Rituals and ceremonies have their place in the completeness of our integral spiritual life but they should be conducted in the spirit of true devotion that rises from the depths of the heart as a steady flame of faith. A spirit of beauty and truth, a genuine act of kindness and charity, movements of self sacrifice motivated by courage and love, a seeking for wisdom a gesture indicating the spirit of service and self giving to the Divine are surely far more valuable and dear to God than all these ritualistic formal readings and elaborate ceremonies often conducted in a soulless lifeless mechanical manner and for low and obscure motives as if we can fool the Divine by show of devotion and seek His favours by pleasing Him in these crude ways.
This phenomenon of processions with idols and all the paraphernalia associated with it has little to do with bhakti. It is relatively new, a few centuries old perhaps. Ceremonies are there as part of all religious tradition but generally they are solemn and based on certain occult truths as well as the sense of the sacred. But this blatant beating of drums with chaotic gyrations and gesticulations remind one of the dionyssians who lost the truth of their great teaching and fell into oblivion. These are distortions and degradations of certain truths whose core has been lost. At best they invite some gods and beings of the vital world where much falsehood is mixed with fragments of truth, at worst they invoke certain dangerous forces in the atmosphere. Their only justification lies in the fact that much of mankind is still too crude and gross and hence not ready for deeper subtler ways of coming in contact with the Beyond. Better than this is a seeking agnosticism. Best of all of course is a conscious aspiration and faith burning ceaselessly like a lamp in the altar of the heart where God dwells, fed by a deep quiet devotion manifested in acts of true service to God everywhere and in everything.
