Emma Lazarus Quotes

Standing near the door, we dipped our fingers in the holy water, crossed and blessed ourselves, and proceeded up to the sleeping-room, in the usual order, two by two.

When all is ready, the leaders walk out to the dance place.

I do love the idea of ritual.

The Lord doesn't like us to be dead. Be alive. Sometimes I dance to the glory of the Lord, because He said so.

Prayer does not use up artificial energy, doesn't burn up any fossil fuel, doesn't pollute. Neither does song, neither does love, neither does the dance.

Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.

Throughout its history, the members of Shearith Israel have observed Thanksgiving by reciting in synagogue the same psalms of praise and gratitude sung by Jews all over the world on festive days like Hanukkah.

Liturgy and worship were never meant to be confined to the cathedrals and sanctuaries. Liturgy at its best can be performed like a circus or theater - making the Gospel visible as a witness to the world around us.

People crown kings and queens at homecoming parades all the time. We do a lot of things in our society that are simply symbolic.

this is her body this is her blood

Now is the time for drinking; now the time to beat the earth with unfettered foot.

I go to church every Sunday. I've always been a believer. I love singing. I don't have the best voice - I just love getting my emotions out.

I light candles because I want to have candles lit, not because I need to see!

Religion in the West has a very wrong connotation. It has almost reached to a point where the very word 'religion' creates a repulsion, where the very word 'religion' reminds one of dead churches and dead priests. It reminds one of serious looking people, long faces. It has lost the capacity to dance, to sing, to celebrate. And when a religion has lost the capacity to dance, to celebrate, to sing, to love, just to be, then it is no more religion - it is a corpse, it is theology. Theology is dead religion.

Some days I pray to the God of sex and drums and rock and roll.

Let this be the criterion always: anything that makes you festive, anything that gives you celebration, anything that makes you dance and sing to such an extent that you disappear in your dancing, in your singing, in your celebration... is the only true religion I know of.

When we gather for worship, whether with a handful in a storefront chapel or with thousands in St. Peter's Square, we perform a drama with different parts-speaking and singing and praying and giving money and baptizing and eating bread and drinking wine-all for the delight of God.

True art means if it helps you to become silent, still, joyous; if it gives you a celebration, if it makes you dance—whether anybody participates with you or not is irrelevant. If it becomes a bridge between you and God, that is true art. If it becomes a meditation, that is true art. If you become absorbed in it, so utterly absorbed that the ego disappears, that is true art.

Let us now celebrate the literary allusion.

It was then that my religious consciousness emerged to flower years afterward into definite forms of religious dancing in which there is no sense of division between spirit and flesh, religion and art.

At present I am light, now I fly, now I see myself below me, now a god dances through me.

When the year turns, there are bells on the wind. All the old years fall on the ground in lights.

The church is no more religion than the masonry of the aqueduct is the water that flows through it.

[A novel by Henry James] is like a church lit but without a congregation to distract you, with every light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently place, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an egg-shell, a bit of string.

I sacrifice to the God of Beauty — the impulse to beauty in nature. Here are flowers. Here is wine spilled on the floor. I will burn incense & myrhh. I will kneel & strike my breast & touch the dust with my forehead. I will I will! Only do not forsake me, Oh God of beauty.