This is from the PBS series Joseph Campbell: The Power of Myth, with Bill Moyers:
There’s been a reduction, a reduction, a reduction of ritual. Even in the Roman Catholic Church. my God, they’ve translated the Mass out of the ritual language into a language that has a lot of domestic associations. Every time…that I read the Latin of the Mass, I get that pitch again that it’s supposed to give, a language that throws you out of the field of your domesticity. The altar is turned so that the priest’s back is to you, and with him you address yourself outward [gestures upward with his hands] like that.
Now they’ve turned the altar around; [it] looks like Julia Child giving a demonstration—all homey and cozy. They’ve forgotten what the function of a ritual is: it’s to pitch you out, not to wrap you back in where you have been all the time.
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