"Ritual" Seen As A Bonsai WiIlow

Willow Bonsai

Jesus said the kingdom of heaven was the inheritance of the Poor.
His Mother sang that the Almighty will thrust the mighty and rich from their thrones, and then raise up the lowly, thereby turning the profane world upside down!

Jesus said the Peacemakers are the children of God.

How do we deal with the poor and homeless in today's world?

How do we deal with war and peace?

The manner in which we, the USA, deal in public with these issues is reflected in and is a reflection of our religious beliefs. We do not feel the divine compulsion to go up to the high country and listen to that Sermon on the Mount too often.

"Ritual" is the setting aside of space and time, moving it from the profane to the sacred. For example,when we deal with the poor, we have special times: food drives, Sunday sermons; all compact and perfect within themselves, yet not pervading our entire lives.

By setting aside special times and spaces, by not letting the great teaching pervade our lives, we create the separation of religion and life. We set up small rooms of devotion, and then we tend to use our extra religious "furniture" - way too much for the one small room - in our profane and non-churchly pursuits...because we think we have seen the Holy in its entirety.

By establishing special times and special places for God, we restrict holiness into those small rooms.
By restricting God thus, we find ourselves able to look about the small room into which we pushed the divine and fancy that we see everything there is.
Thus, we feel we know all the aspects of the divine.
Thus, we create Ritual, and Ritualistic Icons: Yoda, Neo, martial arts with a spiritual bullet.

Ritual is akin to a cutting, a pruning...not to promote luxuriant growth, but to restrict and domesticate the wild; to bring the forest into the domicile.

Think of your Ritual as Bonsai: small, restricted; it will not grow beyond bounds and infect the entire universe with its virus of freedom and life. It is an Icon.
When the Icon substitutes for the reality, then we see the world of today in the USA and around the globe.

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The later post in 2011:    http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2011/02/willow-bonsai-original-post.html
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