The Power of Ritual: Turning Everyday Activities into Soulful Practices

by Casper ter Kuile

I have been asked one key question: How might I find deeper happiness? The science points to an answer in the abstract: Find more community. Deepen your connections with others. Be with others in meaningful ways. Find rituals to organize your life.

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.

Casper’s book points to higher-order principles through which you can create more ritual in your fragmented life. Read sacred texts (this past June I reread Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” a sacred text in my family, and was moved again). Create sabbaths in your life, from work, technology, social life, and our frenetic, often overscheduled hours of the day. Find opportunities for what one might call prayer—mindful quiet forms of reflecting on love, gratitude, and contrition. Eat with others. Seek out nature, that universal source of transcending the self, that so often repairs, as Emerson observed, “life’s calamities.”

While for most people it’s just another rom-com, for me, You’ve Got Mail is sacred.

We found that not only did secular spaces offer people connection in similar ways that religious institutions once did, but they also provided other things that filled a spiritual purpose. Communities that we studied offered people opportunities for personal and social transformation, offered a chance to be creative and clarify their purpose, and provided structures of accountability and community connection.

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?

Mark Chaves, a sociologist at Duke University, has estimated that over three-and-a-half thousand churches close their doors every year.

Deep connection isn’t just about relationships with other people. It’s about feeling the fullness of being alive. It’s about being enveloped in multiple layers of belonging within, between, and around us. 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.*

what I mean follows the wisdom given to me by activist and minister Kathleen McTigue, who looks for three things in any practice or ritual: intention, attention, and repetition. So, though you may take the dog out for a walk numerous times a day, ticking off the repetition component, it isn’t a ritual practice if you’re also on the phone because you’re not really paying attention to your pup and the walk you’re on. It’s simply a habit. Or, you might read every night before bedtime, but not really bring any specific intention to it. Again, that doesn’t match our description of a ritual or practice.

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.

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.”

Sometimes we need the temporary isolation of enforced unplugging to bring into our awareness parts of ourselves that have been lying low. 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.

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.

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.

The way Vanessa and I have translated this on the Harry Potter and the Sacred Text podcast is to think of these four stages as four sets of questions. 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?

“Addiction” is a big word to use, but when I found myself checking my phone compulsively while cycling to school, it was clear that I had a problem. As artist Jenny Odell writes in her fabulous book How to Do Nothing, nothing is harder to do these days than doing nothing.

In dining halls all over the country, by eating together over and over again, we learn that we don’t have to like a person in order to love them.

we do benefit from this model of regular mealtimes together because it holds us accountable to the relationships we value most.

Thinking of taco Tuesday

Many of us have become hardened cynics as we travel through the world. We don’t allow ourselves the joy (and danger) of letting down our guard and allowing others in. Working out together can help.

Thinking of HS football and basketball

West African spiritual teacher and writer Malidoma Patrice Somé explains that before beginning a ritual, you own the journey. You are in control. But “once the ritual begins, the journey owns you.” Somé argues that the lack of modern rituals in the West is in large part because many of us have an overwhelming desire to be in control, which is antithetical to ritual. “To surrender the sense of control can be terrifying.”

A 2012 study by Russell Hoye, Matthew Nicholson, and Kevin Brown showed that even a low degree of involvement in team sport was associated with increased social connectedness for individuals.

I would argue band and choir belong here as well

This is the guiding principle of a healthy, meaningful fitness community: a community can flourish only when each individual member flourishes.

In one of the most important texts I’ve read, Community and Growth, Vanier writes that when we enter into community we find the warmth of love to be exhilarating. This feeling of welcome allows us to lift our masks and barriers and to become more vulnerable with one another. We enter into a time of communion and great joy. “But then too,” he writes, “as [we] lift [our] masks and become vulnerable, [we] discover that community can be a terrible place, because it is a place of relationship; it is the revelation of our wounded emotions and of how painful it can be to live with others, especially with some people. It is so much easier to live with books and objects, televisions, or dogs and cats! It is so much easier to live alone and just do things for others when one feels like it.” Sister of Saint Joseph Sue Mosteller, who has spent four decades living in L’Arche communities, puts it very simply: “Community is the most wonderful thing in the world. And it is also the most terrible!”

Sounds like living in a small town - everyone knows your business, whether you want that or not

We’ll explore three ancient practices: pilgrimage, celebrating the seasons, and reimagining the distinction between our bodies and the outside world.

Scientists, too, have concluded that spending time in nature is connected to all sorts of health benefits. The gentle burbling of a brook or the sound of the wind in the trees shifts your nervous system into a relaxed state, according to a 2017 Scientific Reports paper, and data reveals that people who have regular access to nature are less likely to be on antidepressants. Expectant mothers who spend time in nature have healthier babies, and being around plants can even strengthen our immune system and prevent illness.

