Quote:
Originally Posted by Drolefille
From a minority person's standpoint, that discomfort is just one more in a long list of discomforts that they're expected to 'deal with' throughout their everyday lives. Newspapers assume the 'standard' person is white and only identify someone by race if the person is non-white. Co-workers assume that everyone's Christian and say a very specifically Christian prayer before a holiday meal. It gets wearing on a person when it's always "them" who is expected to be humble for the whole.
I really don't disagree that ultimately it's worth it for some people, but I don't think it's an issue that can be swept away as humility vs. pride. And I think that her opinions on whether or not ritual is outdated is not because of discomfort but because of the same thing that causes the discomfort, if I'm reading her right. In her description they're both symptoms of the same problem, not one caused by the other.
Again, the inability to talk in specifics makes this a pretty pointless discussion and only enhances my opinion that any sort of concerted effort among GLOs to 'recognize ritual' is fruitless. We should support our ritual - or work from within to change it if we so desire - but we can't really talk about things otherwise.
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Understanding the limitations of this topic, I would argue that most GLOs try to be accommodating to this discomfort by generally focusing more on the values based sentiment of Ritual in membership education, resources, publications, etc. As long as we emphasize the values inherent in our rituals we should be able to move on from things that are maybe less inclusive.
It's probably worth saying that I feel my Ritual is very inclusive (a valid argument could be made to call it secular, though I would call it interfaith) so I may not fully understand the breadth of these feelings.
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