For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World

We all deserve holidays, celebrations, and traditions. We all need to mark time. We all need community. We all need to bid hello and goodbye to our loved ones. I do not believe that my lack of faith makes me immune to the desire to be part of the rhythm of life on this planet.

Growing up in our home, there was no conflict between science and spirituality. My parents taught me that nature as revealed by science was a source of great, stirring pleasure. Logic, evidence, and proof did not detract from the feeling that something was transcendent—quite the opposite. It was the source of its magnificence.

How astonishing that being bathed in rays of light from a 4.6-billion-year-old mass of hydrogen and helium located 93 million miles away can make us feel happy?

By convention there is color, by convention sweetness, by convention bitterness; in reality there are atoms and space. —DEMOCRITUS

As long as I get to spend it with you, one blink of an eye in the vastness is enough for me.

He saw rite, or ritual, as a kind of three-step path from a state of separation to a state of togetherness. Things are one way: separate, apart. Then there is a transformation, a transition, a change. When that is complete, everything is together, united or reunited.

“for small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.”

In a way, it’s really science that’s been inspiring rituals all along. Beneath the specifics of all our beliefs, sacred texts, origin stories, and dogmas, we humans have been celebrating the same two things since the dawn of time: astronomy and biology. The changing of the seasons, the long summer days, the harvest, the endless winter nights, and t

That only leaves the question of who the “he” is here. Maybe the “God of Spinoza,” the one Einstein once described as “reveal[ing] himself in the orderly harmony of what exists.” In other words, the God of the physical laws of the universe, a kind of literary—but not literal—personification, along the lines of Mother Nature. I have always loved thi