Word: rite
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...evil spirits; yet they also plumb the animist religions for concepts of eternal life or of a remote "high god" or primordial creator that might be used to inspire belief in the one God of the Bible. After all, the missionaries point out, Christmas was originally a pagan rite that ancient preachers turned to good advantage...
...another relatively new and rare Japanese ritual: the divorce ceremony. Japan's baby-boom generation, raised on the Beatles, social protest and affluence, has elevated Japan's divorce rate to an alltime high; three out of ten couples will break up. At a typical split-up rite, guests pay a fee for food and drink. The couple apologize to family and friends and return their rings...
...canonization ceremony for Kolbe in St. Peter's Square was attended by 150,000 worshipers, among them 5,000 Catholics who came from Poland legally and hundreds of others who surreptitiously slipped out of that troubled country. After the rite, John Paul stepped down from the altar platform to kiss and embrace Gajowniczek, now 81, who had wept silently through the service. Gajowniczek recalls: "I was never able to thank him personally, but we looked into each other's eyes before he was led away...
...prefect Lord Guo Guo whose daughter Pleasure Mouse is about to have her feet bound. Pleasure Mouse is a lively six-year-old who, while romping through places like the Stream of No Regrets and the Bridge of Piquapi Memory, discovers the terrible truth about her impending rite of passage. Of course familiar pressures override her objections to a life of crippled submission: in the end she must choose between such a life and a kind of mystical suicide. That the child's mother has abandoned the custom of performing the binding herself because she lears her daughter's wrath...
This incident, says Professor Seymour Feshbach, chairman of the psychology department at U.C.L.A., occurred at a Los Angeles nursery school. Margaret Mead might have described the scene as a tribal rite of the global village; Marshall McLuhan might cite it as proof that the medium is indeed the message. But to Professor Feshbach as well as to Joan Anderson Wilkins, a researcher on family issues, it was not a symbol but an illustration of something more portentous: television addiction. Those nursery-school students are video junkies...