COPYRIGHT

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF WilliamCollinsBooks.com First published in Great Britain in 2020 by William Collins First published in the United States by HarperOne in 2020 1 Copyright © Casper ter Kuile Casper ter Kuile asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 Excerpt from No Man Is an Island by Thomas Merton, copyright © 1955 by The Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani and renewed 1983 by the Trustees of the Merton Legacy Trust. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Company. All rights reserved. Excerpt from Grateful: The Transformative Power of Giving Thanks by Diana Butler Bass, copyright © 2018 by HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by kind permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Excerpt from To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings by John O’Donohue, copyright © 2009 by John O’Donohue. Used by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Excerpt from World as Lover, World as Self by Joanna Macy, copyright © 1991 by Parallax Press. Reprinted by kind permission of Parallax Press, parallax.org. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. Source ISBN: 9780008389901 Ebook Edition © June 2020 ISBN: 9780008389918 Version: 2020-05-26

Advance Praise for The Power of Ritual

‘If you are passionate about community building or simply seeking what feels good in life and how to get more of it . . . consider this book your new bible.’

– Cleo Wade, author of Heart Talk and Where to Begin

‘The Power of Ritual is essential reading for anyone interested in how to find meaning in our strange, new world. Bursting with wisdom and compassion, this is the rare book that really might change your life. It has certainly changed mine.’

– John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars

‘Casper ter Kuile continues to have his pulse on this generation’s search for meaning. Building on the incredible work of ‘How We Gather’, The Power of Ritual offers a radical proposition: we decide what’s sacred.’

– Priya Parker, author of The Art of Gathering

‘Casper ter Kuile’s book is genuinely wise and utterly useful: it offers you the opportunity to remake your life in small but vital ways that will leave you happier, calmer, and more able to do the work that must be done on this planet. A classic the day it is published!’

– Bill McKibben, author of Radio Free Vermont

‘I’ve been waiting for a book like this. The Power of Ritual teaches us how to treat reading as sacred, fitness as sacred, alone time as sacred, and people as sacred. No blasphemy, but this book is my new sacred text!’

– Scott Heiferman, cofounder of Meetup

‘Casper so perfectly captures the power of ritual in this very research-based, thought-provoking book. Ritual is an integral part of architecting community, and he thoroughly shares so many important examples of just how to integrate it in everyday life and in creating community. A must read for any leader.’

– Radha Agrawal, cofounder and CEO of Daybreaker and author of Belong

‘As we reimagine our relationships with self, one another, and nature, The Power of Ritual provides deep insight into traditions both new and old. Brilliant.’

– Elizabeth Cutler, cofounder of SoulCycle

‘Human beings are made to experience the transcendent – for worship and, though this might surprise many people, for ritual as well. Casper ter Kuile invites our increasingly secular world to discover the sacred in the midst of the everyday and turn our days into rituals of joy, praise, and gratitude.’

– James Martin, SJ, author of The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything and Jesus: A Pilgrimage

To my father, who taught me when to follow the rules, and my mother, who taught me how to change them.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Advance Praise for The Power of Ritual

Dedication

Preface by Dacher Keltner

Introduction: The Paradigm Shift

1 Connecting with Self

2 Connecting with Others

3 Connecting with Nature

4 Connecting with Transcendence

5 Already Connected

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About the Publisher

PREFACE

WE LIVE IN AN ERA of fragmentation. Scholars have studied how our communities – families, churches, neighbourhoods, work teams, and bowling leagues – are transforming. Once stable and enduring, now, as a result of economic and social forces, they are filled with people who have a more transient commitment to their jobs, locales, friendships, and marriages.

For deep and historical reasons, our sense of identity is now more fragmented, for better and worse. We have more complex and richer spiritual identities than in the past, more complex and richer gender identities, and more complex and richer ethnic identities. We are living in a globalised world.

There is much to praise in this era of fragmentation: the rise of rights and freedoms, the growing number of women in power, the democratisation of art forms and information, and the glacial but accelerating move away from the homophobia, sexism, and racism that defined our recent history of colonial conquest.

