The Power of Ritual
Highlights
- Connecting with Transcendence
To pray is to listen to and hear this self who is speaking. .
- Connecting with Transcendence
Prayer is about listening to what our hearts know to be true: the deep loves and longings that live within everyone.
- Connecting with Transcendence
Anthony Bloom talks about true prayer being the process through which things “suddenly disclose themselves with a depth we have never before perceived or when we suddenly discover in ourselves a depth.”
- Connecting with Transcendence
four types of prayer: adoration, contrition, thanksgiving, and supplication.
- Connecting with Transcendence
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. If the first level of connection that we explored in Chapter 1 is about connecting deeply to yourself, this practice is about connecting to a great otherness.
- Connecting with Transcendence
Simone Weil famously argued that even concentrating on a difficult math problem prepared oneself for prayer. In Waiting for God, she explains that “if we concentrate our attention on trying to solve a problem of geometry, and if at the end of an hour we are no nearer to doing so than at the beginning, we have nevertheless been making progress each minute of that hour in another more mysterious dimension.” Despite it feeling like nothing is happening, Weil promises us that our apparently barren efforts nonetheless lead to bringing more light into the soul—even without feeling or knowing it.
- Connecting with Transcendence
For Weil, the key to spiritual practice was “the realization that prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable toward God. The quality of the attention counts for much in the quality of the prayer.”
- Connecting with Transcendence
“We already have language in the arts that speak to the life of the soul: find your flow, get in the groove, be in the zone. There’s a sense that my body is caught up in a movement that is larger than myself. I have surrendered to a power, a force, a source of inspiration that I can touch or tap into, but that I can never fully control. It’s not mine alone. That’s the starting point for us.
- Connecting with Transcendence
it is in the creative flow that people enter that the artists say they connect with the fullness of the world. “People tend to speak about their experience in a beautifully mysterious way: the very same moment when they feel connected to something more than themselves is when they also feel most authentically true to themselves. ‘I didn’t come up with this poem, it came to me from somewhere else, but it’s who I really am most deeply.’ It’s a paradox! We are our truest selves and totally not ourselves at the very same time.”
Preface by Dacher Keltner
I have been asked one key question: How might I find deeper happiness?
Preface by Dacher Keltner
Find more community. Deepen your connections with others. Be with others in meaningful ways. Find rituals to organize your life. It will boost your happiness, give you greater joy, and even add ten years to your life expectancy, science suggests.
Preface by Dacher Keltner
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.
Preface by Dacher Keltner
Deep connections and the sense of community reduce levels of stress-related cortisol; they activate reward and safety circuits in the brain; they activate a region of the nervous system called the vagus nerve, which slows down our cardiovascular system and opens us up to others; and they lead to the release of oxytocin, a neurochemical that promotes cooperation, trust, and generosity.
Preface by Dacher Keltner
we genuflected and made a request and offered a quiet reflective thought—prayer—for someone we care for
Preface by Dacher Keltner
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.
Preface by Dacher Keltner
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.” In the spirit of our fragmented lives, Casper encourages us, through his broad, synthetic view of spiritual life, to weave together a fabric of rituals to bring meaning and community to our lives.
Preface by Dacher Keltner
We have a biological need to belong, scientists have shown; without community, as in solitary confinement, we lose our minds.
Preface by Dacher Keltner
what I missed most was not points scored or victories eked out, but the rituals that hold people together in pickup basketball: fist bumps, forms of protest and contrition, celebration and dance, ritualized patterns of five people moving together on a basketball court. It is sublime.
Introduction: The Paradigm Shift
All they know about each other is that they love books and they love New York City—nothing else. Not even one another’s real name. And through the back-and-forth emails that they send each other, they fall in love. They’re honest with each other about their secret fears and hopes and pain. They share everything that they don’t tell even their partners. This is the best of online anonymity—feeling intimately connected and totally safe at the same time.
Introduction: The Paradigm Shift
I am convinced that we are in the midst of a paradigm shift. That what used to hold us in community no longer works. That the spiritual offerings of yesteryear no longer help us thrive
Introduction: The Paradigm Shift
older theories prove irrelevant to new questions that people start asking
Introduction: The Paradigm Shift
CrossFit.
People didn’t just talk about it as their community. “CrossFit is my church” became the refrain.
