The Power of Ritual In Our Lives And Communities
How personal and community rituals can help us to rediscover connection, meaning, and purpose
Hi Grand Fam,
When every day feels like Blursday, we crave ritual and community. The following Q&A was from our February Grand Time with the one and only Casper Ter Kuile, co-founder of The Sacred Design Lab, Ministry Innovation Fellow at Harvard Divinity School, and author of The Power of Ritual: Turning Everyday Activities Into Soulful Practices.
From Tech Sabbaths to shared rituals, Casper shared inspiring insights with The Grand community.
How do you define a ritual and how is it different from a habit?
Rituals have 3 defining characteristics: you do them with intention, they require your attention, and involve repetition.
I think a really helpful way to distinguish a ritual from a habit is that routines have a functional purpose. These include taking the dog out for a walk because it needs to pee or brushing your teeth because you want good oral hygiene. A ritual draws you beyond the action itself and has a meaning associated with the behavior. Unlike habits, rituals don’t need to have a functional purpose. By ritualizing something, you are adding a layer of evocation or symbolism or have storytelling to a particular action. Rituals help set apart the sacred from the routines of our everyday. Take circumcision, for instance. If you think about ritualized circumcision, while the act itself can be like very, very unpleasant, it carries a strong symbolic meaning, and so it’s done for that purpose.
Can you tell us about one of your favorite rituals and how you created it?
One of my favorite personal rituals is my Tech Sabbath. It’s been my most consistent spiritual practice and one that I’ve been able to continue during the pandemic. When I moved to America, I had a bunch of Jewish friends and classmates and ended up reading a wonderful book, called The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel, a great theologian and rabbi of the 20th century. In it, he describes the Sabbath as a moment when we get a taste of heaven, where we enter this palace in time, and what our work lives should be in service of. So during the Sabbath, we should do things like eat delicious food and be with loved ones. When I looked at my own life I was like, well, I’m not Jewish and I’m not going to celebrate a traditional Jewish Sabbath. But I know that I cannot get in that state of mind that Heschel speaks of when my phone is around, because for me, it feels like an addiction. And so I started at sundown on Friday turning off my phone and laptop, lighting a candle and singing a Dutch summer camp song.
It felt like going on vacation. Because suddenly, although the world hadn’t changed, my experience of the world had changed.
Rituals don’t make the world different, but they help to make it more real.
How do we create a ritual in our own lives?
A lot of our rituals were disrupted from the pandemic due to the changed context of our lives, so we really have an amazing opportunity to create new rituals.
Start by taking a look at the places in your life that have the most meaning already - maybe it’s a recipe that you love cooking, a painting that you have, a song you sing, or a book that you reread every year.
Then start to build some intention, attention, and repetition around it. Ask yourself, what’s the thing you want to hold in your heart or mind, as you engage in this practice? Then find a way to pay attention while you practice it. Stay present and try to engage your multiple senses around the practice. And finally, repeat this practice over time. This might be every day, every week, or every year on a particular day. But that triptych of intention, attention, and repetition layered onto an existing moment of meaning...that is where a beautiful ritual is created!
Tell us about the power of shared community rituals.
I believe rituals are an underused tool of bringing people together with a shared purpose. When we're practicing a ritual together, we are acknowledging the values that this ritual represents and also being shaped by it as a collective.
These rituals don’t need to be complicated - they may involve circle dancing (like at my wedding), sitting in silence, going on a hike together, and all sorts of different practices.
How can communities co-create rituals together?
One of the best ways to create community rituals is through creating a community ritual calendar. As a community, you can map out moments in the year when you know significant moments are going to happen, whether it’s Ramadan or the Oscars, and celebrating them together. Chances are, people in your community may already be doing them, so elevating and enabling them is a worthy pursuit.
Celebration is a great way to give a sense of rhythm of life for the community. Rituals are formative to community life.
Join me in thanking Casper, for sharing these ideas and stories on creating joyful lives of belonging through personal and community rituals in our lives. We hope this conversation inspired you to fuse ritual into your own life as a way of creating greater meaning and purpose.
The Grand community is here to provide support and guidance as you’re navigating big decisions. Join the upcoming Grand Quest on Becoming an Effective Manager
Warmly,
Serena