But there is much to be concerned about, as well. People feel the absence of community. Studies find that the average citizen of the US, and likely the world, is lonelier than ever before. People have fewer friends. They spend inordinate amounts of time commuting in the car or scrolling through online feeds. People feel less trust toward their fellow citizens and work harder than before. The technologies many of us greeted with such enthusiasm a decade ago are now proving not to be the utopian, digital new world of connecting and sharing but a different kind of new world defined by anxiety, loneliness, endlessly comparing oneself to others, and perhaps surveillance. Our era of fragmentation has paved the way for an era of anxiety.

And this fragmentation has pronounced costs for the mind and body. As a professor of psychology, I teach the science of happiness at University of California, Berkeley, and beyond to hundreds of thousands of people in online courses, digital content, and my podcast, The Science of Happiness. Over the twenty years of this engagement, 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 organise your life. It will boost your happiness, give you greater joy, and even add ten years to your life expectancy, science suggests. 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. But I have been hard-pressed to point to deep, practical, principled ways to build connection, community, and a sense of ritual.

Now I can. In Casper ter Kuile’s illuminating book The Power of Ritual: Turning Everyday Activities into Soulful Practices, we find a road map to greater meaning in life through community. A first step is through the creation of everyday secular rituals. 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. I learned this from Casper during the summer of 2018. He invited me into a ritualised experience of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, my favourite cathedral in Paris. Before entering the illuminated space inside, we circled around the building, clockwise, taking in the stream of sounds and images that meditative walking brings about. We then offered alms to a man begging at the entrance feeling the deep sympathies of charity. Before sitting in a pew, we genuflected and made a request and offered a quiet reflective thought – prayer – for someone we care for. We took in the stained-glass windows and their patterns and colours, so reflective of the patterns and beauty of nature – veins in leaves, colours of trees, reflections on lakes. Our attention moved up to the apse of the cathedral as though looking up to the clouds in the sky. We crossed ourselves in an act of quiet touch. Although I am not religious, these simple acts of ritual – like those that run through this book – brought me a feeling of calm, reverence, and even grace.

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’. 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.

Casper offers perhaps a more challenging prospect, too: to awaken to the ritual and community that you are already instinctively creating in your social life. We have a biological need to belong, scientists have shown; without community, as in solitary confinement, we lose our minds. We seek out and create rituals with alacrity and force. For twenty years, I played pickup basketball until I depleted the cartilage in my knees. I played in nearly every city I visited, from Santa Monica, California, to Brockton, Massachusetts, to cities in France. I played with anyone. I was not even that skilled a player. And when I had to hang up my high-tops, 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, ritualised patterns of five people moving together on a basketball court. It is sublime.

Casper’s brilliant book challenges us to see and feel the rituals that are already part of our lives, to switch our minds to a community mind-set. It is likely happening in your spin class, on climbing trips, at musical concerts, when you shop for food, as you dine with your family, in the patterns of play, conversation, and celebrating and consoling on children’s football pitches – and even in how you might use your smartphone, in its better moments, to share photos, recipes, quotes, jokes, GIFs, memes, and news. After reading The Power of Ritual, I came to see how much ritual already ran through my daily life. And I felt lifted up.

Social, economic, and architectural forces, such as the rise of single-family housing, have made this an era of fragmentation. There is much to decry about that, and we feel it in the pains of isolation and loneliness. But there is much freedom and promise in this fragmentation, to create community and ritual in a richer and more complex fashion, one that honours and celebrates the diversity that is our species. The Power of Ritual points us toward this promise.

Dacher Keltner

Professor of Psychology, UC Berkeley

Faculty Director, Greater Good Science Center

INTRODUCTION
The Paradigm Shift

AS A TEENAGER, I was convinced: You’ve Got Mail was the greatest movie of all time.

Kathleen Kelly and Joe Fox, played by Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, meet online in the early days of AOL chat rooms. (We’re in 1998 here – think Monica’s ‘The Boy Is Mine’ and Bill Clinton’s sex scandal.) 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.

