Ritual

Q: What is the nature and purpose of ritual?
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A: Ritual as defined by Clifford Geertz is a ceremonial performance whose sacred symbols induce conceptions of the order of existence and transform one's sense of reality by blurring the line between real and imagined.
Apart from a rather rambling way of expressing himself, I found his examples of ritual relieving, having expected a far more constipated set of illustrations.
Prior to reading this passage, I too saw ritual chiefly as a type of heavily prescribed hallucinatory theater, a series of motions among metaphorical objects, spoken texts, musical pieces and various ingestions that let lazy believers do their praying for them.
No big fan of the device, I've come to prefer a more free-form, malleable type of worship (or visitation to a headstone, night at the pub or gathering to listen as an attorney friend recites "The Jabberwocky"), where there's more than a snowball's chance of some sort of unscripted, emotional give and take as to the actual nature of God. Anything less smacks of idolatry and posing.