Ritual

"Ordered movement, ritual, is natural to men. But some ages are better at it, are more used to it, and more sensitive to it, than other. The Middle Ages like great spectacle, and therefore (if for no other reasons--but there were many) they liked ritual. They talked in ritual--blazons declared it. They were nourished by ritual--the Eucharist exhibited it. They made love by ritual--the convention of courtly love preserved it. Certainly also they did all these things without ritual--but ritual (outside the inner experience) was the norm. And ritual maintains and increases that natural sense of the significance of movement. And, of course, of formulae, of words." --Charles Williams