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

by Sasha Sagan

Copyright © 2019 by The Great Unlikelihood LLC

ISBN 9780735218772 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735218789 (epub)

Version_1

Introduction

When I was little and my dad was alive he would take me to see the dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. This was a holy place for me, grand and full of answers to deep and ancient questions. It filled me with awe. But it also frightened me. I would hide behind my dad’s legs, nervously stealing peeks at the frozen animals.

“It’s dangerous to believe things just because you want them to be true.” That’s what my dad told me, very tenderly, not much later.

No matter how tempting a belief was, my father preferred to know what was true. Not true in his heart, not true to just him, not what rang true or felt true, but what was demonstrably, provably true. “We humans have a tendency to fool ourselves,” he said.

My father was a scientist. He was the astronomer and educator Carl Sagan. Science wasn’t just his occupation, it was the source of his worldview, his philosophy, his guiding principles. He and my mom, writer and producer Ann Druyan, taught me that belief requires evidence. They taught me that science wasn’t just a set of facts to be compared and contrasted with other philosophies but a way of testing ideas to see which ones stand up to scrutiny. 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.

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. And they taught me that, as they once wrote, “for small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.”

Growing up in our home, there was no conflict between science and spirituality. My parents taught me that nature as revealed by science was a source of great, stirring pleasure. Logic, evidence, and proof did not detract from the feeling that something was transcendent—quite the opposite. It was the source of its magnificence.

My parents taught me that the provable, tangible, verifiable things were sacred, that sometimes the most astonishing ideas are clearly profound, but that when they get labeled as “facts,” we lose sight of their beauty. It doesn’t have to be this way. Science is the source of so much insight worthy of ecstatic celebration.

For me the biggest drawback to being secular is the lack of a shared culture. I can live without an afterlife, I can live without a god. But not without celebrations, not without community, not without ritual. There are no hymns about the testing of theories or mapping of genomes. No festivals to commemorate great inventions or medical breakthroughs. Since I long for ways to honor the wonder of life, I’ve found myself making up new rituals. Sometimes I find I can repurpose the traditions of my ancestors to celebrate what I believe is sacred.

Through my secular lens, I see a different meaning in their traditions. In a way, it’s really science that’s been inspiring rituals all along. 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.

Our vast universe provides us with enough profound and beautiful truths to live a spiritually fulfilling life.

Nature is full of patterns and we humans love finding them, creating them, repeating them. That’s at the core of language, math, music, and even ritual, which is the repetition of words or actions deemed worthy of representing something bigger than ourselves. Some rituals are very private, some are very public. Some are so commonplace we don’t even think of them as rituals. My view is that all over the world and across time, these are all a form of art, an elaborate performance or a secret poem, all vital in their ability to help us face the nature of time and change, life and death, and everything else we cannot control.

Every single one of us appears seemingly from nowhere and then, eventually, returns to nowhere. We are conceived, we grow, and we die, but what happens beyond that is a great, haunting mystery. We grapple with it by marking how and when things change here on Earth, both cyclically and permanently.

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.

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.

chapter one

Birth

Being born at all is amazing. It’s easy to lose sight of this.

Rituals are, among other things, tools that help us process change.

To say “I don’t believe” in something doesn’t mean that I am certain it doesn’t exist. Just that I have seen no proof that it does, so I am withholding belief. That’s how I think about a lot of elements of religion, like God or an afterlife. And it’s the same way my dad thought about aliens. As he once said, “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” We don’t have proof, so we don’t know.

Even with our species flourishing, the chances of any one of us being born are still remote. Think of all the slight variations in human migration patterns, for example, that could have kept your great-great-grandparents from ever crossing paths. If you have any European ancestry, someone in your lineage had to survive the black death in the fourteenth century, which killed more than half the people on the continent. If you have any Native American heritage, somehow your forebears managed to pass their genes on to you, despite the fact that only 10 or 20 percent survived the microbes and violence brought by European invaders. Whatever your ancestry, the list of wars, raids, plagues, famines, and droughts your genetic material had to overcome is stunning. All this in order to arrive at the moment where you, exactly you, are ready to depart your mother’s womb and come into the great wide world.

It’s true that the vast majority of unions that led to any of us were not rom-com-worthy meet-cutes. Many were terrifying wedding nights, a stranger at the right time or place, a warm body in the cold, lonely darkness, and unspeakable horrors at the hands of invaders and enslavers. But there were, undoubtedly, also some unions formed in the glorious rapture of true love.

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.

Every ritual, tradition, superstition, and celebration designed to welcome a baby has, at its heart, a hopeful wish for that new human.

