Recently I’ve been playing a game in my head called “There should be a ritual for...”
There should be a ritual for when a felon has finished his sentence and is welcomed back whole into the community. There should be a ritual for when a family moves onto a street and the whole block throws a barbecue of welcome and membership.
So great is our hunger for rituals that when we come upon one of the few remaining ones – weddings, bar mitzvahs, quinceañeras – we turn them into expensive bloated versions of themselves.
Between these exceptions, daily life goes unstructured, a flow of moments. We don’t do transitions well.
As Jim Clarke notes in his book “Creating Rituals,” ceremony honors what has taken place. But ritual is a sequence of actions that symbolically walk you through the inner change the new stage of life will require.
Rituals provide comfort because they remind us we’re not alone. Billions of people have done this before as part of the passages of life.
Rituals also force a pause. Many wise people divide their lives into chapters, and focus on the big question of what this chapter is for. Rituals encourage you to be more intentional about life.
There should be a ritual for returning soldiers, in which the community assumes responsibility for the things the soldier had to do to defend the nation.
There should be a ritual for that moment, often around age 27 or 28, when the young adult leaves the wandering phase and begins to sense the shape and direction of his or her life. Young adults might create a life map of where they’ve been and hope to go, and present it to their peers (on Instagram, obviously).
So far, I’ve been talking about personal rituals. But maybe the greatest need is for collective rituals.
In 1620, early European colonists formed the Mayflower Compact, in which they publicly vowed to “combine ourselves into a civil body politic.” Maybe neighborhoods and towns could come together to make town compacts. They would vow to be a community and lay out the specific projects they are going to do together to address a challenge they face.
A public civic compact, publicly sworn to, involving all, would allow towns to do a lot of things. It would be an occasion to redraw the boundary of the community and thereby include those who have been marginalized. It could be done on a spot that would become sacred, becoming the beating heart of the community. It could be an occasion to tell a new version of the town story; a community is a group of people who share a common story.
It would be an occasion for people to make promises to one another – specific ways they are going to use their gifts to solve the common challenge. Towns are built when people make promises to one another, hold one another accountable and sacrifice together through repeated interaction toward a common end.
We’ve become pretty casual over the years. We’ve become reasonably present-oriented. As a result, we’ve shed old rituals without coming up with new ones. We’ve unwittingly robbed ourselves of a social architecture that marks and defines life’s phases. We’ve robbed ourselves of opportunities to celebrate. Why do we willingly throw away chances to throw fun parties about important things?
David Brooks is a columnist for The New York Times.
