Lotus and the Lily. Janet Conner

      create your own ritual

      Ritual maintains the world's holiness…. [I]n a life that is animated with ritual there are no insignificant things…. The soul might be cared for better through our developing a deep life of ritual rather than through many years of counseling for personal behavior and relationships. We might even have a better time of it in such soul matters as love and emotion if we had more ritual in our lives and less psychological adjustment. We confuse purely temporal, personal, and immediate issues with deeper and enduring concerns of the soul.

       The soul needs an intense, full-bodied spiritual life as much as and in the same way that the body needs food.

      —Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul

      You don't have to have experienced Advent, the four-week Christian celebration, or even know what Advent is, to create your own ritual. What's important is to know that humanity from the beginning has relied on ritual to connect with the Divine.

      The most stunning book on this topic is Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman by Malidoma Patrice Somé. Somé's grandfather was the Dagara tribe's shaman in West Africa. When Somé was four years old, he was kidnapped by Jesuit missionaries and raised in a strict Catholic seminary, where he became a French-speaking scholar. At age twenty, he escaped from the seminary and ran home, but by then he no longer remembered his tribe's rituals or language. The tribal leaders decided the only way he could be integrated back into the tribe was to go through the initiation process thirteen-year-old boys experience. There was just one problem: they weren't certain he would survive. In this astonishing book, Somé offers Western readers an eyewitness account of his initiation and, in the process, demonstrates the power of ritual.

      Joseph Campbell's work on mythology and ritual, which he discusses in his book and TV series The Power of Myth with interviewer Bill Moyers, clearly demonstrates how cultures around the globe use rituals to connect the human with the Divine. There is a human need to feel connected, to touch something greater, to be fed spiritually by a greater source, and ritual satisfies that need as nothing else.

      If you don't like the word ritual, and many people don't, substitute a term you do like, perhaps spiritual practice or centering activity. Regardless of what you call it, ritual has always held center stage in human history. In every culture, ancient to modern, the important events in life—birth, death, marriage, graduation—are marked by a ceremony or ritual of some kind. On a smaller scale, our calendars are full of shared ritualized events, like New Year's Eve or Thanksgiving Day. The way people prepare for the Super Bowl or the World Cup sure looks like ritual to me.

      But rituals don't have to be grandiose. Visualize yourself in the morning, making your first cup of coffee. Don't you do it the same way every day, using the same method, the same pot, and your favorite cup? I sure do. Well, guess what, that's a ritual.

      The truth is, our lives are a series of small rituals with repeated behaviors, language, beliefs, and expectations. In the Lotus and the Lily, we are taking the concept one step further by stepping consciously into our spiritual intelligence and using that intelligence to create deeply personal, intention-charged rituals. In the process, we restore ritual to its rightful role in life: as a reminder and experience of our dynamic partnership with the Divine.

      Throughout this program, you will create personal rituals that will culminate in the design of your own Soul Day. Today, you get to create your first one. Keep it simple. What makes a ritual powerful is that it speaks to you. So design a little ceremony that supports and nurtures your intention for doing the Lotus and the Lily.

      To get your ritual-creation juices flowing, here are some components that often appear in rituals. Choose anything that helps you stop for a moment and connect with grace.

      When I began the process that would become the Lotus and the Lily, I went to a craft store to get an Advent-wreath holder like my mother had, but the store didn't have any. I wandered the aisles looking for another idea. Just as I was about to give up, I saw a lone wooden Advent house with twenty-five little gold-trimmed wooden doors. I fell in love.

      Every December 1st since then, I get out my December House, set it on a table in the living room, place four votive candles around it, add a tiny brass bell, and finish off my altar with fresh flowers. I cut thirty tiny cards and write thirty things I anticipate being grateful for in the coming year. I put the thirty folded cards in a small crystal bowl in front of the house. Then, every night before dinner, I ring my little brass bell, light a candle, speak my prayer (you'll write yours tomorrow), read one of the cards aloud, and tuck it behind a little door. The whole ceremony takes three minutes, but it leaves me feeling wonderful.

      That's my ceremony, but please design your own. It needn't be elaborate. When Brother David Steindl-Rast, author of Gratefulness: the Heart of Prayer, lights a candle, that simple act becomes holy: “There is the sound of striking the match, the whiff of smoke after blowing it out, the way the flame flares up and then sinks, almost goes out until a drop of melted wax gives it strength to grow to its proper size and to steady itself. All this and the darkness beyond my small circle of light is prayer. I enter into it as one enters a room.”