For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World

by Sasha Sagan

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever. . . . This is a somewhat new kind of religion. —ALBERT EINSTEIN

A life without festivity is a long road without an inn. —DEMOCRITUS

“It’s dangerous to believe things just because you want them to be true.”

They taught me that what scientists think today might be disproven tomorrow, and that’s wonderful, because that’s the pathway to a better, deeper understanding.

Being alive was presented to me as profoundly beautiful and staggeringly unlikely, a sacred miracle of random chance. My parents taught me that the universe is enormous and we humans are tiny beings who get to live on an out-of-the-way planet for the blink of an eye.

“for small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.”

We all deserve holidays, celebrations, and traditions. We all need to mark time. We all need community. We all need to bid hello and goodbye to our loved ones. I do not believe that my lack of faith makes me immune to the desire to be part of the rhythm of life on this planet.

“The only sin would be to pretend.”

Beneath the specifics of all our beliefs, sacred texts, origin stories, and dogmas, we humans have been celebrating the same two things since the dawn of time: astronomy and biology.

The changing of the seasons, the long summer days, the harvest, the endless winter nights, and the blossoming spring are all by-products of how the Earth orbits the sun. The phases of the moon, which have dictated the timing of rituals since the dawn of civilization, are the result of how the moon orbits us. Birth, puberty, reproduction, and death are the biological processes of being human. Throughout the history of our species, these have been the miracles, for lack of a better word, that have given us meaning. They are the real, tangible events upon which countless celebrations have been built, mirroring one another even among societies who had no contact.

As I see it, here we are on this rock that orbits a star, in a quiet part of a spiral galaxy somewhere in the great,...

We needn’t resort to myth to get that spine-chilling thrill of being part of something grander than ourselves. Our vast universe provides us with enough profound and beautiful truths to live a spiritually fulfilling life.

wowzers

An old tradition is not intrinsically better than a new one. Especially when it is such a joy to make new ones up—ones that reflect exactly what you believe, ones that make sense of your life as you experience it, ones that bring the world a little closer to the way you wish it could be.

Words like sacred, magical, and spiritual come from theism, but they describe the same feeling even when it’s elicited by an understanding of scientific phenomena. These words are evolving with our understanding of our place in the splendor of existence.

I love parties, the marking of time, the sensation of feeling it pass.

Religion, at its best, facilitates empathy, gratitude, and awe. Science, at its best, reveals true grandeur beyond our wildest dreams. My hope is that I can merge these into some new thing that will serve my daughter, my family, and you, dear reader, as we navigate—and celebrate—the mysterious beauty and terror of being alive in our universe.

“You don’t understand, you didn’t exist, and then we made you! And now you’re here!” We roll our eyes and say, “Yes, Mom, that’s how it works.” Which is true, but no less astonishing, beautiful, or thrilling. Being born at all is amazing. It’s easy to lose sight of this.

The blink of an eye, really, in the grand scheme of things. And yet here we are. Right now.

It’s easy to forget how amazing this is. Days and weeks go by and the regularity of existing eclipses the miraculousness of it. But there are certain moments when we manage to be viscerally aware of being alive. Sometimes those are very scary moments, like narrowly avoiding a car accident. Sometimes they are beautiful, like holding your newborn in your arms. And then there are the quiet moments in between, when all the joy and sorrow seem profound only to you.

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

My mother tells me that when I was born, my father lifted me up, looked at me, and said, “Welcome to the planet Earth.” Then they didn’t name me for three days.

She was both magnetic and impossible, a mesmerizing storyteller with a one-of-a-kind laugh.

My parents told me that there was a kind of secret code called DNA running through our veins. I learned it carried the traits of ancestors I would never meet. My genes linked me back to the earliest humans, to prehistoric mammals and back eventually to the first life on Earth. And if, someday, I had children of my own, I would become a link in the chain, passing along an embedded part of myself to the future generations who would never know my name. This was, to me, more satisfying than any other possible explanation. And it was verifiable, independent of my belief or lack thereof.

The ideas that “everything happens for a reason” or that certain things are “meant to be” are often offered as reassurances. But, to me, they are not as astounding or awe-inspiring as the idea that, in all this chaos, somehow you are you.

I feel a sense of awe for every single thing that happened to bring us to this exact moment, where we are each us, alive, experiencing life together on this world.

Time is an elusive concept. It’s passing constantly, yet it’s so hard to feel. It’s like lying in the grass, trying to feel the Earth rotate. When changes are both small and constant, we can’t grasp them. But watching a sunset, for example, we can process that we’ve successfully completed another rotation.

My mother would produce a large book of construction paper, some Elmer’s glue, a pair of safety scissors, and one large piece of cardboard. We would decide on a theme—the ocean, space, dinosaurs, forests—and create a world by cutting out paper flora, fauna, rocks, and suns. Sometimes the themes were even religious. The stories of the Garden of Eden and Noah’s Ark were not censored in our house. They were taught. I cherished my wooden toy ark with two of every animal and displayed it prominently. The only difference was that these pillars of civilization were presented as important, influential literature—not history. (My mother would say things like “There is evidence that there was a great flood, but the fossil record contradicts the idea that two of every animal survived and repopulated the planet.”)

