Ritual's social gifts (SPF)

 Order:

• The reinforcement, not the actual creation, of social order is perhaps the most obvious of ritual's functions.... There is something about ritual that pushes beyond the concern for social order reaching out towards substance, soul, life-feel, and the love of participation. (132)
• Ritual can do more than remind individuals of an underlying [cosmic] order, it reinforces that order. (133)
• In other words, through ritualization we make routine a certain way of seeing, hearing, touching, and otherwise perceiving the environment. (135)
• Out of shared perceptions and ritualized "ways" of a people, as these gradually take on a symbolic functions, there comes into existence a shared "world." ... There is a feeling, not entirely out of rational basis , that if the rituals disintegrated the rivers would not flow nor thing flourish. (136)
• Goes on to talk about the practices used in rituals - how it is the specific things read - not who reads them, not their mental state, but the act itself done correctly that creates order. . (140-144)
•  There are two senses in which he understands rituals to create to create and maintain order. He begins with their ability to mark times and spaces, to symbolize realities, and thus to represent a structured world.... The second sense in which rituals create and maintain order is more utilitarian. Rappaport speaks of rituals as sometimes being "factitive" meaning that they cause things to happen. (145)

Community:

• One obvious aspect or ritual is that it not only brings people together in physical assembly but it also tends to unit them emotionally. It bonds them in even deeper ways, also, as we will see. (152)
• Although it is true that some rituals may be performed by individuals in private, these instances are unintelligible except as offshoots or imitations of collective rituals...we saw that performances is a "showing" that always requires an audience, even if the spectator is physically invisible or is an aspect of the performers own self. (154)
• Purposes of ritual:
• Ensure individual participation in a group activity and to channel and intensify the group's mood (154)
• ...release and direct aggressive impulses in such a way that aggressive hostility is kept under control, while aggressive love (moving toward) is enhanced within the group (155)
• Ritual controls emotions while releasing it, and guides it while letting it run. (156)
• Along with the idea of ritual as party, goes that of ritual as play. (156)
• Communitas - shared sense of community from those that have undergone rites of passage together

Transformation: 

• ... the third and most important, which is to assist the dynamic social change through ritual process of transformation. From a purely theoretical point of view, if that were possible or desirable to achieve, it would be a question of whether
• rituals should be thought of first as instruments of order that happen to enhance communal bonds and to facilitate various kinds of transformation
• or, primarily as community-making events that incidentally generate order and transform it
• or first of all techniques of transformation that help to order life and deepen communal relationships (166)
• Western Intellectuals regard magic as superstition, and most theologians equate it with paganism as well. In these matters, it often seems that one person's "magic" is another persons "religion". 
• .... all magic is ritualized, and as we shall see, all ritual employs magic. (167)
• ...He says that ritual "not only has meaning but also 'works', it is magical." This way of thinking about the subject is close to that of Van Gennep who had used "magic" to refer to ceremonies, rites, and services that are the principal techniques of transformation employed by religion. 168
• ...Magic depends on the declarative to reach the imperative: "This is how things work; therefore let this be the case"169)
• … the spiritual is the very act of transcending, while not excluding, the mundane. Spirit is life. To call it transcendence is to speak abstractly. The same point is made more concretely by saying the spiritual is personal. To view the world spiritually is to view it as full of personal agency, and this is precisely what ritual does… (175)