The Power of Ritual: Turning Everyday Activities into Soulful Practices

by Casper ter Kuile

Rituals, in my view, are patterned, repeated ways in which we enact the moral emotions—of compassion, gratitude, awe, bliss, empathy, ecstasy—that have been shaped by our hominid evolution and built up into the fabric of our culture through cultural evolution.

That’s what this book is all about—taking things we do every day and layering meaning and ritual onto them, even experiences as ordinary as reading or eating—by thinking of them as spiritual practices.

And that, just like stargazers of the sixteenth century had to reimagine the cosmos by placing the sun at the center of the solar system, so we need to fundamentally rethink what it means for something to be sacred.

I’ve written this book to help you recognize the practices of connection that you already have: the habits and traditions already in your bones that can deepen your experience of meaning, reflection, sanctuary, and joy—perhaps at a yoga class, or by reading your favorite books, looking at the setting sun, making art, or lighting candles. It might be through lifting weights, hiking nature trails, meditating, or dancing and singing with others. Whatever it is, we’ll start there by affirming those things as worthy of our attention, and we’ll notice how they make up a broader cultural shift in how we build connection to what matters most.

Vulnerability and empathy expert Dr. Brené Brown explains in her book Braving the Wilderness, “When we feel isolated, disconnected, and lonely, we try to protect ourselves. In that mode, we want to connect, but our brain is attempting to override connection with self-protection. That means less empathy, more defensiveness, more numbing, and less sleeping. . . . Unchecked loneliness fuels continued loneliness by keeping us afraid to reach out.”

What I propose is this: by composting old rituals to meet our real-world needs, we can regrow deeper relationships and speak to our hunger for meaning and depth.

Americans who describe themselves as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular” has grown to 26 percent, and 2019 General Social Survey data suggests that nones are now as numerous as evangelicals and Catholics in the United States.

Among millennials (those born between 1980 and 1995), the number stands at 40 percent, according to a Pew Research Center poll published in 2019.

Again, this isn’t to say that we are becoming less spiritual per se. But the data does tell us that how we engage our spirituality is changing.

The purpose of this book is to show you how you can transform your daily habits into practices that create a sacred foundation for your life.

This book is an invitation to deepen your rituals of connection across four levels: Connecting with yourself Connecting with the people around you Connecting with the natural world Connecting with the transcendent.*

In Chapter 1 I’ll explore two everyday practices that help us connect to our authentic self: sacred reading and sabbath. Chapter 2 proposes eating and exercising together as two sacred tools to help us connect deeply with others. Chapter 3 focuses on reimagining pilgrimage and the liturgical calendar to connect us more intimately with the natural world, and Chapter 4 explores what connecting to the divine might look like by reframing prayer and participating in a regular small group of support and accountability. Finally, Chapter 5 is a reminder that we are all inherently born into belonging. The practices here are simply the tools to help us remember.

intention, attention, and repetition.

3 things that make up a practice or ritual

However, I’ve come to believe that just about anything can become a spiritual practice—gardening, painting, singing, snuggling, sitting. The world is full of these rituals!

We just need to be clear about our intention (what are we inviting into this moment?), bring it our attention (coming back to being present in this moment), and make space for repetition (coming back to this practice time and again). In this way, rituals make the invisible connections that make life meaningful, visible.

Neuroscience, too, tells us that when we can’t fully describe what we’re feeling, we tend to discount the feeling itself as illegitimate or unworthy of our—or other’s—attention. Stay with me if you can, even if these words feel a little uncomfortable. Imagine they’re beautiful new leather shoes that are still a little rigid as you walk. They just need some time before they’ve molded to the shape of your feet. Soon enough you’ll have found the right words, or become used to these, to help you pinpoint that feeling we’re talking about together.

Instead, imagine a horizontal line between the shallow and the deep. It stretches across every place and every person. When we can sink below the blur of habit, we can be present to that portion of our experience where we find deepest meaning. Maybe it’s poetry that takes us there. Or an incredible piece of theater. Or psychedelics.

The word “spiritual,” then, is a pointer to something beyond language. It is a vulnerable connection. As theology and gender studies scholar Mark Jordan puts it, the spiritual is a place of “unpredictable encounter or illumination that cannot be controlled.”

All I’m inviting you to do is reframe your established habits through a lens of multilayered, deeper connection. Give intention to the evening cup of tea. Find community to discuss books that move and inspire you. Recite a little poem in the shower every morning. Whatever the practice is, we’ll start by embracing it as something real and important, and we’ll dive deeper to make it meaningful.

FIRST LAYER of connection is the experience of being authentically connected to ourselves.

Writer Annie Dillard teaches us that how we spend our days is how we spend our lives.

sacred reading and sabbath time.

I love that notion of total loyalty because it captures the inherent goodness of our authentic self, the compassion and friendship that live inside our deepest selves. But when we live disconnected from this inherent knowing, we get caught in cycles of performance and achievement,

The great Japanese Zen teacher Ko–do– Sawaki described his meditation practice as “the self selfing the self.” The idea is that we need time and attention to integrate our experiences, ideas, and identities to be who we are.