And connected and safe were two things I didn’t feel at all.

I was a gay kid living in a Kent boarding school with fifty testosterone-fuelled teenage boys. I stuck out like a sore thumb. A look around my bedroom, shared with three others, revealed all you needed to know. As you walked in there were posters of half-naked supermodels and racing cars to the right, pictures of the band Slipknot in their horror masks to the left, and then in my corner, a complete collection of Agatha Christie books and glitter gel pens.

Needless to say, I wasn’t the first boy chosen for the rugby team. Or the football team. Or anything, really. (I did join an aerobics class, breaking boundaries for all future queer kids in the school, I hope, but that’s another story.)

I felt lonely all the time. I would go on walks and pretend I was a hairdresser asking myself out loud about any vacations I was going on. I tried to ingratiate myself with the older boys by making them toasted Nutella sandwiches like a baboon trying to demonstrate submission on the savanna – please don’t hurt me, I will bring you food!

So, you can imagine why a movie about love and connection and joy meant so much to me. And it’s important to say that (spoiler ahead) the two characters in You’ve Got Mail don’t actually meet until the final – my least favourite – scene. The movie is about the promise of love and connection, more than the actual experience of it. I longed for that kind of connection. And a tiny part of me trusted the universe enough to know that perhaps, one day, ideally in glamorous Manhattan, I might find my own version of a literary multimillionaire who had a dog called Brinkley.

I’ve re-watched You’ve Got Mail many, many times. But it represents so much more to me than just a movie now, because I’ve made it more meaningful. I have very specific rituals for when and how to watch (always alone, always with a tub of Pralines and Cream Häagen-Dazs ice cream). It’s not an ‘Oh, what shall we watch?’ kind of movie; it’s an ‘I’m feeling lost and alone, and I need everything I’ve got to bring me out of this slump’ kind of movie. Certain lines are inscribed on my heart, like mantras. Characters are totems of how I want to be – or not be – in the world. While for most people it’s just another rom-com, for me, You’ve Got Mail is sacred.

That’s what this book is all about – taking things we do every day and layering meaning and ritual onto them, even experiences as ordinary as reading or eating – by thinking of them as spiritual practices. After more than half a decade of research and thousands of conversations with people around the country, 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. And that, just like stargazers of the sixteenth century had to reimagine the cosmos by placing the sun at the centre of the solar system, so we need to fundamentally rethink what it means for something to be sacred. Paradigm shifts like this happen for two reasons. First, because there is new evidence that refutes previously held assumptions – think of how Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species transformed our understanding of evolutionary biology and the historical accuracy of the Bible, for example. Second, because older theories prove irrelevant to new questions that people start asking. And that’s what is happening today. In this time of rapid religious and relational change, a new landscape of meaning-making and community is emerging – and the traditional structures of spirituality are struggling to keep up with what our lives look like.

I’ve written this book to help you recognise the practices of connection that you already have: the habits and traditions already in your bones that can deepen your experience of meaning, reflection, sanctuary, and joy – perhaps at a yoga class, or by reading your favourite books, looking at the setting sun, making art, or lighting candles. It might be through lifting weights, hiking nature trails, meditating, or dancing and singing with others. Whatever it is, we’ll start there by affirming those things as worthy of our attention, and we’ll notice how they make up a broader cultural shift in how we build connection to what matters most.

Religious traditions that were supposed to serve us have often failed. Worse, many have actively excluded us. So we need to find a new way forward. Drawing on the best of what has come before, we can find ourselves in the emerging story of what it means to live deeply connected. Even without espousing specific religious beliefs, the practices that we’ll explore in this book, whether daily rituals or annual traditions, can collectively form our contemporary spiritual life. These gifts and their wisdom have been passed on through generations. Now it’s our turn to interpret them. Here and now. You and me.

I’m so glad we’re in this together.

