Word: rituals
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Down the ancient lanes of old Jerusalem last Saturday, thousands of Christian worshipers surged toward the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where Jesus Christ is said to have risen bodily from his tomb. Many of the devout carried candles for the "Holy Fire Ritual," in which Orthodox priests descend to Christ's tomb and emerge with a flame that they say appears spontaneously - miraculous proof, believers say, that Christ has not forgotten his followers...
...Moments later, the gloomy church glows incandescent as worshipers press forward to light their candles from the so-called "heavenly fire." Sometimes it isn't just the candles that catch fire - beards and hair crackle spectacularly in the chaotic crush around the flame-bearing priests. Skeptics denounce the ritual as a 1,200-year-old sleight-of-hand whose secret is passed from one generation of high priests to the next. But for the thousands of gathered worshipers, it was proof of God's existence and Christ's resurrection...
...what is less well known is that those two traits also combined to shape his spiritual journey and determine the nature of his faith. The rebellion part comes in at the beginning of his life: he rejected at first his parents' secularism and later the concepts of religious ritual and of a personal God who intercedes in the daily workings of the world. But the awe part comes in his 50s when he settled into a deism based on what he called the "spirit manifest in the laws of the universe" and a sincere belief in a "God who reveals...
Protecting the children. That ritual has been played for ages across the generations. Parents fret about what their children see/hear/read, and the youngsters shrug it off until they have kids of their own and renew the worrying cycle. Parents hate violent movies, so kids just have to love them...
...Eventually Yunis, after enduring a ritual beating, is imprisoned (along with his siblings) in Camp Ganci, a satellite of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison. Ganci houses prisoners who have no intelligence value - it seems to be simply a place to file and forget American mistakes - and its population mainly sits around sweltering in the deadly desert heat, without adequate food, sanitation or medical attention. Now and then, insurgents subject it to mortar fire, randomly killing some of its inhabitants, who from time to time riot in protest over their treatment. If there's a grace note to be found...