It suggests that reading is not just something we can do to escape the world, but rather that it can help us live more deeply in it, that we can read our favorite books not just as novels, but as instructive and inspirational texts that can teach us about ourselves and how we live.

We can treat a book as sacred not because we’re going to believe that the storylines within it somehow explain the mysteries of the universe, but because they help us be kinder, more compassionate. They help us be curious and empathetic. And they offer us a mirror in which we get to reflect on the motivations that live behind the actions we take every day. This is the power of reading books as a sacred practice: they can help us know who we are and decide who we might want to become.

In his book To Know as We Are Known, Parker Palmer explains why he keeps returning to sacred texts, despite their problems connected to a spiritual tradition in which people have sought and found wisdom through generations: “These texts allow me to return to times of deeper spiritual insights than my own, to recollect truths that my culture obscures, to have companions on the spiritual journey who, though long dead, may be more alive spiritually than many who are with me now.

Yet I offer a bold rebuttal: none of these definitions is what makes a text sacred. It isn’t about the author or the inspiration. As my mentor, Harvard Divinity School professor Stephanie Paulsell, explains, a text is sacred when a community says that the text is sacred. It’s that simple. When a group of people returns year in, year out, to the same text, wrestling with it by investing their questions, struggles, and joys—that’s what does it.

In everyday language, we think of “sacred” as an adjective, as a synonym for “holy” or “blessed.”

But it is much better understood as a verb—something that we do. The word “sacred” itself comes from the Latin sacrare, which means to consecrate or dedicate. And to consecrate means to declare or make something holy. So the sacredness is in the doing, and that means we have enormous agency to make “sacred” happen ourselves.

In his pamphlet, Guigo furthered centuries of sacred reading instruction and simplified his guidance into the four steps of a ladder. He named these as reading, meditating, praying, and contemplating.

What’s literally happening in the narrative? Where are we in the story? What allegorical images, stories, songs, or metaphors show up for you? What experiences have you had in your own life that come to mind? What action are you being called to take?

Stage 1: What’s literally happening in the narrative? Where are we in the story?

Stage 2: What allegorical images, stories, songs, or metaphors show up for you?

Stage 3: What experiences have you had in your own life that come to mind?

Now, in the fourth stage, we invite the text to speak to us.

Stage 4: What action are you being called to take?

There will be days when your practice feels empty. Pointless, even. Vanessa explains that in these moments we have to trust our former selves, who in times of clarity and conviction decided that this practice was the right thing to do.

Sabbath is about taking some much-needed soul time. When we make a conscious choice to enter a sabbath—creating a rule about when we do and won’t do things, setting boundaries on screen time, whatever it may be—we create a pillar of clarity in our spiritual lives.

tech sabbath, sabbath for solo time, and sabbath for play and creativity.

He proposed that we find a way to live with new technologies and to do without them—not to abolish technology or turn back time, but to be intentional about how we use it. And to practice this, we have the sabbath. For one day a week, Heschel teaches us to live independently from our most important tools of production and to embrace the world—and ourselves—as we find it.

Sabbath isn’t a time to catch up on tasks. Nor is it simply a time of rest to prepare for a busy week. It is a time to revel in the beauty and delight of simply being. The sabbath “is not for the purpose of recovering one’s lost strength and becoming fit for the forthcoming labor,” Heschel writes. “The sabbath is a day for the sake of life. . . . The sabbath is not for the sake of the weekdays; the weekdays are for the sake of sabbath.”

Sabbath inverts some of the most destructive stories we tell ourselves: that we are what we do, that we’re worth only what we create.

Sabbath is all about remembering who we truly are.

In sabbath time, our creativity is not meant for performance—but for enjoyment, and perhaps even as an offering of thanks for the time and freedom we have.

You probably do some or all of these things already. But it might take an intentional shift to start thinking of this time as a sacred time for solitude.

Whatever your practice is, make it an intentional ritual. Light a candle. Recite a poem. Breathe ten times. Whatever you do, try to notice how taking this time heals and softens you. Our inner life is the foundation for our outer lives, so committing to this practice will yield countless gifts. This is the par...

Although sabbath time involves putting daily tools away, it is not about depriving ourselves. The opposite is true. What can we learn about ourselves when we press PAUSE on work and productivity and make space for playtime? Traditionally, the sabbath is a time for joy and fullness. Delicious food, good company—even sex is a mitzvah (Jewish religious duty) during sabbath time!

Inspired by this tradition, I like to pretend that sabbath time is like going to a royal wedding. I’m lucky to be invited, and I’m going to make the most of enjoying it! If you’re exploring a sabbath practice, I invite you to discover how you might create some rituals that help you cross into sabbath time and that can unleash your creative or playful spirit!

Here is the beauty of sabbath for exploring play: it’s really sabbath for exploring you.