The Power of Ritual

I’ve written this book because, although there is much practical guidance out there, it is often bundled up with bits of religious culture that are hard to decipher and painful to stomach. Institutions have turned mysteries into dogmas. They’ve lost the lightness of touch to translate timeless wisdom into relevant teaching. 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, and I hope these pages can be a source of accompaniment as you make your own way.

Throughout the book I’ll share my own attempts as a spiritual beginner, some of which I hope can be of practical help for your own journey. I also hope this book will help us be less isolated in our spiritual lives. The interlocking systems of oppression depend on our feeling alone and ashamed. 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.

Intention, Attention, and Repetition

Words like ‘spiritual practices’ and ‘rituals’ conjure up monks in dimly lit temples or extremely difficult yoga poses. (And they can be those things!) But 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.

However, I’ve come to believe that just about anything can become a spiritual practice – gardening, painting, singing, snuggling, sitting. The world is full of these rituals! Just look at the pregame handshakes at a Cleveland Cavaliers basketball game. 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.

If you’re like me, you’ll try out lots of different things that don’t quite vibe or fall away after a couple of tries. That’s absolutely fine. If, after some time, you find one or two things that start to feel consistently like they’re your practices, that’s when you’ve got a winner.

A Note on That Word ‘Spiritual’

It is easy to avoid the ‘spiritual’ today. We try to satiate our longing for connection by scrolling endlessly through social media feeds. My personal favourite is the YouTube hole, where after an hour I look up from my phone and can’t believe the time that’s passed while I’ve been watching drag queens or Leeds United match recaps.

When we do pay attention to the moments of real meaning, they can overwhelm us. Holding a baby in our arms for the first time, hearing music that makes us weep, being out on the water and feeling completely at one with the elements around us – it can be overpowering to feel deeply connected. These moments unlock memories, longings, traumas, and frequently, tears. And to me, these moments are sacred. They are spiritual. But 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.)

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 privatises 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 others’ – attention.

Stay with me if you can, even if these words feel a little uncomfortable. Imagine they’re beautiful new leather shoes that are still a little rigid as you walk. They just need some time before they’ve molded to the shape of your feet. Soon enough you’ll have found the right words, or become used to these, to help you pinpoint that feeling we’re talking about together.

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 theatre. Or psychedelics. Or the arms of our beloved. Or simply watching our kids running through the garden. 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? And surely there are plenty of congregations that feel about as intimate as a subway station.

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’.

Invitation

This book isn’t going to introduce you to anything wildly new. You already read, eat, walk, talk, and rest. You won’t need to buy a whole new set of spiritual tools. That’s the gift of these traditions! All I’m inviting you to do is reframe your established habits through a lens of multilayered, deeper connection. 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.

Because we’re all different, some practices will come more easily to you than others. I connect most with the sacredness of life when I’m engaging with other people, for example. I love to sing, to play board games, and to eat with others. My husband, Sean, in contrast, will look at my weekly calendar and break out in hives because of the number of calls, meetings, and meals I’ve scheduled. His way of connecting is by being in the natural world or spending quality time on his own. On the other hand, I struggle to make time to be outside. One of the first moments when I knew that I loved him was when we went to the symphony together and halfway through the piece I turned to look at him and saw tears streaming down his face – not because he was upset, but because he was able to open himself to the beauty of the music and feel its depth and intensity resonating with his own life. How I wish for that kind of authenticity and vulnerability! 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.

This book is an invitation to explore the layers of experience that we can dive into in every practice. 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 practise. To help us remember.

So don’t worry if you struggle here and there. Or with all of it. I’ve found that having friends and mentors with whom you can talk about this kind of stuff without feeling self-conscious suddenly makes it all much more doable. But whether you’re an old hat or a spiritual beginner, whether you’re a Potterhead or watching a nineties rom-com, you have everything that you need to take your next best step. Let’s begin.

* ‘How We Gather’, https://sacred.design/insights.

** The irony is not lost on me that it was precisely Ito’s lack of transparency that resulted in his departure from the Media Lab in 2019.

*** I’m indebted to Sarah E. Koss and Mark D. Holder for their definition of spirituality as ‘a feeling of Connectedness to something greater than oneself, experienced through cultivating a relationship with oneself, one’s community, one’s environment, and one’s perception of the transcendent’, which, in part, inspired the structure of this book.

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