‘CrossFit Is My Church’

I have spent the last seven years exploring the idea that just because people are leaving church doesn’t mean that they’re less spiritual. As a ministry innovation fellow at Harvard Divinity School, I’ve studied the changing landscape of American religion with my colleague Angie Thurston. We published ‘How We Gather’,* a paper documenting how people are building communities of meaning in secular spaces, in essence performing the functions historically handled by traditional religious institutions. That paper has been praised by bishops and the former CEO of Twitter alike, as we’ve had the joy of mapping and connecting with America’s most innovative community leaders and meaning-makers.

Through hundreds of interviews and site visits and lots of reading, Angie and I kept track of secular communities that seemed to be doing religious things. Wherever we went and whoever we spoke to, it became our habit to ask, ‘So where do you go to find community?’

Time and again, the answers surprised us. November Project. Groupmuse. Parkrun. Tough Mudder. School of Life. But the one that really threw me was CrossFit.

People didn’t just talk about it as their community. ‘CrossFit is my church’ became the refrain. When we interviewed then Harvard Business School student Ali Huberlie, she said, ‘My CrossFit box [gym] is everything to me. I’ve met my boyfriend and some of my very best friends through CrossFit. . . . When [we] started apartment hunting this spring, we immediately zeroed in on the neighbourhood closest to our [CrossFit] box – even though it would increase our commute to work. We did this because we couldn’t bear to leave our community. At our box, we have babies and little kids crawling around everywhere, and it has been an amazing experience to watch those little ones grow up.

‘CrossFit is family, laughter, love, and community. I can’t imagine my life without the people I’ve met through it.’ At Ali’s gym, or box as it’s called in the CrossFit world, people gather on Friday night for drinks as well as five or six times a week to work out together. Across town at another affiliate box, there’s an expecting mothers’ group, and the box hosts a talent night where members try out stand-up comedy or play the cello for the first time in twenty years.

Co-founder 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 realised, 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. ‘We’re the stewards of something,’ he said. Even though CrossFit is a privately owned corporation, he thinks of his leadership role as distinctly priestly – he talks about ‘shepherding a flock’ and ‘tending an orchard’ of CrossFit boxes. And the flock responds – they call him simply Coach.

Perhaps this shouldn’t have surprised us. After all, CrossFit is famous for its evangelical proselytising. 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. (Compare that to five years of rabbinical study or three years of divinity school!) The evangelical tone is not just about getting a hot body – the mission is much bigger. CrossFit is a lifesaving strategy, according to Coach Greg. ‘Three hundred and fifty thousand Americans are going to die next year from sitting on the couch. That’s dangerous. The TV is dangerous. Squatting isn’t.’ Particularly, Glassman is at war with America’s soda industry. As diabetes rates continue to climb and Coca-Cola and PepsiCo fund public health research that minimises the impact of a high-calorie diet, Glassman sees Big Soda as the next frontier of corporate crime. Indeed, CrossFit is becoming ever more civically involved. In Southern California, gym leaders invited a local politician to hold rallies in their communities, joining forces to take on the Big Soda lobby. Nationally, CrossFit is also affiliated with a network of nonprofit gyms supporting people in their recovery journey from addiction.

Even more striking, and much like religious congregations, CrossFit has found a way to honour its dead – specifically, members who have died in the line of fire: military service members, police officers, and firefighters. And it isn’t simply naming them; their memories are embodied in the combination of burpees, lifts, and pull-ups that make up a Workout of the Day that the CrossFit faithful practice around the world. Former CrossFit television host Rory Mckernan introduced a workout named ‘the Josie’ in honour of Deputy US Marshal Josie Wells who died as he attempted to serve an arrest warrant on a double-murder suspect in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Mckernan introduces the hero workout in a video by saying, ‘Speak his name. Understand what he did. Think about giving your life in the service of something greater than yourself and what that means for those left behind. And do that before you do the workout. I promise you that it will alter the way you attack it. Rest in peace, my friend.’

With over fifteen thousand communities worldwide, this phenomenon was something Angie and I had to pay attention to. And even though people new to CrossFit often came to lose weight or build muscle, what kept them coming back was the deeply engaged and committed community.

