Week 1, Day 1: Hope, invitation & the sea

Monday 13th November 2023

Since reading Casper ter Kuile’s book ‘The Power of Ritual’, I have begun a morning prayer practice, which I like to call ‘womb time’, since it is a dark, warm, private and safe moment of stillness, preparing me to face the brightness and noise of the day. For the past 6 weeks, it's been the first thing I do after waking up in the morning. To start with, I move my body - some days it’s a full yoga practice, others I dance to a song that I’ve woken up yearning to hear, and on other days it’s a few circles of my hips, wrists and ankles. I then open up ‘Devotions’, a book of poems by Mary Oliver, to a random page, reading the poem that I land on as if it’s a specially selected gift that contains some wisdom for my day.

Today’s poem was Shadows, which reads,

Everyone knows the great energies running amok cast

terrible shadows, that each of the so-called

senseless acts has its thread looping

back through the world and into a human heart.

And meanwhile

the gold-trimmed thunder

wanders the sky; the river

may be filling the cellars of the sleeping town.

Cyclone, fire, and their merry cousins

bring us to grief–but these are the hours

with the old wooden-god faces;

we lift them to our shoulders like so many

black coffins, we continue walking

into the future. I don’t mean

there are no bodies in the river,

or bones broken by the wind. I mean

everyone who has heard the lethal train-roar

of the tornado swears there was no mention ever

of any person, or reason–I mean

the waters rise without any plot upon

history, or even geography. Whatever

the power of the earth rampages, we turn to it

dazed but anonymous eyes; whatever

the name of the catastrophe, it is never

the opposite of love.

I sat for a moment, curtains closed, pyjamas still warm from a night under a thick winter duvet, and contemplated the darkness that this poem was asking me to acknowledge; the destruction, the predictably unpredictable nature of the elements at their strongest and most harsh. It felt particularly poignant to be reading this as winter is closing in and on my first morning in Hastings, a seaside town that was hit just last week by the violent storm Ciaran, causing thousands of homes to lose power, schools to close and blocking railway lines, as well as filling the sea with sewage.

I closed the book and opened the curtains, pulled on my clothes and stepped out of my Airbnb, making a beeline for the sea. Where I was met with this:

[Choppy brown waves hit a pebbly shore under grey cloudy skies]

In times of immense personal turmoil, I have often turned to nature to match me in the scale of my emotions. Huge feelings of loss have been held by crashing waves, or trees so tall I can’t see the top, or by wind so strong it might blow me over. After a month of grief, horror and anger, watching the events unfolding in Palestine and Israel, it felt as if nature was saying: I’m strong and old enough to hold this with you; I have seen grief and I have seen rage; I have known pain of this size before; you don’t need to be afraid; you are not holding this alone.

I stood, watching the crashing waves, feeling the wind hit my face and took a deep breath.

* * *

When I came back to the sea a couple of hours later, the sun was out and the sky had cleared but the waves were still crashing against the shore. I stood on the pebbles and listened to Kate Bowler and Wajahat Ali talk about hope on the On Being podcast.

Bowler describes herself as an ‘incurable optimist’, something that I have often grappled with about myself, worrying that my desire for optimism might lead me to hide away from the harsher or darker parts of human existence. But Bowler explains (and I’m paraphrasing here) that hope is “a story for all of us and it is never fully here”. I loved her description of hope as something that is always placed somewhere in the future, meaning it does not deny the reality of the present. She also illustrates how hope isn’t a selfish or individualistic thing, but something that is expansive and collective. Similarly, when I think about hope, I am not thinking of the times when I might hope that the shop is still open or hope that I remembered to turn off the oven before I left... I am talking about a feeling of optimism that sustains action. In times when grief and anger might stall me, or make my limbs so heavy that I feel I can’t go on, hope helps me to feel lighter. Hope might shine a light on the waymarker when our eyes are strained from trying to read a map in the dark, in the middle of a forest in a storm. Hope draws on the past and future to energise us in the present. It is not naive and it is not foolish: it is thoughtful, it is sustaining, it is a serious investment in a better future.

