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

by Sasha Sagan

Just as not every Catholic is a priest, not every adherent to the scientific method is a scientist.

You sometimes hear people say, “Children are born scientists.” This is true in that when we are little we are full of questions and wonder, but there are some significant differences. If little children were really born scientists, they would be better at employing the scientific method. Imagine a four-year-old observing some strange thing and then formulating a hypothesis, devising a controlled experiment, observing the results, looking at the data, and revising their previous position. It would be adorable and impressive, but surprising. Another way in which small children are not very scientific is that they tend not to consider the source. They usually take anyone in a position of authority at face value. It’s very hard for them to imagine that grown-ups might be misinformed, biased, or have some ulterior motive. This is part of what makes children so vulnerable and so easy to confuse or indoctrinate. It’s also one of the hardest things to learn.

My dad died in 1996. He never owned a cell phone. He never had an email address. I often daydream about showing him a smartphone. I imagine telling him that this little rectangular machine contains all twenty-some volumes of the Britannica, also the collected works of Shakespeare, and a world atlas. You can use it to listen to all the music and read all the books your heart desires. It gives you live weather reports, breaking news, and the power to communicate in Albanian or Urdu. You can use it to see the opinions and vacation photos of anyone willing to share them, anywhere on Earth, with just a few taps. He would have loved it.

chapter five

Confession & Atonement

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. Working to improve ourselves isn’t only good in the abstract. It’s a massive evolutionary advantage. If we couldn’t learn that this plant is poisonous or that river has a strong undercurrent, we could die. If we couldn’t learn to work out our differences with the other members of our community, that might kill us, too. We’ve always had to learn the error of our ways and strive to be better. It’s just the definition of better that changes with time and place.

I do agree with the premise that there is something wrong with us, something we must work to overcome. It’s our xenophobia, authoritarianism, and violence. When we lived in small bands of only a few dozen people there might have been some selective advantage to these terrible qualities. But now we live in a tribe of seven billion. We are, more than ever, all in it together.

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 believe our cruelty toward one another, not sex or love of knowledge, is our original sin. It’s that for which we must really atone. In small instances as well as large ones.

We humans evolved to live in groups, to share the work of hunting and gathering, of keeping watch and looking after little ones. It’s not just nice to get along, it has been central to our survival.

There is nothing more central to science than error correction. Scientists are not infallible. Quite the opposite. The greatest minds in history have often been wrong about lots of stuff. But the defining difference between science and religion is that you’re a better scientist if you take the ideas of the people who came before you, the people whose shoulders you stand on, the people who taught you everything you know—your teachers, your heroes, your mentors—and disprove them. Then you’ve done your job. Doing the same does not make you a better pastor, rabbi, cleric, or monk; upholding tradition does.

These words: I was wrong. I made a mistake. I did something bad. Something selfish. Something mean. Something stupid. Something thoughtless. I’m sorry. Why is it so hard to say them? Especially since they’re true for every single one of us?

For atonement-related rituals it would go something like this: You are separated by your sins or shortcomings from the way you believe God or your community wants you to be, from your potential, from some kind of purity. You confess, do penance, apologize, and make up for what you’ve done. And thus you are reconciled with God, or godliness, or your community’s approval, or your ability to sleep at night.

We should probably do it often, whenever we have the gnawing sense we’ve wronged someone. And yet, as is usually the case, having a specified time makes us more inclined to do something. It’s harder to skip a commitment when you’ve set the moment aside ahead of time.

March 4th is as good a day as any to repent. This needn’t be a day to beat ourselves up for being human, but instead to shake off what can no longer stand up to scrutiny, and to bravely march forth into the personal and philosophical unknown.

It’s almost impossible to appreciate something without facing its absence. Just as we cannot improve ourselves if we cannot acknowledge where we’ve floundered, and atone.

chapter six

Coming of Age

My mother has always said there’s a problem with the word supernatural. Literally, it means “above or beyond nature.” But most of what we categorize as supernatural—for example, witches, monsters, or ghosts—is either less compelling than nature or really just an extension of nature itself, often a metaphor for it.

I don’t believe ignorance is bliss. I think understanding is bliss, but, to get to the joyful part, sometimes you have to face the terror head-on. Once I could admit to myself how truly tiny we are, how short our time is, and still love life, I felt like a woman.

There is something about facing fear that defines growing up. Doing something hard, freeing yourself, taking your fate into your own hands—these are the portals into adulthood across the planet. Even if it’s just a matter of getting your driver’s license.

