Guy Reams (00:00.974)
Okay, this is day 229. Ceremony holds value.
So last night, coming home from a graduation, my son noticed a moose lodge on the side of the road. My son asked me what a moose lodge was, and I recollected back from my past of all the times that with my grandfather or grandparents, parents, where I attended a group club or some sort of fraternal order. And I've attended lots of them, right?
But this might have been what we would consider yesterday, social media, a place for people to gather, get together, like -minded people to socialize. A quick internet search in the car landed on a few pages about the loyal order of the moose, which has been around for a long time. I think it started in like 1888. And of course, you guessed it. It was the first.
Moose Lodge was in Mooseheart, Illinois in 1988. Now, there's obviously there's the official one and then there's other, you know, non -official houses or lodges. I don't know the details. I'm sure somebody will comment, tell me how I'm all wrong. But I've been inside a Moose Lodge before. I've been a guest a long time ago. But some very famous people have been part of the
loyal order of the moose. Presidents, politicians, actors, athletes. My son read some of the details on some of the ceremonies that they perform. You know, certain packs of secrecy and certain songs and rules they have. And you can read up on that if you want to. But I was thinking as we were laughing about some of the things we heard or read about, I was thinking we should not be so quick to dismiss things of ceremony.
Guy Reams (02:03.566)
as they could be storage vehicles for great value. So after all, we were driving back from a graduation ceremony at a major university where they were bestowing masters and doctor degrees of various professions. If you stop and think about the ceremonies of pomp and circumstance, they are equally strange. At one point, they have an honorary doctor degree.
They were given an honorary doctorate degree to a woman as part of this process. They performed this thing that they called the hooding. Now I know a little bit about this because I was a faculty member at a college for 20, 20 years or so. And we would walk down the aisle wearing this hood. Now it wasn't really a hood. It was like this brightly colored ribbon that, that kind of draped over your shoulders and came around here and you like tied it to your gown. And then it would hang down in the back and.
I guess if you really look at it, it really is a hood, but it's this completely non -functional hood. Like you couldn't actually wear it as a hood. It wouldn't work. So here they are doing this hooding of this honorary doctorate degree. And you're thinking about, this is kind of interesting. And so if you think about all the various things that we do to celebrate in life,
They are all full of ceremony. We had a birthday party the other day where we put out a cake with a whole bunch of candles on it and the person had to make a wish and blow out the candles. So we have ceremony and rights. Now you gotta think about it. How important does something have to be for it to last the test of time? I mean, we've had ceremonies that we perform that have lasted hundreds, thousands.
maybe even multiple thousands of years. So just because one society does something strange to us does not make it any less meaningful. We do some interesting things in our everyday society that from the outside would look awfully weird to us. So I'm thinking we should take a pause before we dismiss ceremony out of hand just because we think it's weird. So pondering this further,
Guy Reams (04:21.709)
I realized what an incredible amount of vitality a practice must have to last this long. The symbolism, the practice itself, the meaning attached must be really powerful to survive the test of time and go through all the changes in social opinions, moods, and definitions of what is acceptable. You know, as I'm writing this article, I have this ritual that I do when I write my articles every day and when I do this video.
So I have a process I go through and it's not great, but it works for me. You know, my writing, the flow of ideas that come, I have a method for doing this. I have a certain habit that I've established writing consistently every day. And out of that, I have to do it in a certain way to get myself kind of in the mindset. And I've surrounded that practice with familiar things that help me focus and clear my mind, clear my thoughts, allow me to think freely and open.
I do not want to allow myself to pass judgment on my abilities because if I give myself too much pause of thought, I won't do it. The primal mind will kick in and tell me what a loser I am and I won't do anything. So I want to have a certain flow about the work I do. So I have ritual around it to kind of keep me focused. I want to be open to ideas. So I come up with ways to clear my mind, to free myself from stresses and anxiety so I can take a moment and write or think.
