The Power of Ritual: Turning Everyday Activities into Soulful Practices

by Casper ter Kuile

“The mental burden of modern life may be nothing less than the extraordinary cultural demand that each person, in adulthood, create internally an order of consciousness comparable to that which ordinarily would only be found at the level of a community’s collective intelligence.”

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.

So let me say this clearly. 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.

Where religious institutions have been mistaken, as innovation expert Clayton Christensen might put it, is that they’ve fallen in love with a specific solution, rather than forever evolving to meet the need.

The gift of spiritual practices is that they cultivate courage, so that we will risk more for one another. Nothing would bring me greater happiness than knowing that sacred reading groups become hubs of activism, that learning the same songs means we can sing them together in the streets.

three things in any practice or ritual: intention, attention, and repetition.

This language challenge isn’t random. It’s tricky for a reason. We’ve been taught to see the world as divided between the sacred and the profane, the religious and the secular. 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.

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.”

And as we do, struggling here and there, remember, there is nothing that can get between you and life’s deepest connection. Nothing, no matter how powerful, can ever take that away. Not depression or anxiety, not assault or addiction, not grief or jealousy, not poverty or wealth. Each of us is entirely worthy and beloved. Even you. Especially you. Our shared human condition means that we forget this all the time, which is exactly why we practice. To help us remember.

The wisdom of tradition teaches us that there are ways out of this mess, that we can practice self-awareness and befriend our own souls gently and fiercely.

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

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.

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.

It’s weird growing up knowing what evil has done to you, and what a stranger’s hatred has caused you. It’s weird growing up missing someone you’ve never met. Harry’s undying love for Lily and James reassured me that it was okay for me to miss my dad, even though I had never met him. It was okay for me to mourn the loss even though I hadn’t been aware of it when it first happened. It is okay for me to still struggle with it and with some PTSD even though it’s been 22 years and I never met him. I feel a weird connection to Harry due to the nature of our losses, and your invitation to take that connection seriously has been so healing and soothing for me. It’s also led me to see Harry’s grief with very different eyes. It must be so difficult for him to navigate this world in which so many people he’s never met know so much about his parents and remember them so clearly, and he just has to take their word for it. When I found out some stuff my dad had said and done that goes totally against what I believe in, I thought of Harry watching James bully Snape. It was so comforting knowing that James Potter wasn’t perfect when it came to admitting to myself that my dad wasn’t either. It deepened my connection to this story and this character, and I am so grateful I had that anchor when everything else I thought I knew was falling apart.

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.”

I often say to myself that the work is not done, and yet it is still time to stop.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “Perhaps the essential message of Judaism is that in doing the finite we may perceive the infinite. It is incumbent on us to obtain the perception of the impossible in the possible, the perception of life eternal in everyday deeds.”

“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!”

“But in each one there is a yearning for communion and belonging, but at the same time a fear of it.” Though we long for connection and love from others, we also fear it the most. It means taking the risk to be vulnerable and open. We worry that we’ll be constricted by the relationships of care, that our creativity will suffer. We want to belong and then fear the little sacrifices that this belonging will demand of us as we make space for others around us. We want to be special. Different. Unique. We fear the discipline and commitment that will be asked of us. But in the moments of loneliness, we know that the cost of staying afraid and disconnected is too great. This is a time for community. A time for connection.

Using a word like “pilgrimage” can feel like we’re taking something traditional and changing it too quickly. This is a mistake. Those religious leaders who rail against change often confuse tradition with convention; they assume that one way of fulfilling a particular purpose is the only way of fulfilling it.

“Convention and tradition may seem on the surface to be much the same thing. But this superficial resemblance only makes conventionalism all the more harmful. In actual fact, conventions are the death of real tradition as they are of all real life. They are parasites which attach themselves to the living organism of tradition and devour all its reality, turning it into a hollow formality.” This is what has happened with so many sacred practices.

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.”

every tradition was once an innovation. Our souls are free to create and invent. There are as many ways of honoring the dead, of celebrating life, of welcoming a child into the world as there are human beings.

You might also simply stay where you are, find a place on the earth, and look up at the sky, knowing that here you are home.

Instead, 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.

I’m also wary of spiritual tourism in which we desperately seek out transformative experiences that come from cultures that are not our own. We run the risk of picking only the exciting elements of these traditions without understanding the deeper significance and context—a particular danger with traditions that have been marginalized and colonized, such as indigenous practices. We also miss out on the chance to learn more about the hidden gems of our own backgrounds and cultures!

Prayers of thanksgiving are not meant to tidy over the messiness of our lives, however. Bass writes, “Gratitude is not a psychological or political panacea, like a secular prosperity gospel, one that denies pain or overlooks injustice, because being grateful does not ‘fix’ anything. Pain, suffering, and injustice—these things are all real. They do not go away.” What gratitude does, however, is dispel the idea that this is all that life offers, that despair wins the day. “Gratitude gives us a new story. It opens our eyes to see that every life is, in unique and dignified ways, graced: the lives of the poor, the castoffs, the sick, the jailed, the exiles, the abused, the forgotten as well as those in more comfortable physical circumstances. Your life. My life. We all share in the ultimate gift—life itself. Together. Right now.”

A memento mori practice is like a camera lens that zooms out. Remembering that we’ll die, and confronting the reality that it might be today, helps us see our lives with greater perspective.

May I be safe and free from suffering. May I be as happy and healthy as it is possible for me to be. May I have ease of being. May [she] be safe and free from suffering. May [she] be as happy and healthy as it is possible for [her] to be. May [she] have ease of being.

Perhaps my favorite way to offer prayers of supplication is through the art of blessing. 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.” No longer are the threshold moments a time for fear. Transitions become the way in which our lives find rhythm, depth, and meaning.

O’Donohue describes blessings as “a circle of light drawn around a person to protect, heal, and strengthen.”

All of us need to be reminded, often multiple times a day, that we are inherently worthy of those deep and holy links and that—no matter what we do—we are intrinsically connected.

And here is the paradoxical secret: connection and isolation are bound to each other.

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. And all of the practices and stories and strategies that we’ve explored in this book are simply there to help you, in moments of joy and sadness, overwhelm and barrenness, to remember.