For our species to survive we all must, in our own ways, jump off the proverbial tower, let our security blanket be destroyed, and go forth into the terrifying wonder of life.

chapter seven

Summer

That feeling of sunshine is a true mood enhancer. The ultraviolet radiation we get from the sun releases endorphins in our brains. It’s a real chemical reaction, a scientific connection between our bodies and our closest star. How beautiful is that? How astonishing that being bathed in rays of light from a 4.6-billion-year-old mass of hydrogen and helium located 93 million miles away can make us feel happy?

We owe the sun our lives.

If worship is, at least in part, about gratitude, about bowing down to the source of our blessings and bounties, then our bright, hot neighbor fits the bill perfectly.

No matter how hard we revere it, though, the sun will eventually die.

What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

For most of history, if you loved someone and they died, that was the only way you could ever hear their voice again: in your head.

chapter eight

Our fear of complexity, our inability to, as my dad put it, “tolerate ambiguity,” is so often one of our biggest failings. How do we deal with both? How do we face two opposites bound together in a single defining idea?

One of the only things I ever saw my parents argue about was Thomas Jefferson. They both agreed that he was despicable for enslaving other human beings. And they both agreed that he had come up with some brilliant ideas about how to start a country. Their debates were not about if he was good or evil but about how to wrestle with his complex legacy. What do we do with nations and people who have both good and evil in them?

I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.

In his speech, given before the oath was taken, my dad told our new countrymen and countrywomen that the duty of an American is to question everything, especially authority, and to think independently.

And so it seems to me that part of the duty of citizenship is not to be intimidated into conformity, to be skeptical. I wish that the oath of citizenship that you are about to take in the next few minutes included something like, “I promise to question everything my leaders tell me.” That would really be Jeffersonian. “I promise to use my critical faculties. I promise to develop my independence of thought. I promise to educate myself so I can make independent judgments.” And if these statements are not part of the oath, you can nevertheless make such promises. And such promises, it seems to me, would be a gift that you can make your country.

Acknowledging and enacting the need for progress doesn’t mean one doesn’t love their country.

One of my dad’s most often-repeated quotes is “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.” It applies to nations, religions, philosophies, and cultures, too.

Let our independence days become that appointed time to question, the moment when our minds break free from the absolute monarchies of “just the way things are.”

chapter nine

Anniversaries & Birthdays

English is missing a concise, simple word that means “death day,” or the anniversary of someone’s death. But Yiddish has one: yahrzeit.

We do something like this on a countrywide scale, too. At Arlington National Cemetery, the gravesite of President Kennedy features an “eternal flame.” This is a misnomer, since nothing is truly eternal. If the sun will eventually go out it’s safe to say Kennedy’s fire will, too. But it was a way to comfort a traumatized nation after his assassination, a way of reassuring everyone that some part of him continues on.

Somehow we humans got the idea that the best moment to really meditate on an event—a birth, a marriage, a death, a battle, a coronation, an inauguration, anything good, terrible, romantic, auspicious, historic, or otherwise memorable—is when the Earth is back in the same position it was when the thing happened.

We’re so good at seeing patterns, we almost can’t stop ourselves.

This is true for meaning, too. Sometimes something so astonishing happens that we can’t help but believe there is a message in it.

It’s beautiful that our brains have evolved to recognize patterns. It’s one of our greatest strengths. It’s what allows me to communicate ideas to you with these squiggly little symbols you’re looking at right now. It’s what allows us to understand concepts like mathematics and physics, it’s how we manage to engineer buildings that don’t collapse and planes that stay in the air. So in a way, there is a “grand novelist.” It’s us. We are the ones writing this epic saga, pulling out the plot points from the scenery.

It’s this rejoicing at survival that’s at the heart of every birthday party. For most of history, survival was harder. Children perished. A first birthday was not a given. Each passing year, each step closer to adulthood, was a relief not to be taken for granted, something truly worthy of celebration. That’s what a birthday is: the realization that time is passing but we are still alive.

In 1996 the first scientific paper was published that showed that women not only pass on their genes to their babies but that their babies leave cells behind that become part of the mother. It’s called microchimerism. Helena may have left some part of her genetic self inside me in a literal, provable sense. She is emotionally part of me, but she may be physically part of me too, as Jon and I and all our predecessors are part of her.

chapter ten