CrossFit was the most surprising and widespread example of people building community that echoed religious traditions, but it wasn’t the only one. Other fitness communities like Tough Mudder had similar qualities. At Tough Mudder, a community of people who get together to overcome a complex obstacle course – usually covered in mud – the leadership is wholly unafraid of religious comparisons. Founder Will Dean explained to Fast Company in 2017 that Tough Mudder races are ‘the pilgrimage, the big, annual festivals, like Christmas and Easter. But then we also have the gym, which becomes the local church, the community gathering hub. You have the media, which is a little like praying. Then there’s the apparel, which is a little like wearing your cross or your headscarf or any other form of religious apparel.’

Yet fitness communities aren’t the only way that people are finding and exploring questions of belonging. Groups that gather people around play and the creative arts were also spaces for building community. At Artisan’s Asylum, a maker space in Somerville, Massachusetts, a community has formed of artists, artisans, tinkerers, jewellery makers, robot creators, captains of mutant bicycles that look like spaceships, engineers, designers, and more. The creative spirit that runs through the space is embodied in the generosity of members showing one another how to use unfamiliar machines or materials. An active mailing list helps source difficult-to-find parts and helps new artisans get started. One woman shared that she wanted to make a complex butterfly Halloween costume for her young daughter involving lights that would flash on and off. Within hours, the material she needed had arrived on her doorstep and a highly skilled maker was ready to guide her through the process. At Thanksgiving, the whole community gathers for a giant potluck they call Makersgiving, with their creations adorning the long tables alongside homemade dishes. But 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.

After a year and a half of interviews and participant observation, Angie and I were ready to share what we’d learned in our ‘How We Gather’ paper. 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.

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, of people being counselled through a diagnosis or breakup by leaders more expert in fitness than finer matters of the heart and spirit. One SoulCycle instructor remembered getting a text on a Sunday afternoon from one of her regular riders simply asking, ‘Should I divorce my husband?’ With no formal training or preparation to handle these momentous life transitions, community leaders did their best anyway. Communities rallied around members who were sick – bringing food, raising money for hospital visits, and driving them to appointments. More and more, even though they looked nothing like traditional congregations, we saw how old patterns of community were finding new expressions in a contemporary context.

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.

Why This Matters

Noticing these shifts in community behaviour isn’t just interesting. It’s important. 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.

Rates of social isolation are rocketing sky high. More and more of us are lonely and unable to connect with others in the way that we long to. 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.

Health officials now talk of social isolation as an epidemic. When Dr. Vivek Murthy moved through his confirmation process to become the nineteenth US Surgeon General in 2014, he was asked which health issues he particularly hoped to address. In an interview with Quartz, he explained that he ‘didn’t list loneliness in that priority list because it was not one at the time’. But while travelling around the country, 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. Indeed, suicide rates are at a thirty-year high.

The data are clear. 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.

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. And in heat waves or superstorms, we’re more likely to be forgotten by neighbours and perish.

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.

Once in the doom spiral, our brains desperately try to counteract the loss of social connection but struggle to do this alone. In his landmark book In Over Our Heads, Harvard developmental psychologist Dr. Robert Kegan explains, ‘The mental burden of modern life may be nothing less than the extraordinary cultural demand that each person, in adulthood, creates internally an order of consciousness comparable to that which ordinarily would only be found at the level of a community’s collective intelligence.’ More simply put, we need to recreate an entire village network of support in our own brain. Alone. And this goes far beyond physical support and even mental health. ‘We feel unaccompanied at the level of our own souls,’ writes Kegan.

Yet despite the dire warnings that these statistics offer, there is hope. The solutions are age old and all around us. 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.

I have learned that disconnection is about more than our physical and emotional wellbeing. 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. As we encounter major life moments – weddings, births, funerals – we often find ourselves at a loss for how to mark them without the rituals we once had with religion. Think of Cheryl Strayed’s story in her memoir, Wild, about how, without a religious upbringing, she didn’t know what to do when her mother died. What would happen at the funeral? Who could she go to for help during her grief? Generations before us turned to the church or the temple during these times: the priest or rabbi would lead the funeral ceremony, congregation members organised meal deliveries for the family, and everything was taken care of. All of us would know what to do. But today? Just like Strayed, we’re overwhelmed. Without clarity on what to do when we meet these milestones, we let them pass by, unable to live through them wholeheartedly.