I don’t know exactly what that might be, but there is one ritual I wish we’d at least explored. It’s beautiful, tangible, and appears among disparate cultures: the planting of a tree. A tiny seed is deposited in Mother Earth and soon a new life begins to emerge. In the Balkans it’s a quince tree. In parts of China it’s an empress tree—specifically when it’s a girl. In Jamaica, the baby’s umbilical cord is sometimes buried alongside the seed. There is a Jewish tradition, with Talmudic roots, that calls for the planting of cypress trees for girl babies and cedar trees for boys. When they grow up, their chuppah (the Jewish wedding canopy) is built from these branches. In Piplantri, Rajasthan, in northwest India, the villagers plant 111 trees when a little girl is born: mango, North Indian rosewood, Indian gooseberry. In a world where the birth of a daughter was often seen as a burden, this ritual celebrated it, despite being rooted in grief. It was the invention of a man who once served as Piplantri’s sarpanch (a position akin to small-town mayor). His beloved daughter died very young and he wanted to honor her memory. The villagers planted many thousands of trees but worried termites would destroy them. So the villagers started planting aloe vera, which they believed would kill the pests. Soon there were millions of aloe plants in Piplantri. They didn’t know what to do with them all. But the women of the village learned to make juice and salve, and soon the village grew pros...

chapter two

A Weekly Ritual

The week doesn’t exactly have an innate astronomical root the way the seasons do. It may be linked to the phases of the moon, which are about twenty-eight days and evenly divide into seven nicely. Many cultures appear to have adopted this unit independently of one another.

But a week doesn’t have to be seven days. Various ancient cultures had eight-, nine-, and twenty-day weeks. During the French Revolution, when everything else in French society was being questioned, the calendar was briefly revamped into a base-ten system. The ancient Egyptians had that same idea.

From Greece to Scandinavia, people imagined their gods were the personifications of the planets and stars, that the workings of the universe and the gods were one system. In fact, all over the world, for most of history, nature and religion were not just intertwined but inextricable. The universe was sacred. The gods and nature were not yet at war.

“Once a week, you must sing together,” the driver said. “Be playful and you will stay united.”

The thing you are obliged to do regularly, at an appointed time, to remind you of your values even when you are grouchy, busy, or annoyed. Even when you really don’t feel like it. And this cab driver, whose name I desperately wish I had gotten, gave us that.

chapter three

Spring

Alongside the shift toward warmer weather, the return to more light that the spring equinox heralds is innately uplifting. As are the signs of new life after a hard winter. Maybe we have evolved to love spring because it signals we are out of danger, less likely to freeze or starve. Maybe seeing everything around us being reborn assuages our deepest fears about mortality. Either way, the joy of spring requires no dogma and no faith to experience.

Whatever it is that makes you feel like spring has arrived, there is a field of science that studies it and, by doing so, honors it. No matter the moment that crystallizes this change for each of us, the idea that the dark, cold times eventually give way to bright warmth, beauty, and plenty is at the core of spring. All seems lost, but then, somehow, we receive another chance at life.

So much of ritual is the retelling of stories. A philosophy requires more than just a list of things to believe in. These tenets must be illustrated in a way that moves you, draws you in.

All these spring legends are about suffering and heartbreak giving way to joy. Each contains a secret, a hidden miracle, offering hope when all seems lost. This is spring itself. The themes of renewal, rebirth, resurrection, and rescue from death are not religious ideals in conflict with nature but rather rituals inspired by the biology of plants and animals.

chapter four

If I can really slow the hands of time with a skin-care routine it will be because of science, not magic—if we must delineate between the two, although doing so can rob us of the thrill of both.

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?

No matter how many rituals we have, we all also experience uncertainty every day. Maybe even every hour. What should I do? Is this true? What is going to happen? Impossible to predict, the future tortures us. Something absolutely shocking can happen at any moment. What a toll this takes on us. How many small tools have we created to combat this, to assert some control in the universe?

We talk about sunrises and sunsets, despite it being the Earth, not the sun, that is moving. The misnomer aside, this pattern has a profound effect on us. A day is twenty-four hours because that’s the time it takes for the Earth to rotate on its axis once. Our biology, our circadian rhythms, link us to the way we move in space. For most of our history we had no clocks and no calendars, but we always had night and day. There is something profound about doing something, anything, to mark this rotation. And far and wide, we have.

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.

“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. This exchange was revelatory for me. Not because it gave me any clarity on the mystery of death, but because it gave me a window into the nature of life. It taught me that there is no shame in not knowing. Uncertainty is real. It need not be glossed over or buried. We can embrace it, even while we try to understand what we can.

In the 1950s, the philosopher Bertrand Russell made the argument that the burden of proof must be on the believer, not the skeptic.

My dad was frequently asked by interviewers and fans if he “believed” in the existence of extraterrestrials. “I don’t know,” he would say “I don’t have enough evidence.” This would sometimes frustrate people, and there were a lot of follow-up questions about his gut or his instincts. My dad really wanted to know if there were aliens, and if there were, he wanted to know everything about them, but he refused to let his deepest wishes fog his judgment. He was a devout scientist.