National Ritual Celebration Week
 

For those of y'all who don't go on FaceBook much, this was posted:

We are pleased to announce Alpha Delta Pi's participation in the inaugural National Ritual Celebration Week. The week will take place March 1-7, 2011. For more information on this week, please click on the link below.

ADPi - Events
www.alphadeltapi.org

National Ritual Celebration Week
Grand Council is pleased to announce Alpha Delta Pi’s participation in the inaugural National Ritual Celebration Week. The week, which will be observed March 1-7, 2011 will reflect on our sorority’s ritual and will promote awareness of all Greek organizations’ ritual.

There's more on the ADPi site. Seems that Phi Mu started this (go, Macon Magnolias!), and I think it's a great idea. Maybe we should celebrate right in our Forum this week, too! It would start this Tuesday, March 1st. Anyone else up for it?

And of course, the key word will be DISCRETION!!!!!

I.. don't get the point of this actually. I mean... we're supposed to celebrate and promote awareness of the things we specifically have promised not to discuss. I don't get it.

Sorry for the forum crash, realized it post-posting

I'm so glad you posted this honeychile! I think NRCW is a great idea and a positive way to promote fraternities and sororities as values based organizations.

@Drole: It's supposed to be more about taking a moment to recognize and appreciate Ritual within your own membership, and on campus to celebrate our shared fraternal values.

For example, my Order of Omega chapter is sponsoring NRCW here by doing things like having a Ritual reaffirmation pledge for members to sign, displaying posters of common values and listing the organizations that cherish them, and producing a video of members talking about what their organizations values mean to them.

Sorry for the crash.

I think this is a wonderful idea. Perhaps not so much the idea of "promoting" secrets, but more of really taking some time to live your ritual.

Maybe it's not too much of a crash since Sigma Kappa seems to be joining in as well. :D

I'm sure no one is considering promoting secrets -- I assume the idea is more for individuals and chapters to focus on their own rituals and for the Greek community to emphasize that we all have ideals and value that we cherish and try to live by.

As honeychile said, Phi Mu came up with this idea. Here is a page at their website with information, including resources and particiapting groups and individuals. An interesting idea.

Tri Sigma is also participating in this. An interesting thing that we did at the last Panhellenic meeting was that we explained the meaning of the National Panhellenic Conference crest as well as we went around explaining what our sorority meant to us. It was a group with representatives from the 19 NPC chapters as well as our three associate chapters and it was just so cool to realize that all of our sisterhoods are special, meaningful, and important to us in many of the same ways.

I'm not really that down with this, because I think that a lot of rituals are outdated, in that they are too religious for the increasing diversity of their orgs. I think the open creeds/symphonies/what have you of many orgs better represents what they stand for.

This makes more sense, what didn't make sense was the "promoting awareness of all Greek org's rituals." Still, not something I'm particularly excited about, nor do I think that 'celebrating' it would go well here on GC. We really can't talk about the rituals themselves, most if not all of us feel something generally positive about our rituals but can't discuss anything in more than the most vague of terms.

Makes sense within a chapter, or an org, but not as something done with 'other' people.

How would you know this unless you are a ritual collector?

Know what? That the vast majority of rituals have Christian origins? I didn't think that was any sort of secret.

Yeah, but to jump from the knowledge that many orgs have Christian basis to "I think that a lot of rituals are outdated, in that they are too religious for the increasing diversity of their orgs" implies that you know what specifically is contained in other org's rituals. Being based on religion and being too religious are two very different things.

So there's no confusion - this is a serious question, not a taunting one.

Do you really feel that the Christian origins of your Ritual are so pervasive that the other values of your organization do not transcend them? Furthermore, are you in opposition to them simply because they are Christian, or because you are in conflict with them message of them?

I recommend only speaking on your own organization's ritual.

With that said, I really don't get the point of National Ritual Celebration Week when done across organizations. This celebration week makes sense within organization, but not across organizations.

This isn't something that can be answered by members of an organization without breaking ritual. Not easily. But I wouldn't be surprised if non-Christians felt uncomfortable in some of our organizations because of the ritual, no matter how easy or hard it is to dodge around specifics or promises or how you can support the values over the Christian origins or current presentations. I can say that pretty comfortably just based on the comments made on this board across GLOs.

Whether that's a problem or not depends on your organization and its members.

What I am saying is that many of the (NPC) orgs have open mottos/creeds/whatevers that reflect their core beliefs. For example, Phi Mu: love, honor, truth. Alpha Chi Omega: love, unselfishness, sincerity. Delta Delta Delta: truth, self-sacrifice, friendship. I think that these core values are very important, and our members should strive to live by them. They are, in my opinion, more important than some specific words in a book.

It's harder to answer the second part of your question. I am not against participating in a ritual based on Christian scripture, as I think that there is value in the historical significance of continuing a tradition set down by our founders. However, even many of the open mottos reference God in a way that I personally find to be exclusive.

So basically, what I'm trying to say, is that I think values are important, and I think historical continuity is important, but the religious aspect makes me uncomfortable, and I think that a week set aside to "reflect on ritual" risks elevating the latter.