Something From Nothing

A friend was trying to get me to help her make some sense of it recently over a tall sip of suds, and I remembered a passage from a book by Joseph Campbell, the late expert on mythology, in which he describes how rituals are sometimes designed to lull us into a higher state of awareness. He wrote, specifically, about primitive festivals lasting several days, a frenzy of dance and drum that would end in a sacrifice, sometimes a human sacrifice.

Campbell says that a ritual is the acting out of a myth. We can see it in some of our own religious practices, though our ceremonies rarely last more than a couple of hours and hardly ever involve human sacrifice - although taking marriage vows involves self-sacrifice for the sake of the union.

Consider how taking communion symbolically re-enacts Christ’s last meal to provoke a meditation on his resurrection. If we’re lucky and in the moment, we might achieve a moment of enlightenment.

Indeed, there’s a deep and enduring relationship between ritual and spiritual awakening, and it’s hard to imagine having a moment of the latter without the former.

“Ritual” is, etymologically-speaking, embedded in “spiritual.” “Spiritual” comes from the Latin noun “spiritus,” or ‘breath.” “Ritual” comes from the Latin “ritus,” which means the same thing, a ceremony. Both words share the comes from the Greek for “to fit,” which is also the root word for “arithmetic.”

(Oddly enough, tracing it further back to the proto-Indo-European word “arete,” which means “virtue” or “qualilty,” we can also see the root emerge in our words “art” and “right.” Words are wondrous things, aren”t they?)

Consider how much of our lives are spent in routine activities, things we can do with our eyes closed and our minds on other things. If you’re like me, you can play the tape of the first hour of this morning and not be able to distinguish it from every other morning of your life. It sounds boring - and it is - but either in spite of the boredom or because of it, I get some of my best ideas in the most mundane situations, while showering or exercising, for instance.

A great novel on this topic is “Something Happened,” by Joseph Heller, his first book after the classic “Catch 22.” For several hundred pages, nothing happens, and the only thing keeping us interested is the promise of the title and the beautiful way Heller describes the fears, jealousies and joys of the narrator’s life.

And so, I tried to assure my friend, that perhaps by leading lives of quiet, mind-numbing routine, we’re simply preparing ourselves for some great spiritual awakening, but we won’t know what that is unless we tend to the grind of maintaining a home and a family and a job and a church and a body and a car and so on.

If it seems as though we’re simply running a treadmill, then maybe we need to imagine ourselves in a giant hamster wheel generating enoromous amounts of energy to power something.

But so what? That’s the key, and something for each of us to decide on our own.

Our lives are like great novels and myths in that the narrative itself is not as important as the meaning we derive from it.

A version of this column originally appeared in the JournalNews, Hamilton, Ohio, on Oct. 25, 2002.