“For me, broadening my thinking about ritual has given me more freedom to bring my whole self and my creativity to my spiritual life, as well as meet my unique and evolving spiritual needs,” explains Selina Forsyth, who joins Cynthia and Susan to discuss ritual in the lives of Latter-day Saint women. What about when the rituals provided by our religion no longer fit? Even if they do remain deeply meaningful, in a church where women have not been involved in creating official sacred rituals—and sometimes participate in them only as observers—it can be hard to feel we have authority to create personal sacred rituals for ourselves. Episode 196 is a conversation about the intentional making and marking of meaning in the big and small moments of our lives.
Notes & Quotes:
connect with Selina: contact@selinaforsyth.com
The Dinner Party, by Judy Chicago, ca 1979
See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love, by Valarie Kaur
The Power of Ritual: How to Create Meaning and Connection in Everything You Do, by Casper ter Kuile
The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters, by Priya Parker
Remaking Gathering: Entering the Mess, Crossing the Thresholds, Priya Parker with Krista Tippet, On Being podcast, 9/30/2021
“’The Dinner Party’ suggests that women have the capacity to be prime symbol-makers, to remake the world in our own image and likeness.” —Judy Chicago
“Ceremony may be self-derived, it may come from vision, it may be given by a teacher, it may be cultural. But from all sources it has the same underlying root. It is a process in which the human capacity for sacred feeling and reverence is given form and expression.” —Stephen Harrod Buhner
“This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don’t have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down. We all need such places of ritual safekeeping. And I do believe that if your culture or tradition doesn’t have the specific ritual you are craving, then you are absolutely permitted to make up a ceremony of your own devising, fixing your own broken-down emotional systems with all the do-it-yourself resourcefulness of a generous plumber/poet.” —Elizabeth Gilbert
“With the demise of religion, many people are left stranded in a chasm of emptiness and doubt; without rituals to recognize, celebrate, or negotiate the vital thresholds of peoples lives, the key crossings pass by, undistinguished from the mundane, everyday rituals of life. If we approach our decisive thresholds with reverence and attention, the crossing will bring us more than we could have ever hoped for.” —John O’Donohue
