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This is http://www.essayz.com/a8611012.htm Previous-Essay <== This-Essay ==> Following-Essay Click HERE on this line to find essays via Your-Key-Words. {Most frequent wordstarts of each essay will be put here.} ========================================================== %RITUAL CEREMONY FORMALITY PRESENCE 861101 If people do not with personal intentionality own and invest themselves in their own rituals, ceremonies and formalities; then their rituals, ceremonies and formalities die and invite disgust. If the prescriptive weight of rituals, ceremonies and formalities are experienced as oppressive and coercive: people are likely to withhold their personal presence, and not invest themselves in ways which sustain them with life. In the absence of personal presence they all become dead. They die for lack of personal presence. Creative people renew rituals, ceremonies and formalities by investing their creative presence in them, thereby enlivening them and transforming them in ways which keep them from becoming oppressive, coercive and weighty burdens which people naturally want to cast off. The value of rituals, ceremonies and formalities does not reside in objective considerations; rather their value resides in the meanings which are invested in them with the personal presences of the participants who renew them through participation. Rituals, ceremonies and formalities give communal expression to meaningful transitions in human relationships; affirming, acknowledging, accepting, celebrating, remembering, mourning, etc. as may be appropriate to the occasion. Communally people can do what they can not accomplish individually through rituals, ceremonies and formalities. Expressions are offered which most people are incapable of offering without the assistance of such conventional communal behaviors. Creative people enliven conventional communal behaviors with personal presence; they "own" the behaviors in ways which make them their own. They are not imprisoned by the prescriptions. They do not regard them as weighty, oppressive or coercive. They are free to renew the conventions to fit new needs and so the rituals survive as meaningful communal behaviors in changing times. I-Thou relationships are not conventional; yet rituals, ceremonies and formalities may provide contexts within creative persons relate to each other in I-Thou relationships which transcend the conventions of the day. (c) 2005 by Paul A. Smith in (On Being Yourself, Whole and Healthy) ==========================================================