Honoring Your Ancestors: A Guide to Ancestral Veneration

Bake sweet things to bring to any gathering. Pray over the sugar (or other sweetener) that the people who eat your baked goods will think sweet thoughts and say sweet words about you.

other readers may instead feel a twinge of disappointment that so much of what I’ve described looks less like a glamorous witchy photoshoot and more like chores. A good portion of this book is dedicated to cooking, cleaning, and praying, things that rarely make for good posts on Instagram. We can see devotional activities as burdens that keep us fr

As any good host knows, you can’t force a party to happen. You can send out the invitations. You can buy the food. You can make a playlist. But it’s still possible that no one will show up. Or if they do show up, they might sit quietly and awkwardly in their own worlds instead of really communing with one another. You can only create the conditions

Catholics of a more traditional bent perform a special devotion to the Sacred Heart on the first Friday of the month for nine consecutive months to ensure a good death.

It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand.

Their household religion was the entire world writ small.

household devotion.

others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists.

And perhaps, there’s just one amendment I would make to the obligation I was raised with: it’s not just that every generation must make life better for the next—it’s that every generation must make life better than even seems possible to them. The humble recognition that we don’t know everything opens us up to futures we couldn’t otherwise imagine.