Bruce Feiler

It felt like a ritual.

And yet at the same time, it was not what you and I grew up with.

which was a top-down, pre-scripted, institutionally mandated, hierarchical, enforced ritual.

It was bottom-up.

It met us where we were, and it allowed all of us to have a sense that we are contributing to it.

We're not just reading a pre-approved script.

I think that that's a really important question.

It's a shared unnecessary act that makes us feel at home.

I think it, first and foremost, it is a sense of safety.

When do people do rituals?

They do rituals in times of change.

Okay, someone comes into the group like a baby or like a marriage.

When someone leaves the group, like a coming of age

or a death, when someone moves, when someone gets sick.

When there's a change in the group, the group is somewhat aimless.

Or as one death doula I spoke to said, there's a kind of gray, murky directionlessness in the group where no one quite knows where to sit, what to say, how to stand, how to express themselves.

So we are sort of containerless in these moments of change.

And we all know that these moments are hastening and quickening.

What the ritual does is it creates a container.

So it's a sort of safe space, a sense of time outside of time or place outside of place, inside of which we can be confused, but we are held.