Are Native Rituals for Everyone?

There

is

a major difference between Native Americans incorporating Christianity into their beliefs and people outside the Native cultures using specific Native rituals outside the Native cultural context. I don't know if this difference operates for all Native families and tribes, but it does for some. The reason you can't see the difference is because you are not part of the culture, and so you don't view ritual the same way they do.

	What Do You Think? Should only those who are rooted in the culture be practicing Native American rituals? Discuss

In some Native cultures, the belief is that a ritual doesn't happen just when someone does it. When a ritual is done the same way, over and over again, it becomes something--by doing the ritual, the ritual gets shaped and formed, like a clay pot.

Doing a ritual does something within our mind and our will, it affects energy, and in many cases it communicates with and invokes the aid of certain spirits. The first time that ritual is done, all of these things are shaped a certain way for the first time. As it's done over and over in the same way, it builds a pattern--in our minds, in our will, in the energy, perhaps in the collective unconscious.

The spirits who work with us recognize the ritual and know what we intend to do. All these things together are sometimes thought of as a container--like the clay pot, or maybe like a clay tube that power flows through--doing the ritual a certain way gives the container a certain shape, and the container shapes the power and directs it in a certain way.

When a ritual is done that way, over and over, for years or centuries, the container becomes very strong, and the ritual can have tremendous power. But when someone does the ritual not in a good way--without understanding, without the internal shaping that goes on in the mind and heart, without connection to the same spirits, without getting parts of it right, or doing it in the wrong season, or in the wrong way--anything that takes it out of its context and pattern--then it weakens the container.

The idea is that the container acts a little bit like you do when you learn how to do something so well that it's automatic--then you start doing it a different way. You won't do it as well. Even when you go back to doing it the first way, you still won't do it as well.

Now, what if the thing you learned to do was to control huge amounts of power? If you suddenly didn't do it as well, there are lots of possible outcomes. You could just be less effective at doing what you meant to do. Another outcome is that you could fail to do what you meant to do, but the energy could ricochet off somewhere and do something you didn't intend for it to do. Or you could get hurt.

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