Resonant Reading (Saturday)-Expressive Ritual-Langer

When

02/21/2026

4:00 pm - 5:00 pm

Event Type

Resonant Reading, Spiritual practice, Spotlight

An exploration of ideas, feelings, and our life experiences, using a different short reading as our springboard each time. The sessions are on Saturdays, 4-5, and on Wednesdays, 12-1. All are wide open and you are welcome to come twice a week or once in a while.

The participants over the years have found that the approach we take, and the respectful, affectionate community of inquirers in which we read and converse, are as important as the reading itself. While many small groups begin with a check-in, with a session only an hour long, Resonant Reading jumps right in to the conversation. Those who are frequently in the group get to know each other very well this way, and those who are new will soon find they are among friends.

Facilitators use a light hand, posting the reading in the chat and calling on whoever’s Zoom hand is up. Suggestions for readings* come from group members, who also take turns facilitating, if they want to try that role.

The reading for this session: Saturday, February 21, 2026

Speech is the mark of humanity. … But in fact, speech is the natural outcome of only one kind of symbolic process. There are transformations of experience in the human mind that have quite different overt endings. They end in acts that are neither practical nor communicative … I mean the actions we call ritual.

Human life is shot through and through with ritual…. It is an intricate fabric of reason and rite, of knowledge and religion, prose and poetry, fact and dream. [In addition to] verbal symbolism, … all other instinctive acts may serve the expressive function. Eating, traveling, asking or answering questions, construction, destruction, prostitution—any or all such activities may enter into rites; yet rites in themselves are not practical, but expressive. Ritual … is born in the cortex, not in the “old brain”; but it is born of an elementary need of that organ, once the organ has grown to human estate.

Suzanne K. Langer (1942), Philosophy in a New Key, pp. 48-49.

How to join:

Join this class from your Web browser: https://zoom.us/j/91019857324, passcode 227385
Join this class using the Zoom app: Meeting ID: 910 1985 7324
Join this class by phone: 669 900 9128 US (San Jose), Meeting ID: 910 1985 7324
Join this class by on-tap on mobile phones: +16699009128,,91019857324# US (San Jose)
Phoning in, but not in the bay area? Find your local number: https://zoom.us/u/abL8clvIYT

This is the Zoom link for Saturdays. For the Wednesday Zoom link, go to the Calendar and click on a Wednesday session.

Questions? Drop an e-mail to resonant-reading+owner@uucpa.org.

*This activity was formerly called “Sacred Text Reading.” That proved misleading–for one thing, more often than not our sources are secular–but it’s worth describing the qualities of a sacred text, which we still look for in the readings we choose. It is any reading that helps us to: