Word: rite
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...would be like to have lan walk onto the ward and say let's go and as easy as that leave this enormous machine that endlessly cranks out thick swatches of time like huge strings of taffy. It was absurd to be able to simply walk out. Some elaborate rite of passage seemed called...
...ground--handle pointing skywards--and writhe around it in a riotous, sensual dance. If you ask him where he learned to do that with his umbrella, he will say, "Man, they always done this at parades!" or "My daddy done that!" It is a remnant of some long-forgotten rite. An astute observer once described that scene as "some vanished ritual grandeur of humanity that has been lost in the stones, the jungle and the dust, yet lies only lightly sleeping in our blood...
...character of Christian death," more and more bishops are allowing an experimental "white funeral," a service as different from the old requiem Mass as Easter is from Good Friday. Dressed in white vestments instead of the traditional black, the priest meets the coffin at the church door, recalling the rite of baptism that ties the Christian to Jesus. "If in union with Christ we have imitated his death," declares the priest, quoting St. Paul, "we shall also imitate him in his Resurrection." During the service, a white pall covers the coffin to symbolize eternal life; a paschal candle flickering...
...village of Peredelkino, a residence of the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church. At midnight the clergy and members of the congregation walk in procession around the church and enter through its main doors to celebrate the Resurrection. The Soviet authorities discourage religion, but they tolerate this rite-after a fashion. Alexander Solzhenitsyn describes the vigil at Peredelkino in the following story. It is published here in translation for the first time...
...STRANGLERS, by George Bruce. Before the 1830s, native travelers in India were in constant danger of being choked to death by marauding bands of Thugs, who murdered as a religious rite. An account of how a British officer brought the Thugs to heel. A horrifying, little known facet of Empire...