Customer Reviews

A Sense of the Sacred: Finding Our Spiritual Lives Through Ceremony

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A few years ago, I attended the outdoor wedding of some friends in the American Southwest. At one point, an attractive woman stepped to the front and spoke a kind of benediction for the ceremony that is a marriage. She spoke in a strikingly mood altering manner: calm, unhurried, sincere, with matter of factual intensity and grace; and she spoke of the deeper experience and meaning of this moment which we all shared in. Usually uncomfortable in the presence of sermons and ceremony, I found myself thinking that this woman was a new kind of priestess, one that could help us reintegrate our spirits with our lives on this planet in a natural and honest way. The speaker was Adele Getty, and we are fortunate that she has published here what amounts to a manual for the revitalisation of "The Sense of the Sacred" which she understands and embodies so well. Ms Getty speaks movingly and with insight on the meaning of the sense of the sacred in earlier societies and it's subsequent loss, and of revitalisation movements, particularly the current and recent New Age, before moving into the reawakening of the sacred in our lives. Here the reader especially benefits from Getty's particular gifts and experience, for she has a natural sixth sense for the personal as well as social processes involved here. She speaks of the use of creating meaningful ceremony, as part of the process of investing our experiences with the full dimensions of their meaning for us; of birth and dying, of troubled teens disconnected, of the women's and men's movements, and of the male-female partnership, and our lives in our communities. Sense of the Sacred is an engaging and insightful personal manual for the revitalisation of this resonant dimension in our lives. I heartily recommend it.-Stephen Miller, Mkzdk.