Ritual Quotes

“We do not always allow ourselves to work through pain. More often than not, we think pain is a signal that we must stop, rather than find its source. Our souls do not like stagnation. Our souls aspire toward growth, that is, toward remembering all that we have forgotten due to our trip to this place, the earth. In this context, a body in pain is a soul in longing.”
― Malidoma Patrice Somé, Ritual: Power, Healing and Community

“We need ritual because it is an expression of the fact that we recognize the difficulty of creating a different and special kind of community. A community that doesn’t have a ritual cannot exist. A corporate community is not a community. It’s a conglomeration of individuals in the service of an insatiable soulless entity.”
― Malidoma Patrice Somé, Ritual: Power, Healing and Community

“The focus here is not on ritual itself, but on opening up something in hearts and spirits that has been locked away so long that individuals can barely remember the source.”
― Malidoma Patrice Somé, Ritual: Power, Healing and Community

“The clock tells you everything and keeps you busy enough to forget that there could be another way of living your life.”
― Malidoma Patrice Somé, Ritual: Power, Healing and Community

“A true community does not need a police force. The very presence of a law enforcement system in a community is an indication that something is not working. And the presence of the police is supposed to make it work. Such a force is essentially repressive, which means that certain people in such a dysfunctional community do not know how to fit in. A community is a place where there is consensus, not where there is a crooked-looking onlooker with a gun, creating an atmosphere of unrest. In my village, houses do not have doors that can be locked. They have entrances. The absence of doors is not a sign of technological deprivation but an indication of the state of mind the community is in. The open door symbolizes the open mind and open heart. Thus a doorless home is home to anybody in the community. It translates the level at which the community operates. In addition, this community does not have a police force because it does not assume that the other person is dishonest or potentially evil. The trust factor must be high. Elders”
― Malidoma Patrice Somé, Ritual: Power, Healing and Community

“ritual is called for because our soul communicates things to us that the body translates as need, or want, or absence. So we enter into ritual in order to respond to the call of the soul.”
― Malidoma Patrice Somé, Ritual: Power, Healing and Community

“In his book The Africans, Ali Mazrui began his study of the triple heritage of the African people by pointing out that the ills of the continent of Africa nowadays are the result of the anger of the ancestors in the face of the general desecration brought about by modernism. He indicates that throwing away one’s culture for another is an insult to the dead, and can result, as in the case of Africa, in a lot of unresolved ills. In a way, Mr. Mazrui is not just speaking about mechanized Africa, where the worship of the ancestors is being gradually replaced with the worship of machines. He is also speaking to the developed countries, where the antlike frenzy of life, characterized by a work-obsessed culture, is symptomatic of an illness that is perhaps too large to face. Thus”
― Malidoma Patrice Somé, Ritual: Power, Healing and Community

“speed is a way to prevent ourselves from having to deal with something we do not want to face.”
― Malidoma Patrice Somé, Ritual: Power, Healing and Community

“Acknowledgment of error is not error. A person who sincerely tells the spirit that he did something wrong cannot be punished anymore. The wrong itself is its own punishment. Power”
― Malidoma Patrice Somé, Ritual: Power, Healing and Community

“I have witnessed funerals where wounded people in great need of healing (through ritual) are the ones actually planning and taking care of the funeral arrangements. These are people who need someone to help them in their own grief who are burdened with creating ritual space for themselves as well as others. We are facing here some kind of flawed process of self-caretaking. Who can create ritual in its proper space and sequence when there are no elders? Who is there who remembers the old ways, the ancient ways, the ways of the heart, the ways of the spirit that reach to the depths of the soul in its grief? It”
― Malidoma Patrice Somé, Ritual: Power, Healing and Community

“before getting started with any aspect of our lives — travel, a project, a meeting — we first bring the task at hand to the attention of the gods or God, our allies in the Otherworld. We openly admit to them what we are facing and how overwhelming it is. By ritually putting what we do in the hands of the gods, we make it possible for things to be done better because more than we are involved in its getting done. Also, willingness to surrender the credit of our accomplishments to Spirit puts us in greater alignment with the Universe. From”
― Malidoma Patrice Somé, Ritual: Power, Healing and Community

“In the surface world our ability to make things happen is very limited. This limitation is a reflection of the incompleteness of a world without the spirit realm. So Spirit is our channel through which every gap in life can be filled. But the spirit realm will not take care of these gaps without our conscious participation. Thus our collaboration makes us central to the actual happening of a ritual.”
― Malidoma Patrice Somé, Ritual: Power, Healing and Community