You may remember hearing about what happened when the city of Melbourne, Australia, assigned email addresses to trees throughout the city so that citizens could report dangerous branches or other problems. Instead, nearby citizens wrote thousands of love letters to their favorite trees.

The first is the setting of a purpose or intention.

The second phase is the journey itself.

In the final phase, the arrival and return, we integrate what we’ve experienced on the road back into our own lives.

Walking, instead of driving or even cycling, brings us into an easy rhythm with the landscape around us. My friend and Episcopal priest Marisa Egerstrom likes to say this is traveling “at the speed of sniffs.” Just like an enthusiastic dog on the road, we notice all sorts of interesting sights and smells that invite further investigation. Our breath slows down. We become present.

A staff is the perfect prop; it propels us along, supports our heavy backpacks, and immediately communicates to the world that we’re a pilgrim! Plus, we get to impersonate Gandalf.

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.

Tradition, though of course always old, is at the same time always new, because it is forever being born again into a new generation and a new historical context. It will be lived and applied in a new and particular way. “Tradition nourishes the life of the spirit; convention merely disguises its interior decay.”

Thinking of Fiddler on the Roof song Tradition, and how maybe the musical ends up following this book's line of definition in the end

Perhaps you draw on civic or sporting celebrations, or something from the movies—Groundhog Day, Valentine’s Day, baseball’s opening day.

the practice of prayer is about being conscious of—and telling the truth about—how we really feel and think, taking what has been unconscious and bringing it into open awareness.

ADORATION Ironically, the first step to deeper awareness isn’t about introspection. It’s about getting radically away from ourselves, to decenter our individual experience and seek to place ourselves in service of, or to become part of, something bigger than us.

The second type of prayer is contrition. Here we bring to awareness the ways in which we have fallen short of how we want to be and behave in the world.

It isn’t just a collection of friends who get together, but rather a committed group of trusted people who travel through life with you. The same goes for whatever kind of secular small group you create: a book group, for instance, that talks about the book but really talks about life’s difficult questions.

THANKSGIVING After the introspection of contrition comes thanksgiving, in which we list the people and things for which we are grateful.

as Brené Brown affirms in her book Braving the Wilderness, the key to joy is practicing gratitude.

To integrate this practice, find a place where you won’t be interrupted for a little while. Imagine you only have a year left to live. What might you do with the time you have left? Spend some time thinking or journaling. Visualize where you might go, who you’d want to talk to. What you’d stop doing. Now imagine you only have a week. How might you choose to spend your last days? What would your last meal be? Who would you be with? Now imagine it is your last hour alive. And then your last minute. Your last breath. This very breath you’re breathing right now.

You might download an app like WeCroak, which pings you five times a day to remind you of your coming death.

Find happiness by contemplating your mortality with the WeCroak app. Each day, we’ll send you five invitations at randomized times to stop and think about death. It’s based on a Bhutanese folk saying that to be a happy person one must contemplate death five times daily. The WeCroak invitations come at random times and at any moment just like death. When they come, you can open the app for a quote about death from a poet, philosopher, or notable thinker. You are encouraged to take one moment for contemplation, conscious breathing or meditation when WeCroak notifications arrive. We find that a regular practice of contemplating mortality helps spur needed change, accept what we must, let go of things that don’t matter and honor things that do.

SUPPLICATION The final stage of this prayer sequence is supplication, in which we mindfully hold someone or something in the presence of the divine. Of the four stages, this one comes closest to what I always thought prayer was—the holy shopping list of wants and needs.

What we do might not magically change other people or the world outside, but prayer certainly changes us.

Blessings are rare for most of us today, and yet human life was once saturated with blessings. We might have been blessed before setting off on a journey, at the start of a meal, before getting married, or at the arrival of Shabbat. “With the demise of religion, many people are left stranded in a chasm of emptiness and doubt; without rituals to recognize, celebrate, or negotiate the vital thresholds of people’s lives,” writes John O’Donohue in his book To Bless the Space Between Us. “This is where we need to retrieve and reawaken our capacity for blessing. If we approach our decisive thresholds with reverence and attention, the crossing will bring us more than we could ever have hoped for. This is where blessing invokes and awakens every gift the crossing has to offer.”

A blessing is never about developing ourselves or becoming more holy and enlightened. It is the gift of helping one another to remember our ever-present enough-ness.

Spiritual growth doesn’t depend on doing more than the soul is probably already doing, but on doing the same things in a design instead of in a muddle.

In many ways, our understanding of “religion” over the last few hundred years is an anomaly. Because the West has been deeply marked by a Protestant Christian understanding, we assume religion is all about what you believe. That’s part of it, of course, but most of the rest of the world—and certainly most of history—points to a different way of thinking about religion: that it’s about what you practice.