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.

quiet reflective thought—prayer—for

Never defined prayer like this before.

Rituals create patterns of the greatest capacities that I believe were given to us in the process of evolution and elaborated upon in our cultural evolution: our capacity to share, to sing, to chant, to revere, to find beauty, to dance, to imagine, to quietly reflect, and to sense something beyond what we see.

Religious traditions that were supposed to serve us have often failed. Worse, many have actively excluded us. So we need to find a new way forward. Drawing on the best of what has come before, we can find ourselves in the emerging story of what it means to live deeply connected.

What studying these modern communities taught me is this: we are building lives of meaning and connection outside of traditional religious spaces, but making it up as we go along can only take us so far. We need help to ground and enrich those practices. And if we are brave enough to look, it is in the ancient traditions where we find incredible insight and creativity that we can adapt for our modern world.

While our culture often lifts up the importance of self-care, we’re desperately in need of community care.

We can be one another’s medicine.

More than that, the number of occasions we deem worthy of ritual are embarrassingly small. It strikes me that as the cost and stress of weddings has gone up, the number of other rituals and celebrations has gone down. If we no longer celebrate spring or harvest time, the new moon or a young person’s coming-of-age, is it any wonder that our human hunger for meaning gets amped up on the one day in our lives when we’re actively engaged with designing a ceremonial experience?

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.

However you express your spiritual life, it is legitimate. If you touch the sacred on the basketball court or on the beach, in cooking or crafting, in snuggling with your dog or singing in a crowd of thousands, during Yom Kippur services or at an altar call, while you read these pages you never need to say “or whatever,” okay? You can think of this book as giving you your dose of spiritual confidence and social permission.

It is time to liberate the gifts of tradition so that all of us can live lives of integrity and joy. Each of us has permission to curate and create rituals that will help us connect,

We’ve been taught that there’s somehow a line that makes a church building sacred and a supermarket secular. That vertical line is an invention. 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. Or the arms of our beloved. Or simply watching our kids running through the yard. When we look at the world that way, any place and any time can be sacred. It all depends on how we look at it. Who is to say a tender interaction at the checkout counter can’t feel sacred?

The word “spiritual,” then, is a pointer to something beyond language. It is a vulnerable connection.

What I mean by connecting with our authentic self is less about stripping away the parts of ourselves that we don’t like or focusing only on the bits that seem more spiritual, and more about integrating the fullness of who we are. Quaker activist and teacher Parker Palmer calls it rejoining our soul and our role because in the splitting of the two, much of our lost awareness and subsequent suffering appears.

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.

Palmer points us to the value of sacred texts because they are conversation partners that expand our reference points and force us to reflect on the culture we live in.

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. It becomes generative, creating new responses in text, music, movement, film, and story. When we understand a text to be sacred because a community says so, we are given permission to infuse spiritual meaning into whatever text speaks to us.

In everyday language, we think of “sacred” as an adjective, as a synonym for “holy” or “blessed.” It describes something static, maybe a little dusty, outside our day-to-day experience. 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.

Saint Anselm had advised his wealthy patron, Countess Matilda of Tuscany, that if she read a sacred text her goal was not to finish reading it, but instead to read only as much as would stir her mind to prayer.

Have conviction in your practice, no matter what others or your insecurity may tell you. 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. Like a student deciding to cheat at three in the morning, hours before the deadline, we can make our worst decisions when we’re in distress. Conviction will help us make it through these trying moments to return once again to our sacred practices of connection. We have to have faith in the practice itself, even when we feel lost or like it isn’t “working.”

Our inner life is the foundation for our outer lives, so committing to this practice will yield countless gifts. This is the paradigm shift: everyday moments can be the sacred foundation of your spiritual life.

That is the beauty of sacred time: it stretches across all places and is accessible to us, wherever we are.

Eating together affirms the simple fact of being alive.

What if we reimagine dietary laws in the context of our flaky friends, busy partners, and frequently frustrating family? Imagine if we deepened our haphazard gatherings and dinners to become solid commitments, observing the rule of eating with the same group of friends every Thursday night. Or tried to expand our capacity for relationship by having lunch with our least favorite colleague once a month. In other words, though we don’t need to declare which foods we can or can’t eat, we should repurpose a model of committing to those we eat with.