Introduction: The Paradigm Shift
Cofounder Greg Glassman never set out to build a community, but he’s embraced the role of quasi-spiritual leader with open arms. In an interview with us at Harvard Divinity School, he explained, “We kept being asked ‘Are you a cult?’ And after a while I realized, maybe we are. This is an active, sweating, loving, breathing community. It’s not an insult to a CrossFitter to be called part of a cult. Discipline, honesty, courage, accountability—what you learn in the gym is also training for life. CrossFit makes better people.” His remarks at times sound outright religious.
Introduction: The Paradigm Shift
CrossFit is famous for its evangelical proselytizing. In applying to open a box, trainers are required to attend a two-day seminar and write an essay about why they want to open a box. What HQ looks for in these essays is not an applicant’s business savvy, training skills, or fitness level—the key ingredient is whether one’s life has been changed by CrossFit and whether the applicant wants to change other people’s lives with CrossFit. It’s that simple
Introduction: The Paradigm Shift
Artisan’s Asylum has become more than a community. It is the place where people come to grow into the person they want to be. Learning a new skill like welding gives members the confidence to try something new like improv or singing. Becoming a mentor to someone new to a craft shapes how members see themselves in the world. And because the space is open twenty-four hours a day, and a number of members have insecure housing, the whole community has become passionate about advocating to city government about better public housing. The congregational parallels are not difficult to spot.
Introduction: The Paradigm Shift
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.
And because the leaders of these communities became trusted and respected, they were often approached by community members about life’s biggest questions and transitions. We heard of weddings and funerals being led by yoga instructors and art class teachers
Introduction: The Paradigm Shift
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.
Introduction: The Paradigm Shift
A 2006 paper in the American Sociological Review documented how the average number of people that Americans say they can talk to about important things declined from 2.94 in 1985 to 2.08 in 2004. Essentially, we’ve each lost someone to care for us in the moments when we most need it—and that number includes family members and spouses as well as friends. Our social fabric is fraying.
Introduction: The Paradigm Shift
More and more of us are lonely and unable to connect with others in the way that we long to
Introduction: The Paradigm Shift
In the midst of a crisis of isolation, where loneliness leads to deaths of despair, being truly connected isn’t a luxury. It’s a lifesaver.
Introduction: The Paradigm Shift
he met numerous people who would tell him stories of their struggles with addiction and violence, with chronic illnesses like diabetes, and with mental illnesses like anxiety and depression. Whatever the issue, social isolation made it worse. “What was often unsaid were these stories of loneliness, which would take time to come out. They would not say, ‘Hello, I am John Q, I am lonely.’ What they said was ‘I have been struggling with this illness, or my family is struggling with this problem,’ and when I would dig a bit it would come out.” Disconnection sours the sweet things in life and makes any hardship nearly unbearable.
Introduction: The Paradigm Shift
In a landmark meta-analysis of over seventy studies, Dr. Julianne Holt-Lunstad demonstrated that social isolation is more harmful to our health than smoking fifteen cigarettes a day or being obese. Holt-Lunstad concludes in her 2018 American Psychologist paper that “there are perhaps no other facets that can have such a large impact on both length and quality of life—from the cradle to the grave” as social connection.
Introduction: The Paradigm Shift
While our culture often lifts up the importance of self-care, we’re desperately in need of community care. Without it, the impact of social isolation shows up in numerous ways. It is harder to find work. We fall out of healthy habits
Introduction: The Paradigm Shift
Perversely, when we feel far away from one another, our brains have evolved not to foster connection, but instead to strive for self-preservation. 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.” My husband and I call this entering the doom spiral, where one thing leads to another, and soon it feels impossible to get out.
Introduction: The Paradigm Shift
As much as for our joy as for our health, we can deepen our existing connections to the world around us and to one another. We can regrow those relationships that have withered away. We can be one another’s medicine.
Introduction: The Paradigm Shift
I have learned that disconnection is about more than our physical and emotional well-being. Our spirits, too, suffer. Without rich relationships and a sense of connection to something bigger than ourselves, the occasions that could mean the most in our lives feel emptier.
Introduction: The Paradigm Shift
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?
Introduction: The Paradigm Shift
podcasts and tarot decks replace sermons or wisdom teachings.
Introduction: The Paradigm Shift
they find spiritual lessons and joys in completely “nonreligious” places like yoga classes, Cleo Wade and Rupi Kaur poetry, and accompaniment groups like Alcoholics Anonymous and the Dinner Party (a community-based grief support group for twenty- and thirtysomethings). Stadium concerts and karaoke replace congregational singing
Introduction: The Paradigm Shift
we are especially wary of a religious identity that threatens to “overwrite [our] self-identity in ways that seem to compromise personal integrity and authenticity,” as Drescher writes.
