My father died a few months before the pandemic lockdown began in early 2020. In the absence of his abiding presence and tender guidance, our family cautiously navigated the ensuing months. Absent too — and this, blessedly — was his bewilderment and angst. My dad had battled dementia the last several years of his life, and the expression “to be beside oneself” took on new meaning. As we bore witness to my dad’s decline, he indeed seemed present but not always, as if somehow standing next to himself, the intricate threads of spirit, mind, and body invisibly untethering from one another. Each of us in our own way held tightly — telling him stories, smoothing his forehead, playing him music — but it wasn’t enough to bind him to himself, let alone to us. You may know this well.
What we had, though, that so many were denied in the subsequent year was the powerful container of ritual to hold us in our grief and guide us forward. It’s hard to comprehend now how we took it for granted that we could plan an in-person memorial and that friends and family could travel with ease to gather with us to remember, tell stories, laugh, share a meal, hold our hands. Only a few months later, these things became impossible. Like so many, I began doing what none of us had ever imagined, attending online birthday parties, graduations, and, yes, funerals.
The pandemic reminded us poignantly of many vital human needs — touch, connection, clean air. It reminded us of the importance of our most sacred creations — the healing capacity of music, say, or the genius of public schools. And it reminded us too of the power of ritual to guide, celebrate, and make meaning in our lives. When we lost these things, we lost not just the joy of coming together, we lost — at least in their familiar form — the touchstones, small gestures, songs, prayers, and collective transformation that constitute the essential rituals of our lives.
Ritual is primal; it is how we make and mine the meaning of our existence. There is no culture in which it does not exist. At its most elemental, ritual creates what the sociologist Émile Durkheim described as social cohesion, reinforcing shared norms and values. Transition rituals remind us to pause at the milestones in our lives and also help us navigate the daily shifts from home to work to caretaking. And when healing or disruption of the status quo is needed, ritual has the power to transform us not only individually but as a whole.
While we work to solve problems through voting or volunteering or activism, I can’t help thinking that it’s also time for a new ritual shared across difference, geography, and language.
While most of our rituals are rooted in rich cultural or religious traditions, our unprecedented global connection and interdependence seem begging for something new. While we work to solve problems through voting or volunteering or activism, I can’t help thinking that it’s also time for a new ritual shared across difference, geography, and language. Not the ritual of war and othering, not the ritual of borders and profit, but a ritual for connection and healing. A ritual for possibility.
In her poem Presence, Melissa Shaw-Smith imagines what would happen if for one moment around the globe humans “stopped fighting for history / for fears, hopes, dreams / and stood facing the morning sun / letting the warmth of the moment / and the next, the next, accumulate like dust at their feet / Listened instead of spoke, acknowledged truth / embraced silence.” What if this were the worldwide human ritual we practiced each day? Not a few of us or some of us, but all of us. How might such a small, collective, ritualized act open the door to a new paradigm and new way of being? How might it change us? How might we then survive?
Such an idea is aspiration and inspiration, of course — an idea for us to live into. As Wendell Berry reminds us, “No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it.” And thus we begin where we are, taking stock of the rituals we practice in our own lives:
- What rituals help you celebrate the joyful occasions of life and guide you through hardship?
- What rituals deepen and grow because they have been handed down through generations?
- What rituals no longer serve you or the needs of our time?
- What new ritual might you create in your own life and then share with others?
This kind of personal audit can help reclaim the long-practiced rituals that help us make meaning of our lives, and it can point to the places where a new ritual could help create the connection and healing that is needed in the world.
At my father’s memorial, we leaned into the timeless ritual of coming together with loved ones to grieve. My family and I shared stories, sang my dad’s favorite hymns, said prayers we know in our bones, and were embraced by loved ones who loved our dad. And within the familiar sounds and words and rhythms of those rituals, our grief was no longer singular but held by the collective. It became part of a larger story of birth and death and what it means to be alive for a few years on this planet. Through ritual, it became a grief we could somehow now carry, out beyond the church doors and into the crisp fall day that awaited.
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