Muchas Gracias

Banners hang in the trees, signs of gratitude left behind from families who returned to thank Juquila for favors granted. I believe ceremony and ritual are something most of us in the modern world long for, though we may not know it. The idea can seem antiquated, confining, and constrained, but it helps us to know when a thing begins and when it ends. When ritual is made personal it can quell a relentless inner whirling and searching.

I love this story of a personally meaningful ritual in "Balancing Heaven and Earth," by Robert Johnson.

One of the finest ceremonies I have observed came from a young friend of mine. This fellow had a dream that he was at a Saturday night party where everything was going wrong. The food was inedible, no one would talk to him, and he was feeling absolutely miserable. We talked this dream over, and he went home and worked on it. He came back the next week and said he realized that Saturday night consciousness had died for him, by which he meant the American ideal of Saturday night as the time to party, get drunk, and have mindless fun with the gang.

Usually this Saturday night syndrome is not as much fun as it is said to be, but I watch most young people try to wring some personal satisfaction out of it anyway. People know they have a God-given right to some feelings of ecstasy, so they are driven to more and more excessive behaviors to get that Saturday night high. The very word Saturday comes to us from the Latin saturnalia, which means an occasion of unrestrained or orgiastic revelry, and the festival of the god Saturn, a Dionysian deity, was celebrated with feasting in ancient Rome.

My friend researched all of this and decided that a sacrifice was called for; he decided to sacrifice the Saturday night syndrome. He hunted around his house for something that would represent this syndrome and decided to go out and buy a Big Mac hamburger. He then took a shovel, went out to the backyard, and buried this symbol of the "fast life" and instant gratification. He did this ceremony with great seriousness to mark a change in lifestyle. Saturday night was never quite the same for this young man again. He was able to reinvest the energy that had been tied up in the old pattern and thereby move on to the next level of consciousness. This is a wonderfully creative, meaningful, tailor-made ritual not found in any book.