I see rituals as a way of practising and cultivating hope. In Casper Ter Kuile’s book, ‘The Power of Ritual’, he quotes the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who suggests that in a ritual, “the world as lived and the world as imagined… turn out to be the same world”. When we create rituals, we are performing the world we want to see, and in doing so we bring it into being. This, to my mind, is a radically optimistic act.

It is for this reason that I see ritual as being such an important tool for social and environmental justice movements. When we spend so long thinking about destruction, oppression and injustice, we need more than anger to fuel the fire. Perhaps, to extend the fire analogy, anger is kerosene, whilst hope is a big, dry log: one burns bright and fast, whilst the other burns more gently and for longer (and is a naturally occurring resource that we must be careful to protect!).

Later this afternoon, I hopped on my first call of the Fellowship, with Casper, whose beautiful book I just referenced. Amongst many other things, Casper and I discussed how social justice movements in the US, like If Not Now and Black Lives Matter, as well as Extinction Rebellion in the UK, have made use of rituals and spiritual practices to sustain and connect their movements. But it seems like there is still so much more work to do here, particularly for justice movements that do not share a religious, cultural or spiritual background. I was left wondering what kind of rituals are available to ensure that the practice of hope is central to organising, in order to keep members of these kinds of movements moving forwards, and avoid them burning out. How can we reframe hope, and therefore hope-building rituals, as central to the action of community organising for social justice? How can we ensure that resources are allocated to this work, when we are drawn to prioritise more direct actions, such as protests and campaigns?

Despite the potential for rituals to breed hope, Casper and I also reflected on the times when rituals are not radical or hopeful acts at all. We discussed the fact that ritual as a practice is precarious, and is particularly vulnerable to being used by capitalism as a way of fuelling production, as opposed to nourishing the souls and communities that need it. We discussed what happens when companies mistakenly use ritual as a way of driving productivity, or of caring for their people just enough that they are able to contribute productively to the workforce. We talked about the growing interest in “solo rituals that can be done in under five minutes”, which feels somewhat antithetical to the concept of ritual. Ritual is at its heart a slow and contemplative thing that requires patience, attention and (re)commitment. When we reduce rituals to short, sharp acts that can get us from A to B (e.g. from burnout to productivity, or from confusion to clarity) we miss the point entirely. Rituals are inherently anti-capitalist – they require us to slow down, to be present and to spend time in communication with our souls - none of which are “productive” things in the eyes of capitalism. We must therefore be sceptical of big companies trying to “sell” us rituals, or trying to incorporate rituals into their day-to-day workings, particularly as a way of furthering profit-making activity.

And yet, one of the main questions I am asking with this fellowship is how do we sustain this work? Good rituals require resources - time, space and energy, and often money - to make them happen, but we live in a society where public space is being privatised before our eyes, and where the world of work drains so much from us, that many people have little energy left to give outside of the 9-5. It is perhaps for this reason that we see initiatives or projects that require funding - whether grant funding or funding that comes from participation fees - to make the work sustainable. But how does this change our relationship with the ritual or practice we are participating in? Should rituals always be free to access? And if so, then how do we make that happen?

One idea Casper suggested was modelling an invitation, that is to say, doing something publicly (in Casper’s case, it was the practice of sacred reading through his podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text). Through the podcasts, he and his co-host repeated a practice and invited people to participate in it often enough that there wasn't really any teaching that was necessary for people to go out and make it their own, doing it with their immediate communities because they wanted to and they had the tools to do so, without having been ‘formally taught’.

It made me wonder what it would look like to model more invitations to ritual. Perhaps me sharing my ‘womb time’ practice is a good start? Perhaps I will host more full moon campfires? Perhaps I will return to the Chanukah Hope Stories WhatsApp group I created in 2021? In any case, it has made me wonder who is already out there modelling invitations to ritual, giving others the inspiration and the confidence to give it a go themselves.