“people have had to update their trust because money has intruded into everything,”
― Malidoma Patrice Somé, Ritual: Power, Healing and Community

“A true community begins in the hearts of the people involved. It is not a place of distraction but a place of being.”
― Malidoma Patrice Somé, Ritual: Power, Healing and Community

“each time we enter a ritual space we do so because something in the physical world has warned us of possible deterioration at hand. This presupposes that one does not enter into a ritual without a purpose, a goal. As I said earlier, ritual is called for because our soul communicates things to us that the body translates as need, or want, or absence. So we enter into ritual in order to respond to the call of the soul. So illness, perhaps, is the sign language of the soul in need of attention. This means that our soul is the part of us that picks up on situations well ahead of our conscious awareness of them.”
― Malidoma Patrice Somé, Ritual: Power, Healing and Community

“Human senses are devices of communication. Sight is a language, as are pain, touch, smell and taste. The most powerful among them is the feeling of pain. For the Dagara elder, pain is the result of a resistance to something new — something toward which an old dispensation is at odds. We are made of layers of situations or experiences. Each one of them likes to use a specific part of ourselves in which to lodge. It’s like a territory. A new experience that does not have a space to sit in within us will have to kick an old one out. The old one that does not want to leave will resist the new one, and the result is registered by us as pain. This is why the elders call it Tuo. It means invasion, hunting, meeting with a violent edge. It also means boundary. Pain, therefore, is our body complaining about an intruder. Body complaint is understood as the soul’s language relayed to us. A person in pain is being spoken to by that part of himself that knows only how to communicate in this way. Thus,”
― Malidoma Patrice Somé, Ritual: Power, Healing and Community

“Ritual in a way is an anti-machine, even though the industrial world is not totally devoid of the practice of ritual. David Kertzer, in Ritual, Politics and Power, points out it is innately inscribed within humans to do ritual. He goes on to show that ritual exists in every aspect of political practice where the construction of power is ordered by symbol and ceremony. For him, ritual is unavoidable in modern political and social interplay because it is something that enables people to deal with archetypes. There is some truth in such a vision. But I think that the term is being manipulated to fit certain urges for legitimization. A spirit can be used to legitimize someone’s desires. For example, someone can say that a spirit told him or her to do something, which legitimizes his or her unwarranted action (as in the American comedy line “The devil made me do it!”). One can claim divine sponsorship to justify actions that have nothing to do with the divine. One has only to look at American televangelism for that. It”
― Malidoma Patrice Somé, Ritual: Power, Healing and Community

“Christianity invented or blessed the invention of the technological Machine. The bulk of people in the Third World today have experienced Christianity not as separate from technology but almost as a part of it. Throngs of people went to school to learn to be modern — that is, to be Christian. Many ended up serving the administrative machinery of Christianity, hoping for a taste of greater modernism. It was a team of Christians who came into my village over twelve years ago to ask those who went to church on Sunday to grow cotton so that they could buy it from them. The naive villagers saw in it an immense opportunity to become modern — that is, to acquire bicycles, short-wave radios and clothes. What they did not see was that these white Christians had their own separate agenda. Because they were in control, they laid out what they wanted the villagers to do. It included using fertilizer and pesticides that were banned in France. No one had the money, but everyone bought on credit. They were barely able to pay their debts out of their sales. With bitterness, the villagers returned to their traditional farming, but the land was angry. Tortured by foreign chemicals, it “went into a coma.” Technology”
― Malidoma Patrice Somé, Ritual: Power, Healing and Community

“It is the right of the grandfather to tell the grandson later what was said while in the womb. It is the right of the grandfather to give the name that will serve as a life program to its bearer. Grandfather”
― Malidoma Patrice Somé, Ritual: Power, Healing and Community

“Is it possible then to say that pain is good, primarily because it is a call to growth? The Dagara elders would say yes. They believe that a person who has suffered is a person who has heard pain (won Tuo). The person hears the pain as a creative action, connecting that person with his or her highest self, which prescribes an alternative to spiritual death. So pain at least teaches us something. It is commotion, e-motion and a call for a rebirth. It teaches that one must return to a mode of living that began with life itself.”
― Malidoma Patrice Somé, Ritual: Power, Healing and Community