More than that, 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?

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.

But why are we in this mess? We need to understand the era-defining patterns in religious decline that we’re in, and what that decline means for each of our lives.

Rise of the ‘Nones’

Much has been written about the decline of religion and the rise of the so-called ‘nones’ (people who tick ‘None of the above’ when asked about their religious identity). Whereas nearly a century ago, Americans could assume that just about everyone around them fit into a religious box – Catholic, Presbyterian, Reform Jewish, African Methodist Episcopal, Quaker – today, many of us straddle multiple identities or have none at all. Perhaps you grew up with a Hindu father and a Jewish mother, celebrated both Passover and Diwali, and now find yourself practising a bit of both. Or your former-Methodist parents took you to an Episcopal Sunday school for a few years before church slowly drifted into the background of family life. Or perhaps, like me, you weren’t raised with anything in particular, but celebrated popular holidays and had a mix of family rituals and traditions. Wherever you fall on this spectrum, you are part of the shifting sands of religious identity and practice. The percentage of Americans who describe themselves as atheist, agnostic, or ‘nothing in particular’ has grown to 26 per cent, and 2019 General Social Survey data suggests that nones are now as numerous as evangelicals and Catholics in the United States.

Unsurprisingly, the trend is most pronounced for young people. Among millennials (those born between 1980 and 1995), the number stands at 40 per cent, according to a Pew Research Center poll published in 2019. Research data also suggests that each new generation is less religious than the last. A Barna Group poll in 2018 revealed that 13 per cent of Gen Zers consider themselves atheists, more than double the 6 per cent of American adults overall. But the trend toward disaffiliation holds true across every age cohort. In 2014, nearly one in five boomers were nones (17 per cent), and nearly one in four Gen Xers fit the same bill (23 per cent). All this results in massive changes in our religious infrastructure. For instance, Mark Chaves, a sociologist at Duke University, has estimated that over three-and-a-half thousand churches close their doors every year.

America is not alone in these trends, of course. In Europe it’s an even starker picture. A 2017 survey by the British National Centre for Social Research revealed that 71 per cent of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds consider themselves as nonreligious, while UK church attendance has declined from nearly 12 per cent to 5 per cent between 1980 and 2015. This has had huge implications on the Church of England. In the 2018 British Social Attitudes survey, only 1per cent of British 18 to 24-year-olds identified as CofE, and even among the over-75s, the most religious age group, only a third described themselves as Anglican. A similar trend has emerged in Australia, where nearly 40 per cent of Australians did not state a religious affiliation in the 2016 census, and attendance in church is down also.

Again, this isn’t to say that we are becoming less spiritual per se. But the data does tell us that how we engage our spirituality is changing.

It may be helpful to think of the human longing that leads to religious culture as akin to music and the music industry, which has struggled mightily over the last twenty years, with CD sales in free fall for much of the 2000s and 2010s. But our love for music itself endures. Decades after the technology-induced crisis, industry executives have figured out a new business model – combining streaming subscriptions with vinyl sales, which are at a fourteen-year high. The same thing is happening in our spiritual lives: a mix of fast-paced innovation and rich tradition. Attendance at congregations is down, but our hunger for community and meaning remains. Formal affiliation is declining, but millions are downloading meditation apps and attending weekend retreats. Moreover, 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 thirty-somethings). Stadium concerts and karaoke replace congregational singing, and podcasts and tarot decks replace sermons or wisdom teachings.

In her book Choosing Our Religion, Elizabeth Drescher explains that we nones see our spiritual lives as organic and emerging, responding to the people around us rather than structured into dogmatic categories of belief and identity. Said otherwise, we’re less likely to affiliate with an institution than we are to affiliate with another individual. We see religious institutions as being driven by hypocrisy and greed, judgmentalism and sexual abuse, anti-scientific ignorance and homophobia. People also leave religious communities behind because worship experiences are simply boring or formulaic. Most interesting to me is that 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. 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!

