The purpose of a ceremony is to integrate: to fuse the individual with his or her fellows, the community of people with that of the other kingdoms, and this larger communal group with the worlds beyond this one. A raising or expansion of individual consciousness naturally accompanies this process. The person sheds the isolated, individual personality and is restored to conscious harmony with the universe. In addition to this general purpose, each ceremony has its own specific purpose. This purpose usually varies from tribe to tribe and may be culture-specific.

Why should I pray? Why should I venerate and be ceremonious?

That, I think, is the power of ceremony: it marries the mundane to the sacred. The water turns to wine, the coffee to a prayer. The material and the spiritual mingle like grounds mingled with humus, transformed like steam rising from a mug into the morning mist.

What else can you offer the earth, which has everything? What else can you give but something of yourself? A homemade ceremony, a ceremony that makes a home.

The sunrise ceremony is our way of sending gratitude into the world, to recognize all that we are given and to offer our choicest thanks in return. Many Native peoples across the world, despite myriad cultural differences, have this in common—we are rooted in cultures of gratitude.

With our dreams, with our stories, with our tears, and with our hopes, we, too, scatter new seeds and harvest new beginnings. We gather outside-the sky above us, the earth below, and all of the ancestors watching. We gather in a place blessed by the sun, watered by the rain, and cooled by the wind. We gather in a place that has known fire, and survived. We are here to remember the future, and look forward to the time when the ancestors remember us. May they rejoice. ("The Desert Remembers My Name")

Perhaps all the good that ever has come here has come because people prayed it into the world.

Ceremonies are employed to embellish and adorn sacred functions; to excite in the faithful sentiments of respect, devotion, and religion, by which the honour of God is increased and the sanctification of the soul is obtained, since these constitute the principal object of all liturgical acts; to lead the illiterate more easily to a knowledge of the mysteries of religion; to indicate the dispositions necessary to receive the sacraments worthily; and to induce the faithful to fulfil with greater docility the obligations which the reception of the sacraments imposes on them.

The primary purpose of prayer is not to make requests. The primary purpose is to praise, to sing, to chant. Because the essence of prayer is a song, and man cannot live without a song.

Prayer may not save us. But prayer may make us worthy of being saved.

May I fall as rain to increase The harvests that must feed living beings And in ages of dire famine May I myself serve as food and drink.

That spirit, that feeling for one's comrades in the snow, the moonlight, under the blossoms, is also basic to the tea ceremony. A tea ceremony is a coming together in feeling, a meeting of good comrades in a good season. I may say in passing, that to see my novel Thousand Cranes as an evocation of the formal and spiritual beauty of the tea ceremony is a misreading. It is a negative work, and expression of doubt about and warning against the vulgarity into which the tea ceremony has fallen.

The ceremonies that persist — birthdays, weddings, funerals — focus only on ourselves, marking rites of personal transition. […]

We know how to carry out this rite for each other and we do it well. But imagine standing by the river, flooded with those same feelings as the Salmon march into the auditorium of their estuary. Rise in their honor, thank them for all the ways they have enriched our lives, sing to honor their hard work and accomplishments against all odds, tell them they are our hope for the future, encourage them to go off into the world to grow, and pray that they will come home. Then the feasting begins. Can we extend our bonds of celebration and support from our own species to the others who need us?

Many indigenous traditions still recognize the place of ceremony and often focus their celebrations on other species and events in the cycle of the seasons. In a colonist society the ceremonies that endure are not about land; they’re about family and culture, values that are transportable from the old country. Ceremonies for the land no doubt existed there, but it seems they did not survive emigration in any substantial way. I think there is wisdom in regenerating them here, as a means to form bonds with this land.

The aim of individual prayer is not only to obtain particular favors, but also the purification of the soul: it loosens psychic knots or, in other words, dissolves subconscious coagulations and drains away many secret poisons; it externalizes before God the difficulties, failures and tensions of the soul, which presupposes that the soul be humble and genuine, and this externalization − carried out in the face of the Absolute − has the virtue of reestablishing equilibrium and restoring peace; in a word, of opening us to grace.

The purpose of prayer is not to inform our Lord what you desire, for He knows all your needs. It is to render you able and ready to receive the grace which our Lord will freely give you. This grace cannot be experienced until you have been refined and purified by the fire of desire in devout prayer. For although prayer is not the cause for which our Lord gives grace, it is nevertheless the means by which grace, freely given, comes to the soul.

Like sacrifices, prayer is intended to change man, not God. Its purpose is to cultivate a contrite heart, to promote feelings of humility and inadequacy in man, whilst encouraging reliance on Divine assistance.