From Beginning to End: The Rituals of Our Lives
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Overview
FROM BEGINNING TO END Why "rituals"?My thinking was set in motion by those who, knowing I was a parish minister for many years, have asked me for advice about ceremonies and celebrations. They wanted words to use at graduations, funerals, and the welcoming of children. They inquired about grace at family meals, the reaffirmation of wedding vows, and ways to heal wounds suffered in personal conflict. People requested help with the rituals of solitude, such as meditation, prayer, and contemplation. . . .
Rituals do not always involve words, occasions, officials, or an audience. Rituals are often silent, solitary, and self-contained. The most powerful rites of passage are reflective—when you look back on your life again and again, paying attention to the rivers you have crossed and the gates you have opened and walked on through, the thresholds you have passed over.
I see ritual when people sit together silently by an open fire.
Remembering.
As human beings have remembered for thousands and thousands of years.
FULGHUM
America's most beloved philosopher and essayist draws from his ministerial background to celebrate "the unnameable wonder and mystery of life, " teaching readers how to create their own personally meaningful ceremonies while being gathered in a universal and ebullient embrace. Illustrations.
Synopsis
FROM BEGINNING TO END Why "rituals"?
My thinking was set in motion by those who, knowing I was a parish minister for many years, have asked me for advice about ceremonies and celebrations. They wanted words to use at graduations, funerals, and the welcoming of children. They inquired about grace at family meals, the reaffirmation of wedding vows, and ways to heal wounds suffered in personal conflict. People requested help with the rituals of solitude, such as meditation, prayer, and contemplation. . . .
Rituals do not always involve words, occasions, officials, or an audience. Rituals are often silent, solitary, and self-contained. The most powerful rites of passage are reflective—when you look back on your life again and again, paying attention to the rivers you have crossed and the gates you have opened and walked on through, the thresholds you have passed over.
I see ritual when people sit together silently by an open fire.
Remembering.
As human beings have remembered for thousands and thousands of years.
FULGHUM
Publishers Weekly
In this free-form meditation, former Unitarian minister Fulghum (All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten) examines how people impart meaning and structure to their lives through public rituals-weddings, funerals, high school reunions, church services-as well as myriad private and interpersonal rituals that mark events and preserve memories. Ritual, in his broad discussion, includes the repetitive yet crucial chores of parenting, learning to drive a car, walking home alone from school for the first time, one's first sexual encounter, prayer and thousands of ``little deaths and little rebirths,'' such as partings and reconciliations. Fulghum movingly describes his recent reunion with his long-lost daughter, whom he and his fiance had secretly placed with an adoption agency in small-town Texas in 1958. He writes with the calm wisdom and gentle reassurance that marked his previous bestsellers. First serial to Good Housekeeping, Modern Maturity and Penthouse; Literary Guild main selection; author tour. (Apr.)