About this episode

The episode explores the significance of rituals in reconnecting individuals to meaning and community amidst modern challenges.

As we confront the turbulence of rapid change, technological dehumanization, and cultural polarization, how do we reconnect to being and meaning? Best-selling author BRUCE FEILER returns us to ritual: world-wide, time-honored ways for people to come home to themselves, their communities, and the sacred. Ritual returns us to unity. Rituals use symbols to move and shape psychic energy for a group and its members. Energy expands as the unifying power of symbol is evoked and shared, an experience of extra-ordinary reality. Ritual mediates our relationship with the sacred, individually and together. It opens a door to the infinite and allows us to know we belong to something greater. The universality of rituals to commemorate life events such as birth, marriage, and death also speaks to Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious. We are imbued with the importance of ritual as a means of coming into alignment with one another and the numinous. Although many of the rituals that mark birth, puberty, marriage, and death have weakened or faded in modern life, a range of new rituals is emergent: gender reveals welcome new life; an "honor walk" through hospital corridors…

People in this episode

Hosts: Joseph Lee, Deborah Stewart, Lisa Marchiano

Guest: Bruce Feiler

Topics covered

• ritual
• meaning
• community
• sacred
• collective unconscious
• transformation

Keywords

• ritual
• community
• sacred
• collective unconscious
• transformation
• Bruce Feiler

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: A Time to Gather: How Ritual Created the World—and How It Can Save U

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