For a brief period of time, the lie of our separateness is exposed, and we remember that we are wholly connected to one another. It’s not that our individuality disappears, but that we are no longer blinded by individualism.

it’s important to note that a strong community should not deny one’s individuality. That’s when communities become cults.

a pilgrimage is simply a transformative journey on foot to a special or sacred place.

As pilgrims, we remember how to actually be in a place.

Pilgrimage can happen anywhere: a hike in the desert or a walk around the block, solo camping in the Rockies or a family trip to the dog park. What matters is setting an intention before we head out, paying attention to the natural world along the way—using all five senses if possible—and returning home again with a new perspective. Perhaps only at the end of a pilgrimage, after all the preparation and arduous travel, can we speak to how our relationship to nature has changed. Has the landscape spoken to our longing? Have we reconnected with our inner wholeness that we lose so easily in our day-to-day busyness? Have we let ourselves be soothed and tested by the bigger home that we all share?

“Tradition is living and active,” Merton writes, “but convention is passive and dead.”

Tradition is therefore inherently creative! And that creative spirit frees us to make something as ancient as pilgrimage into a method of connecting with spaces beyond our walls, sidewalks, and streetlights.

Our lives are leavened with the yeast of celebration.

Instead of seeing ourselves as separate from our landscapes, we can understand ourselves to be the landscape itself.

As my pilgrim guide Will Parsons says, “Our spiritual landscape is open to all.”

So many of us have stories like this. We have moments in which we feel a bridge has appeared between us and something beyond. That bridge can come along when we explore a homemade ritual that we, now and then, revisit but never talk about. Those moments feel mysterious because we can’t rationalize what’s happened. Though they feel special, sacred even, afterward we feel embarrassed and uncomfortable. “What the hell was I doing? I don’t even believe in that stuff! Massaging my aura?! Let’s never tell anyone about that. Ever.” It can be disconcerting. We’re not in control when we give ourselves over to an experience like this. We’ve handed over our power, we’ve fully let go, and later we come back to ourselves with what Brené Brown calls a vulnerability hangover. I’ve learned to understand moments like this as prayer. I’ve always been suspicious of that word, but I’ve discovered that prayer practices are beautiful, powerful, and perhaps even necessary for us to feel deeply connected to what is beyond us.

Prayer is about listening to what our hearts know to be true: the deep loves and longings that live within everyone.

Often the most valuable moments of prayer are when our preset assumptions are unraveled and a new insight emerges, though this can take time. Scholar Mark Jordan reminds us that what is most important isn’t how we feel during prayer time, but what happens afterward.

good small group is loving enough for us to be supported and held, but accountable enough to not let us get away with platitudes and easy answers.

you’ll find that these people will love you and hold you responsible for your actions. They don’t need to believe in the same things you do, nor use the same language to describe their spiritual practices. Nor do they even need to be your closest friends. But they will start to matter enormously.

Sometimes we overcomplicate everything, even prayer. The great medieval mystic Meister Eckehart advised us that if all we can say is “Thank you,” then we have said enough.

Gratitude isn’t just for yourself, ironically. Being grateful actually helps us show up for others.

Prayer is like a workshop for the soul. In it, we get to work out all the kinks and knots of life. It can soften resentment and make space for forgiveness. What we do might not magically change other people or the world outside, but prayer certainly changes us.

Whatever you do, if it helps bring your attention to this time of reflection, it is valuable and worth ritualizing.

Talk about what matters most, even—and especially—if you know that nobody is listening except yourself. Because unless we are honest, unless we speak the truth, we will forget what we want to stay loyal to.

and the divine goes through seasons, just like the rhythm of the earth. Sometimes there’s a bleak numbness to how we feel about our connectedness. Sometimes it feels like we’re spending a lot of time planting seeds, but little reward is blossoming yet. Other times, we’re overwhelmed by the bounty of love and joy we experience, like an orchard laden with summer fruit. Just like the land, we too will plant, harvest, and lie fallow now and then.

We simply cannot know connection without also experiencing disconnection. There is nothing wrong with you when you feel that vast emptiness. Nothing you need to change. Nothing to fix. But there is one thing to do. Remember. Remember that both are true. The vast emptiness and the eternal connection. The sense of total aloneness and the interdependent belovedness. It is the paradox in which we live.