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A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day with Hope Lonergan

Good Morning!

One morning I wasted an hour wrapping up an empty Coke can with plumbing tape. Why? No reason. No reason whatsoever. This was just another one of those pointless rituals that mark the passage of time. A miniscule procedure with a futile objective: to cover the can in tape so the tape totally covered the can.

Despite the needlessness of this act, ritual is actually a fundamental part of spiritual practice. Whether it鈥檚 ritualised courtship, communal dancing, synchronised shrieking or the more personalised rituals.

As anthropologist and cognitive scientist Dimitris Xygalatas writes in Ritual: 鈥淩ituals are highly structured. They require rigidity (they must always be performed the 鈥榗orrect鈥� way), repetition (the same actions performed again and again) and redundancy (they can go on for a long time). In other words, they are predictable. This predictability imposes order on the chaos of everyday life, which provides us with a sense of control over uncontrollable situations鈥�.

The world is buzzing, cacophonous; full of attention grabbing and social-media sharing. A world alive with visual clutter and aural detritus. In such a world sometimes you need to just stop, take a breath鈥�and cover a can with plumbing tape.

With this in mind. God, thank you for the feeling of togetherness experienced during collective rituals. And thank you for the discipline and order of my own repetitive action patterns. With constant noise, change and fluctuation, it鈥檚 nice to have the continuity of daily customs.

Go lightly.

Amen.

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