I’ve come to love Sunday mornings in this season of life. Maybe it’s obvious by the naming of this newsletter or how often I share snapshots of my Sunday morning reading online.
But this wasn’t always the case. When my children were younger and still waking up before the sun and couldn’t pour their own milk, Sunday mornings almost felt like a taunt. Like they culturally represented this sense of what I longed for – rest, ease – but couldn’t quite have. They also marked the last chance to get all the things accomplished before heading into another nonstop week.
The weeks are still nonstop and my kids still get up on the early side, but intensity has eased enough that some Sundays – an increasing number – I can enjoy my Sunday rituals.
They aren’t anything too elaborate, or there would be no way I’d be maintaining them. I usually just try to start the morning in the papasan chair that I bought last year (best purchase I’ve ever made – hands down) and placed by the front window, light a candle, have my coffee with cream, and read a few pages of Brandie Freely’s book, Sundays + Other Musings. That’s the ritual.
When I get to the end of Brandie’s book, I’ll have to decide whether to start it over or begin another one. But that’s a decision for another day.
I have other rituals too, like starting most days with a walk in my neighborhood or a particular phrase I tell my youngest son when I’m tucking him into bed. My partner and I have a ritual of Sunday check-in (okay, I am obsessed with Sundays) where we pick four Seeing You Questions to ask each other.
I’ve been thinking about these rituals lately, and how it’s always the moments I feel least capable of or inclined to do them that I need them the very most. It got me thinking about how equally true this is for us a collective. How the decline of ritual has taken from us something deeply important. And how much we need them right now.
Throughout history, when things have felt the most unpredictable, overwhelming, or outside of human control, rituals have offered this small but undeniable sense of having something to hold on to. They were like surfboards that we could grasp when the waves threatened to swallow us – not to stop them, but to ride them.
Even in the eras of greatest suffering and gravest uncertainty, people kept connection to ritual. In the Japanese Sengoku period, a time of near constant warfare and chaos, the tea ceremony emerged as ritualized mindfulness, a way to practice presence and calm amid the instability. Enslaved Africans in the Americas carried forward ritualized drumming and communal dance, despite attempts to ban and punish the practices. People across religious traditions have turned to the comfort of prayer beads – like the Catholic rosary or Muslim misbaha – in times of unrest.
Indeed, many of the rituals people have kept throughout history were tied to their religious traditions. Fewer people than ever today are attending religious services, though over 80% of Americans still do identify as religious, spiritual, or both. We seem to be retaining a sense of something bigger, but we’re less often engaging in religious practices. And whether you personally see that as a tragedy or a liberation, it has heralded the loss of something that holds deep significance to human beings – ritual.
Ritual does indeed connect me personally with something beyond myself. For me, that doesn’t necessarily mean a god or even a higher power in the traditional sense. It’s more like a signaling to my internal system that something exists outside of and larger than the internal chaos I am feeling in the moment.
Rituals done repeatedly over time remind me that there is something beyond this particular moment. The practice of a ritual connects me to all of the times I’ve done that ritual before, and that helps me remember that I’ve survived all of those times before, even when I didn’t think I could.
I think rituals connect us to something else, as well. They connect us to parts of ourselves that we tend to lose track of in the melee of life. The part that can slow down. The part that actually wants to tend to ourselves. The part that longs to feel like it belongs to something rather than alienated.
And they give us a sense of agency. They require us to say to everyone and everything else, “You can wait.” Something else is important here. Coming back home to myself matters.
But maybe more than anything else, I love rituals because they have a way of turning the mundane into the mystical. I don’t mean mystical as magical, exactly. More as something with deeper purpose and resonance. They turn a cup of coffee into a meditation. They turn journaling into an offering to ourselves. They turn the way we wake up our children into a thread that will live within them for all of their days.
They take what could feel like very little and turn it into just a bit more.
Reflection Questions:
- What is a ritual that you’ve already been practicing, even if unknowingly?
- What do your rituals help you feel connected to?
- Where could you build in more ritual in your life?