Religions have a habit of squatting on things which did not originally belong to them. —ALAIN DE BOTTON, Religion for Atheists

I have a friend on social media who, every spring, posts pictures of the gorgeous eggs she’s painted to look like the galaxies of deep space. She drinks nature-themed cocktails while she decorates, and watches an episode of my parents’ show, Cosmos, while the eggs dry. She describes herself as secular but spiritual, and has successfully combined a religious tradition with an understanding of the universe as revealed by exploration. It moves me in a strange way, like seeing an artifact from a society where science and religion were never at odds.

This is what our ancestors believed. There is wisdom, insight, and poetry in it, but it’s not what we believe.

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. —CICERO

The heavenly bodies, the earth, the river Nile, its water, mud and slime, man, animals, plants, reptiles, insects, all the forces of nature, animate and inanimate, were sacred, and were partakers of divine honors . . . —ANN ELIZA SMITH (AS MRS. J. GREGORY SMITH), From Dawn to Sunrise: A Review Historical and Philosophical, of the Religious Ideas of Mankind

When my daughter and I leave the playground or some other place frequented by small runny noses, I ask her if she’s ready for the magic potion we put on our hands to protect us from sicknesses. Antibacterial gel is not usually the stuff of fables, but it could be. Imagine encountering a sect somewhere who devoutly carry small bottles of clear fluid around with them and believe wholeheartedly that rubbing the contents on their hands shields them from danger. We would think they believed in magic. Why don’t we? Just because we know why and how it works? Why does the provability of something rob us of the thrill of it?

How different would our daily lives be if we found ways to celebrate even the smallest wizardry in life?

It’s easy to forget that even the ending of a day is an astronomical event.

The goal of so many daily religious rituals is to tap into our sense of gratitude for the great and powerful force to which we owe our lives. This is no less important if you think those forces are physics and biology. Yoga and meditation are rooted in religion but have taken on secular lives of their own.

I knew exactly what she believed and I knew that it was different from what my parents believed. My parents weren’t afraid that exposure to other belief systems would somehow harm me. The more I knew about what people thought, the better off I was.

“Maruja says when you die you go to heaven and there are angels playing harps and you’re with God. And you guys say it’s like you’re asleep forever with no dreams. Who is right?” My parents, without missing a beat, said in unison, “Nobody knows!” And they didn’t just say it. They announced it like good news, joyful, enthusiastic, beaming.

“Science demands a tolerance for ambiguity. Where we are ignorant, we withhold belief.

some strange part of me wants to answer yes. Not because I hold a degree in anything more objective than dramatic literature, but because my parents

I’d find myself somewhere new and start to wonder, What is the name of where I am at this moment? The street? The neighborhood? The city? The nation? These proper nouns could have been anything, but this place has its name for a specific reason. Was it named after a person? Another place, picked by some homesick explorer?

We are, in some way or another, offered something new to understand, memorize, or question. Sometimes it’s aggressively boring, sometimes it’s inaccurate, occasionally it’s inspiring, but it’s always a chance at new enlightenment.

It was the Britannica, after all, not the Encyclopedia Earthtannica, let alone the hypothetical Encyclopedia Galactica my dad yearned for in Cosmos.

There are some mysteries to which we will never get the answer. We might not live to learn what came before the big bang. We won’t know the eventual fate of our species. And there are answers that we will get. Now, both my father and Maruja have the answer to the question I posed all those years ago. And someday each and every one of us will, too. But until then, there is so much else to learn and celebrate between each sunrise and sunset.

A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying in other words that he is wiser today than he was yesterday. —ALEXANDER POPE

Recognizing that we have made a mistake, acknowledging it, attempting to make amends, or at least trying not to do it again, is the pathway to growth, whether ritualized or not.

Ritual purification, both spiritual and physical, is common to many religions. It often comes from the idea that human bodies are dirty, innately flawed in their functionality and earthliness. I don’t see it that way. I think the parts of us that bleed and orgasm and eat and sweat are sacred, too. It’s all part of the astounding, intricate machinery of being alive.

As my dad once said, “If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”

I certainly learned that it’s often worse to envision admitting you’re wrong than to actually do it. I also learned that a preexisting, formalized framework for apologizing would be nice.

The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates tells of how, when he got in trouble with his teachers as a kid, his mother would have him write about what he had done. He would answer a series of questions that led him to examine his own behavior, exploring how he felt and what he thought about the situation. In his stirring open letter to his son, Between the World and Me, he writes that “these were the earliest acts of interrogation, of drawing myself into consciousness.” For those of us who have no single sacred guidebook that outlines the dos and don’ts of life, this kind of self-examination is required.