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

“for small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.” That is a line that appears in the novel Contact,

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.

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.

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

I want to create moments that make us feel united with other Earthlings, without the dogma that divides us. 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.

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.

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.

My parents raised me to see love as holy, and Jon and I have always thought of our love as a kind of religion. Not supernatural or preordained but something to trust in, something to honor, something to cherish—and not take for granted.

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.

I was happy because of a deep understanding of the finite nature of life, not in spite of it. This, to me, felt like adulthood. 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.

We are, after all, someone’s distant future and someone else’s ancient past.

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. This is astronomy at work. On anniversaries and birthdays, we are in the same place in relationship to the sun. However, the whole solar system is actually moving through the galaxy every 225 million years. So you’re kind of in the same place, but everything is also totally different.

In the times of hopelessness I’ve experienced about the state of the world—the inequity, the unfairness and oppression—in the moments when the world feels like a terrible place, I have found that there is also great solace in giving. Sometimes a monetary donation, sometimes a donation of time or effort. Marching for something you believe in, volunteering at an organization you feel is moving the world in the right direction, or boycotting a company that is not. These actions are more than wishes, they are work that has demonstrably changed minds and lives.

ancestors, all of our ancestors, contemplated Earth’s place in the universe with awe. For them, it was sacred. And it still can be for us. Even more so because science has brought us a deeper understanding of the mystery and beauty of nature than our ancestors could have ever dreamed. Usually the words mythology and myth imply

Every loss you withstand in your life reopens all the others. Every goodbye is every goodbye.

One of the last things he said to me was “I’m sorry.” I could not understand, for many years, why he could possibly be apologizing to me. I should have been apologizing to him. He was the one who was in so much pain. He was the one who was dying. But he understood what I was too shocked to grasp. This would be the defining event of my life. Every other loss, every other heartbreak, would reopen this wound. And even the very best moments of my life—any future successes, my wedding, holding my newborn baby for the first time—would be tarnished by his absence.

hate to be the bearer of bad news, but what makes it so hard is how awful the other person feels. Through absolutely no fault of their own they’ve brought up the most painful thing in my life and they are often mortified. I feel terrible for them. It’s the kind of thing I would do too and then cringe about it while trying to fall asleep for the next ten years. So I do my best to relieve the awkwardness, saying things like “It’s okay,” which is a lie. It is not okay. It’s very sad, but we don’t have a way of talking about this without making it weird for everyone.

Whatever it is that we have yet to learn will be part of nature once we understand it. And when we do, I hope we can still feel wonder. In those revelations and the ways the randomness, the chance, the chaos sometimes, somehow works out. Still magical. Still beautiful.

No matter what the universe has in store, it cannot take away from the fact that you were born. You’ll have some joy and some pain, and all the other experiences that make up what it’s like to be a tiny part of a grand cosmos. No matter what happens next, you were here. And even when any record of our individual lives is lost to the ages, that won’t detract from the fact that we were. We lived. We were part of the enormity. All the great and terrible parts of being alive, the shocking sublime beauty and heartbreak, the monotony, the interior thoughts, the shared pain and pleasure. It really happened. All of it. On this little world that orbits a yellow star out in the great vastness. And that alone is cause for celebration.