So I have a whole sequence of processes do. I have a certain drink I drink. I have a certain place I sit. I usually go running first and then right second. So I have a place I sit to tie my shoes. It's actually right behind me. I always sit in the same place to put my shoes on and sit in the same place to take my shoes off. I feel like, you know, Mr. Rogers neighborhood or something, you know, when he walked in and took a shoe. Well, I understand that now because it's kind of ritualistic, right?
So the habits that I formed around this writing process have become ritual. So I'm starting to get the vision of how a ceremony starts to happen. So let's say I keep this daily writing thing up. And let's say I do it for the next 50 years, if I actually live that long. But as I do, I get more and more people to help me. Let's say I hire a few people. Let's say I hire a ghostwriter, I don't know, or somebody to help me. I get too old, I need somebody to type.
Guy Reams (06:48.622)
But let's say I organize myself and I get more people around me and my processes and procedures and my ritual becomes more well -defined, well rehearsed. People start mimicking it. And maybe after I pass away, there's enough money around where my estate continues the process going and people forget the original intent behind the ritual, but they do the ritual anyway. For example,
Maybe my morning green drink that I do in the morning, maybe that becomes ritualistic. Maybe there's a certain process where they go through. They have to sit on a certain bench and stir the mixture slowly with a certain type of spoon. You know, and then it gets repeated and repeated and refined. A hundred years after that, if the organization survives that long, there's a real strange process where somebody has to sit under a citrus tree. Somebody has to sit on a particular wooden bench.
The bench would have to be wood because wood produces the correct energy and all that, right? Of course. And then of course they have to use a small porcelain spoon. And you must hold the cup in the left hand and stir only in the clockwise fashion with the right hand. I don't know, I'm just making it up now. No one remembers why this is done or why it has become a porcelain spoon. All the meaning is lost.
They just know that before they start writing for the day, they must sit quietly by a citrus tree and stir a drink. This would be ceremony. Now, in a couple hundred years, they could decide to ditch the ceremony. But the problem is, is the ceremony holds value. There is a real value there. The value is taking a moment in nature, calm, relaxing moment to free your mind so that you can write better.
So I don't really believe that anything I do will ever become ceremony, but I'm just using it as an example. But if you think about it, after more than 100 and 100 years of repetition by a body of people, one small habit could become ritual and then become ceremony. And so if you think about it, that could happen with almost anything. But in my case, it's just one little thing.
Guy Reams (09:09.23)
What if there's an entire religion or entire structure of things that people do? Ceremony embodies so many of those things all into one. Think of the average wedding ceremony. How many little nuances are in the average wedding ceremony that remind us of commitment and covenant, remind us of family, remind us of bonds, remind us of all these things that we do, and reminds us of our obligations to raise children of the world?
So marriage is centered around that whole idea. And sometimes we don't even know why we're doing the ceremony the way we do it. But it's this whole concept of bringing families together and doing all this stuff. So the ceremony serves the purpose still. It contains latent value. So the graduation ceremony that we attended is intended to create separation, prestige, and a reminder of how important loyalty, aspiration, and camaraderie are.
in your chosen professional field. This symbolizes advancement to a unique and special class of scholars that deserves respect, but also demands that you defend the community of like -minded professionals. I would not be too quick to dismiss the fancy ribbons, the funny hats, the strange robes, the completely impractical hoods. The ceremony holds meaning and transcends the ridiculous nature of the garb and permeates our understanding of what
is happening and the respect that scholars of this nature deserve. I've only met a few moose pilgrims. I think that's what they call one of the higher levels in the moose law, the moose order, I'm not sure, but I think they call them pilgrims. But I can tell you this, I've only met one or two of those moose pilgrims. But the ones that I've met have usually been very kind people and they've been devoted to a life of service.
They tend to be at charity drives and events in their local community, and they seem to be rather happy doing it. Recently, I saw one man wearing this large moose hat on his head at this community event as he was happily serving pancakes to the homeless. Who wouldn't be happy wearing moose ears at a social gathering? We may think all the rituals and ceremonies,
Guy Reams (11:30.798)
that an order that we don't know about seems kind of strange and perhaps a bit comical. But clearly, there is some merit in long -held practices. They do seem to produce dedicated, well -rounding, and amazing people. Thank you.