“Ritual is recognizing a life change and doing something to honor and support the change,” wrote cultural anthropologist Angeles Arrien. You are probably familiar with rituals to mark such transitions as birth, marriage, and death; religious prayer books usually contain scripts or your family may have their traditional rituals. This wonderful collection of rituals compiled by Heather Concannon and Allison Palm, both Unitarian Universalist ministers, expands our repertoire to include other milestone moments deserving of such honoring: preparing to give birth, adoption, starting school, coming out, release from prison or detention, retirement and more.
Individuals will also find rituals here for unions of partners, for separation or divorce, for blessing a new home or bidding farewell to one. Rituals are offered for blessing our bodies and for grief and memory.
A second section of the book includes rituals for congregations and communities. There are scripts for breaking ground on a new space or saying goodbye to one. We can think of many groups that would welcome a ritual for the days following a natural disaster, for the end of natural disaster season, and for the first anniversary of a natural disaster.
We also know congregations that are working for justice and can use rituals for blessing the organizers, nourishing justice makers, blessing a Black Lives Matter banner, trauma in the news, and lamenting White Supremacy Culture.
How to set up and carry out the ritual is explained and scripts are included for such activities as opening words, chalice lighting and extinguishing, reflections, songs, naming of challenges, shared blessings, laying on of hands, and prayers. What makes these rituals authentic is that they have been put together by people who have actually gone through these experiences.
This wonderful collection lives up to its title, encouraging us to “bless it all” – the ordinary and the extraordinary, the joyful and the sad, the heart-opening and the heart-breaking.
