is used which is foreign to both, neither can complain that the other is preferred to them, and they listen with all attention and devotion, so that the system has something to recommend it.

It has not only detested beauty when produced at the price of justice; it has rejected the ritual when performed by the morally corrupted. Even religion itself, worship, was not considered to be an absolute. "Your prayers are an abomination," said Isaiah to the exploiters of the poor. Stay away from the synagogue, wrote the Gaon of Wilna to his household, if you cannot abstain from envy and gossiping about the dresses of your fellow attendants.

I remember the day of my baptism very vividly. I was baptized in the baptismal font in the Tabernacle on Temple Square. Those who were being baptized put on white coveralls, and one by one were gently taken down the steps into the water.

This is criterion by which the Church is to be judged, not by the forms of its doctrine or ritual, but by the reality of the reality of the love which it manifests.

Baptism is the door of the spiritual life and the gateway to the sacraments.