“My father finally performed the ritual thathe owed to the Earth Shrine, but the questions remain: Why do the innocent suffer from the negligence of others? Why is it that social responsibilities are inseparable from rituals? And why is it so important that every individual in a community stay in good rapport with their gods and goddesses? Here”
― Malidoma Patrice Somé, Ritual: Power, Healing and Community

“Technology was sent into Africa as an instrument of terror. Colonization could not have happened without it — followed by much destruction. I do not know why it feels to me that the Christianization of the Third World is fueled by guilt, but somehow the often violent zeal with which indigenous people were pulled away from their traditions, the lingering fear of sinning, going to hell, failing to pay dues, were all projections of a filthy Shadow. The colonizers called this a “pacification mission.” Then they came in to console those terrified by technology and converted them to Catholicism. My experience with Christianity in Africa is that its power does not come from Christ but from technology —”
― Malidoma Patrice Somé, Ritual: Power, Healing and Community

“A community is a place of self-definition. Any group of people meeting with the intention of connecting to the power within is a community. People who regroup under a different banner to take care of themselves are attracted to indigenous culture. In these new formations, people seek to explore what has frustrated, betrayed and constituted a deep wound in their hearts. What they are trying to do is restore their inner power, which has been tarnished. Because they are trying to fight the servitude in which corporate power holds them prisoner, they are redefining themselves. They are moving themselves away from the magnetic visibility of externalized power. But to regroup against the Machine is to get out of control. However, one must not only be aware of this moving away, one must also be prepared to go all the way. To leave behind society and culture, one has to be prepared to do battle in order to be who you want to be. Without a community you cannot be yourself. The community is where we draw the strength needed to effect changes inside of us.”
― Malidoma Patrice Somé, Ritual: Power, Healing and Community

“In the traditional world the person who violates the secret of a ritual becomes an outcast. The outcast is a person who has spoken the unspeakable or who shows the unshowable. What the outcast is doing is saying, “I no longer want to exist among you.” When this happens, there is no cure for him, hence the final departure. I say there is no cure, but actually it is because the cure would require the rest of the group to suspend its current relationship with the spirit world and descend to the lower region where the outcast resides in order to rise up slowly with him. No one wants to do that, and so the outcast never gets reinstated, even when he wishes to. The concept of “all for one” does not work in initiation societies. The”
― Malidoma Patrice Somé, Ritual: Power, Healing and Community

“The more ritualized our space, the more ritualized our lives. I am suggesting that a space (cultural space or community space) in which ritual is the yardstick by which life is measured puts the people living in it in a constant state of ritual energy that sanctifies their lives. A sacred life is a ritualized life, that is, one that draws constantly from the realm of the spiritual to handle even the smallest situation. Sabotaging”
― Malidoma Patrice Somé, Ritual: Power, Healing and Community

“As humans, we are fascinated by supernatural, spiritual power. Every moment you display this kind of power to the world, that power isolates you. You become displaced by the power you display because that power is also displaced through you. For”
― Malidoma Patrice Somé, Ritual: Power, Healing and Community

“The problem with Western culture is that it is a show-off culture that intimidates. This is why it is generating so much death, loss and displacement. To perform ritual for show is to generate some kind of death or loss. Concealment of ritual is an act of life preservation because it is only in its concealment that needs are met that cannot be met in any other way. If”
― Malidoma Patrice Somé, Ritual: Power, Healing and Community

“I remember once being asked by an American, “Does everyone in your country still sleep in trees?” And I replied, “Yes.” He was overjoyed (or at least seemed so) at meeting someone who had slept in a tree. But when I added that in our capital city of Ouagadougou the ambassador of the United States sleeps in the tallest tree, he walked away confused and a bit suspicious. Americans are bred to expect the rest of the world to be underdeveloped. The”
― Malidoma Patrice Somé, Ritual: Power, Healing and Community

“I am tempted to think that when the focus of everyday living displaces ritual in a given society, social decay begins to work from the inside out. The fading and disappearance of ritual in modern culture is, from the viewpoint of the Dagara, expressed in several ways: the weakening of links with the spirit world, and general alienation of people from themselves and others. In a context like this there are no elders to help anyone remember through initiation of his or her important place in the community. Those who seek to remember have an attraction toward violence. They live their life constantly upset or angry, and those responsible for them are at a loss as to what to do. For”
― Malidoma Patrice Somé, Ritual: Power, Healing and Community

“Anyone who worships his own creation, something of his own making, is someone in a state of confusion. Power”
― Malidoma Patrice Somé, Ritual: Power, Healing and Community