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

by Sasha Sagan

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.

People once believed with all their hearts that the sun went around the Earth. But believing didn’t make it so. There are certainly things we believe right now that will someday be revealed to be hilariously or abhorrently ignorant. Our understanding changes with new information. Or at least it ought to.

“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.

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.

I don’t think that faith is a requirement to see a world full of provable miracles and profound meaning. I also don’t think lack of faith means you must give up your most beloved rituals. There is a way to honor your traditions and your ancestors without feeling you are just going through the motions.

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.

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.

Yesterday a drop of semen, tomorrow a handful of [. . .] ashes. —MARCUS AURELIUS

But the big bang may or may not be the beginning of everything. What came before, if anything, remains an unsolved mystery to our species. As we humans learn, create better technology, and produce more brilliant people, we might discover that which we currently think happened is wrong. But somehow, something started us off a very long time ago. In the other direction there will, theoretically, be an infinite amount of time after we’re dead. Not infinite for our planet or our species, but maybe for the universe. Maybe not. We don’t know much about what that will entail except that the star we orbit will eventually burn out. Between those two enormous mysteries, if we’re lucky, we get eighty or one hundred years. 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.

Right now we think there have been approximately 7,500 generations of Homo sapiens. They all had to find each other in that perfect moment. There are so many forks in the road that within ten or fifteen generations the odds become mind-boggling.

Once, early in my fascination with death, I came to my parents with a question: “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.

When a new person discovers my good fortune of being my father’s daughter, they often ask, “Well, are you a scientist?” I don’t know how many women go into their fathers’ businesses nowadays, but I did not. And yet 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 instilled science in me not as a job but as a worldview, a philosophy, a lens through which to see everything. Just as not every Catholic is a priest, not every adherent to the scientific method is a scientist. The discussions that fueled my parents’ workdays flowed over into dinnertime, and that enriched me enormously. They managed to explain even the most complicated concepts clearly and without ever talking down to me, with a kind of gentle intellectual respect, as though I was some kind of tiny professor trapped in a little girl’s body. I think it’s this same skill that made their work accessible to so many non-scientists around the world.

In school everything is divided. Civics, the history of the world, literature, art, languages, math, and science are sectioned into different categories. The bell rings out to say, “That’s over . . . ! Now here’s this totally unrelated thing taught by a different person in a different room!” But that felt artificial to me. It was really all one subject, one story: how human beings understand themselves and the universe. And the more connections I could see, the more interested I became in all of 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.

he wrote about two dozen books and countless essays. I can still read words like these: 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. Now that he’s gone, those very words perform that magic trick. And because I knew him I can even hear them in my head in his voice. It’s like basking in the light of a dead star.

Even though my dad died five years before Brent, his case was different because of the unusual nature of his work. He had been on TV a lot. I had VHS tapes, then later DVDs, with thirteen hours of my dad hosting Cosmos. There he is, saying words that he and my mother wrote (together with the astrophysicist Steven Soter), explaining what he knew about our place in the vast majesty of the universe. Even later, I could Google him and watch videos I had never seen before of him as a guest on the Tonight Show. Or him being interviewed on the street holding me as a baby, something I had not known existed. His light was still reaching me, through technology, through science, the summer of his life still warming me during the endless winter of his death. As I watched and read, I had the sense that there was still somehow more of him in my future. The more footage there was to uncover, the less he only existed in the past. It helped. I think of how much harder it must have been to lose your parents when you didn’t have any way of seeing them again. I felt very lucky.

It’s hard to hold both the mythology of America, its aspirations and promises, and its crimes in my head at the same time. The war on nuance in our politics and culture tries to oversimplify complicated issues: If you criticize the injustices in your country you must hate the troops! or How can you support that candidate when she’s obviously not perfect? Our fear of complexity, our inability to, as my dad put it, “tolerate ambiguity,” is so often one of our biggest failings.

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. This is the very nature of democracy. As he and my mom had once written in an essay called “Real Patriots Ask Questions,” he said that patriotism is not about blind obedience but about finding ways to make the system better. So he had some amendments for the oath: 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. If an idea cannot stand up to scrutiny, it should be discarded. That’s the way of scientific discovery. And the pathway toward a more perfect union.

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

There is a direct correlation between science and survival. Medicine is a branch of science. Access to it keeps us alive in situations when we would have otherwise died. Infant mortality is still heartbreakingly high where war or poverty makes medical care scarce. But even the most powerful medieval queen could not have saved a baby in desperate need of antibiotics, an incubator, or emergency surgery in a clean, well-lit operating room.

Memento mori is Latin. It means “Remember you have to die.”

If there turns out to be something more than dreamless sleep after death, the way it actually works, the why and how, will be part of nature, not something “supernatural.”

We don’t teach children science (or math, for that matter) with the passionate enthusiasm of the best preachers. And we ought to.

There are a lot of T-shirts, posters, and memes in this world that say, Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.—Carl Sagan. He did not say this. It came from a Newsweek profile on him and somehow took on a life of its own. My mother and I find this slightly funny and slightly frustrating. My dad was so committed to accuracy that he would not have used the word incredible, because it literally means “not credible” and therefore the opposite of the kind of thing that’s out there waiting to be known.

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.