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.

Unbundling Traditions and Remixing Them

Like nearly everything else in contemporary culture, how we understand religion is shaped by the technological changes driving our lives, especially the rise of the internet. Institutions have lost our trust, particularly those that claim expertise and authority. But as Joi Ito, former director of the MIT Media Lab, explains in his book Whiplash coauthored with Jeff Howe, 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.’**

Let’s unpack that. The internet era has opened us to the possibility of curating and creating our own tailored practices and to looking to our peers for guidance as much as any teacher or authority figure. There are two key concepts here – unbundling and remixing.

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 personalisation, 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.

The same is true for our spiritual lives. Fifty years ago, most people in the United States relied on a single religious community to offer connection, conduct spiritual practices, ritualise 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.

Meanwhile, there’s a growing number of mixed-religion households. Before the 1960s only 20 per cent of married couples were in interfaith unions, while in this century’s first decade 45 per cent were, according to journalist Naomi Schaefer Riley. Harvard Divinity School dean David Hempton labels this phenomenon ‘braiding’. Jewish teacher Reb Zalman calls it ‘hyphenating’. Marketing guru Bob Moesta refers to it as ‘remixing’. Whatever we call it, and however much religious institutions resist it, it is happening. And not just in the United States.

Anthropologist Satsuki Kawano describes how Japanese people have been Shintoists and Buddhists at the same time for decades, practising elements of both traditions without seeing themselves as necessarily members of two separate religions. In her book Ritual Practice in Modern Japan, she explains that the Japanese state has tried to separate the two religions but that, despite its efforts, the two remain deeply entwined. There have been tensions and conflicts through the decades, but no religious wars or effort to eliminate one another. Indeed, Shinto and Buddhist traditions have interacted, and whole theologies integrating the two have come to flourish. ‘As a result,’ she writes, ‘mutual influence [has] led to a complex orchestration and integration of native and indigenised foreign practices without completely eliminating distinctions between the two traditions.’ One might go to a Shinto shrine for weddings and children’s celebrations but have one’s funeral in a Buddhist temple, for example.

But as we benefit from unbundling and remixing traditions that allow us ever more personalisation, we find that we share less and less with one another. We’re left isolated and longing for connection.

Four Levels of Connection

Like me, you might have been raised without a religious background. Or perhaps you were born into an identity that doesn’t quite fit. You might be atheist, agnostic, at the edge of your tradition(s), spiritual-but-not-religious, unsatisfied in your spiritual home, or simply unsure. Whatever language you use to describe yourself, you’ve been patching together your spiritual life and are longing for something authentic, something more meaningful, something deeper.

The purpose of this book is to show you how you can transform your daily habits into practices that create a sacred foundation for your life. I’ll share some ancient tools reimagined for today’s culture, and I’ll tell some stories about others who are showing us a way forward.

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.***

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.

And each of these layers is rooted in insights from many of the world’s wisdom traditions. For thousands of years those traditions have kept communities together, helped people grieve loss and celebrate joy. The great myths of the world helped us make moral sense out of chaos and catastrophe. Even if we’re a little nervous to engage the traditions, they have much to teach us.

Some things have changed, of course, since these ancient traditions were established. No longer do we need myths to explain how the sun rises and sets, where floods come from, and what lies underground. Instead we have new questions. How can we truly find rest in a stressed-out 24/7 world? How can we remember our ‘enough-ness’ in an economy that always pushes for more? How do we cultivate our courage to stand against injustice?

In Chapter 1 I’ll explore two everyday practices that help us connect to our authentic self: sacred reading and sabbath. Chapter 2 proposes eating and exercising together as two sacred tools to help us connect deeply with others. Chapter 3 focuses on reimagining pilgrimage and the liturgical calendar to connect us more intimately with the natural world, and Chapter 4 explores what connecting to the divine might look like by reframing prayer and participating in a regular small group of support and accountability. Finally, Chapter 5 is a reminder that we are all inherently born into belonging. The practices here are simply the tools to help us remember.

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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