Rituals are practices we use to mark a particular time, space, or transition as important, sacred, or worthy of memory, keeping us grounded and connected within a culture, nature, and/or the spiritual world. These activities both add and reinforce meaning in our lives, whether they are small and personal (such as lighting a certain candle every evening), or large and complex (such as celebrating a royal wedding or a religious festival). We can find a lot of value and reassurance in rituals, whether by creating our own or participating in ones created thousands of years ago.
I sometimes encountered, in churches and elsewhere—in the presence of a venerable Buddhist monk, in the cantor’s singing at a bar mitzvah, and on mountain hikes—something compelling, powerful, even terrifying that I could not ignore, and I had come to see that, besides belief, Christianity involves...
