One ritual I miss desperately is attending church. While my faith tradition has opted, like many others, to move to virtual services, for me the ritual aspects are communal in nature. Sharing the touch of a hand or a hug with old friends. Singing the songs in harmony. Holding space for those who wish to share joys and/or sorrows. The smell of the building, the sound of the people settling into communal space… those are hard to replicate via teleconference. In fact, it’s so dissimilar that I just don’t participate. It’s too “weird”, and too raw of a reminder what’s missing. Many of my rituals are solitary, but this one is communal, and I deeply grieve the loss.

Looking back over my life, I see how I craved rituals. I grew up in a place where almost everybody was a multi-generational Catholic and steeped in the rituals of that faith. My parents had broken away from that (and many other social norms), and from the outside looking in, it felt like I was missing out on the super-secret community decoder ring because we didn’t participate in the normal social rituals. Digging a little deeper, I think that I wanted the comfort of the predictability to help balance the UNpredictability of both my family life and my own slightly-wonky brain processing. (We didn’t call it “ADHD” back then.. they just said I was “flighty”). As I grew older and my own kids struggled with some of the same challenges, I believed that rituals could add some guardrails to our experience – AND I struggled to maintain them on my own.

Now, I see that the rituals which have finally taken root and sustained me are ones that bear almost no resemblance to much of what I see the people I know practicing, but they do provide me with a kind of trustworthy life map. When things get wonky (and they do.. human condition and all), I can rely on the rituals to provide touchstones for comfort in the consistency. I believe that the intentionality of ritual, different than the muscle memory of a habit (also important, just different) is the most important part of the practice. I’ve never liked “doing just for the sake of doing”, so having a valued “why” tucked into the process makes it resonate far more for me.