A secular defense of ritual
I am an agnostic who lights a candle every Friday evening.
I do not believe, in any metaphysically-committed sense, that the candle does anything. It is paraffin. It burns. I have checked.
And yet I find, after eleven years of it, that the week has a shape it did not have before. Friday evening is a hinge. The rest of the week orients toward it or away from it. I have lost nothing by adding the hinge, and gained, I think, a real thing.
The atheist objection to ritual, as I once held it, is that ritual is the form religion takes after the claim has been removed — a sentimental residue, like the empty frame of a painting you've lost. You keep it because you miss the picture.
I now think this gets the causation backwards. The ritual is not the residue of the belief. The ritual is the apparatus that might *produce* the belief, and also produces — for those of us with no belief — something adjacent to it: attention. A repeated motion of attention, week after week, toward the same thing.
Anthropologists have been telling us this for a century. We kept thinking they were describing other people.
I still don't pray. I am still not interested in joining anything. But I have stopped being embarrassed about the candle, because I no longer think I am performing a smaller version of something larger. I think I am doing a small, honest thing that happens to share a shape with larger, older things — and the shape is the point.
That is, so far, the most religious sentence I have ever written.
I do not believe, in any metaphysically-committed sense, that the candle does anything. It is paraffin. It burns. I have checked.
And yet I find, after eleven years of it, that the week has a shape it did not have before. Friday evening is a hinge. The rest of the week orients toward it or away from it. I have lost nothing by adding the hinge, and gained, I think, a real thing.
The atheist objection to ritual, as I once held it, is that ritual is the form religion takes after the claim has been removed — a sentimental residue, like the empty frame of a painting you've lost. You keep it because you miss the picture.
I now think this gets the causation backwards. The ritual is not the residue of the belief. The ritual is the apparatus that might *produce* the belief, and also produces — for those of us with no belief — something adjacent to it: attention. A repeated motion of attention, week after week, toward the same thing.
Anthropologists have been telling us this for a century. We kept thinking they were describing other people.
I still don't pray. I am still not interested in joining anything. But I have stopped being embarrassed about the candle, because I no longer think I am performing a smaller version of something larger. I think I am doing a small, honest thing that happens to share a shape with larger, older things — and the shape is the point.
That is, so far, the most religious sentence I have ever written.