Quotes of the Day for January 27, 2026 – Thoughts on the power of ritual and repetition
- Michael Haldas
- 4 hours ago
- 3 min read
“….a child at play is a child engaging in ritual activities. Rituals have rules, meaning, purpose, even repetition. It is not childish – it is merely human…Those who utter phrases such as “empty ritual” (something I’ve heard all my life) forget that it is God who first gave ritual to the people of Israel. This primary story about the faith runs counter to modern intuitions. For we presume that real things and true things are in the mind. It is thought and sentiment that we consider to hold the lofty place of the holy. But it is ritual that is given this place in the Scriptures.” (Father Stephen Freeman)
“At the core of ritual is enacting future possibilities. Positive future possibilities are enacted to bring them to pass. Negative future possibilities are enacted in order to ward them off. Within most ancient cultures, the lines between religious ritual and ritual magic are more or less blurred. In Israelite ritual, however, ritual was aimed not at bringing about a change in deity or making God perform certain actions on the community’s behalf. Nor was ritual viewed as grounded primarily even in the repairing of the relationship between God and the community, though this was a secondary effect. Ritual was aimed at the transformation of human life as persons and as a community. Positive future possibilities were not guaranteed by correct ritual performance, nor were negative futures warded off as by a fetish.” (Fr. Stephen De Young)
“The Byzantine Liturgy is not a space of spontaneous self-expression. Our litanies do not allow for personal additions or individual petitions. Yet there is wisdom in this restraint. An open prayer voiced by one group of believers can become a wound for another. Some pray for a “just peace,” others for “any peace at all,” and still others for “victory and the punishment of the wicked.” Liturgy protects the community from a destructive clash of emotions. In worship, evil is neither debated nor analyzed; it dissolves into the rhythm of prayer, as chaos dissolves into cosmos. Words, the aroma of incense, the repetition of formulas, bows and gestures—all these create a sacred space where evil loses its energy.” (Rev. Dr. Aleksei Volchkov)
“ “Liturgy,” as I’m using the word, is a shorthand term for those rituals that are loaded with an ultimate Story about who we are and what we’re for. They carry within them a kind of ultimate orientation…Liturgies work affectively and aesthetically—they grab hold of our guts through the power of image, story, and metaphor. That’s why the most powerful liturgies are attuned to our embodiment; they speak to our senses; they get under our skin. The way to the heart is through the body.” (James Smith)
“You can see now why going to church in and of itself is not the focus in sacramental Christianity. It’s not as though mere church attendance makes you a Christian. That’s how secular things work: you sign up for something and go to the meetings, and that’s what it means to be a member of that thing. But to be sacramental is not merely a matter of attendance, nor is it merely about thinking in a certain way or performing certain ritual actions; it is a lifestyle. All worldviews, if taken seriously, turn into lifestyles. In the case of sacramental Christianity, going to church and participating in the sacraments is about living out the idea that the physical and the spiritual are bound up together, and that you encounter them together through participation—not just in church, but in everything you do and are.” (Dr. Zachary Porcu)