78 TRUE STORIES, WELL TOLD.
bankrupt morning I will simply open my
notebook and there it will all be...Didion’s ritual—the daily writing—is
writerly rather than religious, but the
end result seems to me to be similar.
Yes, sometimes rituals feel empty, rote,
or monotonous. But they can also be
containers for deeper knowledge and
sensory memory, and perhaps also for
previous selves now otherwise lost.
Meaning is found at the intersection of
the ritual and the individual, in the space
where our experience and creativity
meets an established or “rote” form.
Conversely, experiencing a ritual for
the first time may reveal something
about ourselves we never realized
before. As Didion helpfully puts it:However dutifully we record what we
see around us, the common denominator
of all we see is always, transparently,
shamelessly, the implacable “I.”But the first step is to dutifully record.
Ask yourself the following questions
when writing about ritual:What is in front of you?
Behind you?
Look all around you and notice the
specifics of the space you’re in.
Why are you there?
Who else is there?
Who is leaving?
Who is paying attention and who is not?
Who is crying?
Is this a familiar or unfamiliar place
or event?
Do you feel welcome or unwelcome?
Do you feel like you belong?When writing about a ritual from a
tradition that is foreign to you, try not to
make assumptions about the people who
are practicing it. “Spiritual tourism”
holds perils—assuming more knowledge
of a culture than you really have,sentimentalizing the faith of others, or
appropriating a ritual or practice that
isn’t your own as if it were. I admit I’m a
frequent spiritual tourist—I love going
on pilgrimages and visiting the holy sites
of many different faiths, and I love read-
ing about others’ experiences as well.
But I find the writing most compelling
when the discomfort or revulsion or
attraction or tension or even ignorance
the writer feels tells me about who they
are, what they believe, and what they’ve
learned about themselves in this context,
rather than assuming knowledge or
judgment of those they encountered.
In his essay, “A Skull in Varanasi,
A Head in Baghdad,” writer Todd
Gitlin—who says he is not at all a
religious person—wakes up to who he
is and what he stands for while contem-
plating an unfamiliar religious ritual that
involves the smashing of skulls in the
Ganges River in India. When he returns
home to New York to the news of the
decapitation of a young American in
Baghdad, his brain makes a connection
between the two experiences and what
they say about what it means to be
human, to have a body with a skull and a
brain that will meet an end.
“No doubt there is a great deal about
these beliefs I don’t begin to get,” he
writes of the Hindu ritual. “But these
are the mind’s pastimes of an amateur, a
curious dilettante.” Ritual, by definition,
is always the same. But the experience of
ritual, the internal story experienced, the
knowledge gained, can vary vastly.
Writers can also use well-known
rituals as a starting point to push against
or render in unexpected ways. The very
short essay “Ash Wednesday, 2000” from
Susan Neville’s memoir, Iconography,
grew out of a writerly experiment, a
vow to write every day for the season
of Lent. Neville, who is not Catholic,
had never observed Lent, but she had a
hunch that ritualizing her writing in this
way might reveal a pattern or narrativein her life that she was otherwise unable
to grasp. She’d never been to an Ash
Wednesday Mass, and despite her com-
mitment to exploring Lent, she doesn’t
end up there this time either. Instead,
she goes to the mall. This, she admits, is
a ritual that grounds and comforts her,
that speaks to her of who she is (though
would rather not be)—a middle-aged,
white American who finds a ritualistic
comfort in shopping. And yet, by the
end of the essay, she finds herself cov-
ered in ashes, at least metaphorically. She
goes to the makeup counter and covers
her hands in different shades of lipstick.
When she writes about the experience
in her Lenten journal, she arrives at the
same destination as the Catholics—re-
minded of her own mortality—though
in her own peculiar way.
In the essay “All of the Above,”
writer Faith Adiele takes on the ritual of
telling a story at a dinner party—even
breaking it into helpful steps for the
reader with a numbered list—while
also considering the rituals of courtship
and marriage in three different cultures:
Nordic, American, and Nigerian. Again,
we see that rituals serve to show us
both who we are and who we aren’t—a
consistent theme in the work of Adiele,
who navigates all three heritages and
ethnicities in her own life. She is a
storyteller, but her story doesn’t quite
fit into the container of standard tales
of American courtship. She plays with
that container, to comedic effect, in this
piece. She begins:In your new married life, You & O are
invited to couples’ dinner parties where
at some point the hostess turns to you and
crows: “Tell the story of your marriage!”
At fifty-something, this is your first
marriage, so you wonder, is this what
married people do? Or are you objects of
speculation because you’re fifty-something
first-time newlyweds? Or has someone
told her that either the story or its telling