Introduction: The Paradigm Shift
we’re less likely to affiliate with an institution than we are to affiliate with another individual.
Introduction: The Paradigm Shift
All this makes us nervous to even acknowledge that we might have a spiritual life. Tellingly, over half of Drescher’s hundred plus interviewees used the phrase “or whatever” whenever they talked about something spiritual in their own life!
Introduction: The Paradigm Shift
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.
Introduction: The Paradigm Shift
Institutions have lost our trust, particularly those that claim expertise and authority
Introduction: The Paradigm Shift
the emergent systems aren’t replacing authority. Instead, what’s changing is the basic attitude toward information. “The Internet has played a key role in this, providing a way for the masses not only to be heard, but to engage in the kind of discussion, deliberation, and coordination that just recently were the province of professional politics.”*
Introduction: The Paradigm Shift
Unbundling is the process of separating elements of value from a single collection of offerings. Think of a local newspaper. Whereas fifty years ago it provided classifieds, personal ads, letters to the editor, a puzzle for your commute, and of course the actual news, today its competitors have surpassed it in each of these, making the daily paper all but obsolete. Craigslist, Tinder, Facebook, HQ Trivia, and cable news offer more personalization, deeper engagement, and perfect immediacy. The newspaper has been unbundled, and end users mix together their own preferred set of services. Printed news is having to find a new value that it alone offers.
Introduction: The Paradigm Shift
Fifty years ago, most people in the United States relied on a single religious community to offer connection, conduct spiritual practices, ritualize life moments, foster healing, connect to lineage, inspire morality, house transcendent experience, mark holidays, support family, serve the needy, work for justice, and—through art, song, text, and speech—tell and retell a common story to bind them together. Further back, religious institutions provided health care and education too. Today, all of these offerings have become unbundled. Some health care and education is provided by the state, while for those who can afford it, various private corporations provide the rest. Communal seasonal celebrations have shifted to sporting events like the Super Bowl, national celebrations like the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving, with only a sprinkling of religious highlights remaining, most notably Christmas. As for life transition rituals? We mostly make those up with our friends as we go along, if we have enough time and energy for it.
We might introspect by using a meditation app like Headspace or Insight Timer, find ecstatic moments of connection at a Beyoncé concert, and go hiking to find calm and beauty. We set our intentions at spin classes and make a note of thanks in our gratitude journal. We express our connection to ancestors through the dishes we cook, we feel part of something bigger than us at a protest or a Pride parade. The core needs of introspection, ecstatic experience, beauty, feeling like we’re part of something bigger—these have existed for millennia. But how we create these experiences varies over time. 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.
Introduction: The Paradigm Shift
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.*
Introduction: The Paradigm Shift
Each layer of connection strengthens the other, so that when we feel deeply connected across those four levels, it’s as if our days are held within a rich latticework of meaning. We’re able to be kinder, more forgiving. We heal. We grow.
Introduction: The Paradigm Shift
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.
Introduction: The Paradigm Shift
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.
Introduction: The Paradigm Shift
Think about your own life. When was the last time you felt deeply connected to something bigger than yourself? Where were you? What did that feel like? And what words would you use to communicate that experience? By and large, we are starved of good language to describe what matters most to us, to confidently communicate with others those moments of deep meaning. And as spiritual teacher, scholar, and activist Barbara Holmes writes, our isolation in experiencing moments like these further privatizes our interpretation of them. 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.
Introduction: The Paradigm Shift
usually, we allow time to pass, and these moments drift away. The shimmering flashes of life’s fullness get lost behind the stack of unanswered email and the relentless drudgery of the everyday. We forget the intention we’d set to go out into the forest more often, to start making music again, to spend more time with the ones we love. (At least I know I do.)
Introduction: The Paradigm Shift
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.”
Introduction: The Paradigm Shift
When we can sink below the blur of habit, we can be present to that portion of our experience where we find deepest meaning.
Introduction: The Paradigm Shift
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.
Introduction: The Paradigm Shift
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.
Introduction: The Paradigm Shift
Each of us has our own gifts, our own walkways through life and its mysteries, so be gentle with yourself as you discover what captures your attention and opens your heart.
- Connecting with Self
THE FIRST LAYER of connection is the experience of being authentically connected to ourselves.
- Connecting with Self
Surrounded as we are by hundreds of advertising messages a day and the pressures of social media, we move through the world with our bodies shamed and our attention drained. We can barely go to the bathroom or stop at a traffic light without checking our phones.
- Connecting with Self
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