Ritual

Yesterday on the phone my mother described her and my father's new Wednesday routine. She calls it "Bastard Sabbath." Now those of you who know my mother will know that she never uses slang (unless she's attempting an idiom--attempting and failing) and that she always utilizes words in their original, simple meaning. I say this to let you all know that "Bastard Sabbath," though it sounds like the name of a rock band from the 1970's, means that she and my father are approximating, or interpreting, their own sort of sabbath day. They've been reading a book by a Jewish rabbi about the concept of taking Sabbath days and decided to create their own sacred day in the middle of the week when they can discard their routines in the evening and replace them with simplicity, contemplation, and a book discussion.

"We'll fast during the day--not just from food, but from the media, and then at night we'll eat good soup and hearty bread and drink wine."

"You're going to be absolutely loopy," I said. "Nothing in your stomach all day and then wine."

"We're going to drink it slowly," she said, and began to laugh. "Like Shabbat--four glasses, but slowly."

"What?" I started to laugh, too. "Four glasses? It's going to be some kind of contemplative night all right!"

"Well, maybe we'll have to rethink that part," she said.

All drinking aside, my parent's attention to Ritual is something that Martin and I have tried to adopt over the years. Ritual is different than routine. Routines are ways of doing things you fall into without thinking too much about them; they become rote, and often even tyrannical things that eventually disgust you. But to nurture Ritual requires careful forethought, an attention to space and time, and a tender attitude of love.

Our days are full of small rituals that make each day extraordinary in some way (though they don't always happen as peacefully as we hope). Martin and I love tea time together, once in the morning and once in the evening, and that has become one of our most important rituals together: putting the kettle on, heating the teapot with a splash of boiling water, steeping the tea under the cozy, and sitting down together, taking a long, precious fifteen minutes (more if we're lucky) to discuss our day, our writing, our ideas and frustrations.

At night, we get the children to bed, put the house to bed, make lunches for the next day, set the table for breakfast, and finish the writing/grading work that we have inevitably still waiting for us. Then we always meet together, to play a game or watch a program on TV. Our ritual is always the same: one of us gets Sleepytime tea for the other, someone gets a snack. As we watch TV I scratch Martin's back, and he always gets up to get me another cup of tea. It's a simple ritual that I look forward to every day.

In Andre Dubus' short story, "A Father's Story," the narrator, whose marriage has dissolved, wonders about how that relationship might have been saved:

“I believe ritual would have healed us more quickly than the repetitious talks we had, perhaps even kept us healed. Marriages have lost that, and I wish I had known then what I know now, and we had performed certain acts together every day, no matter how we felt, and perhaps then we could have subordinated feeling to action, for surely that is the essence of love.”

Emotion fluctuates from hour to hour; our rituals are like pillars in our days, pulling us back together to focus on what's real and good.