Bruce Feiler has turned his life experiences into books a whopping 14 times, variously mining culture, history, sociology, faith, and family.
Curious about the Bible? He hiked weeks with an archaeologist for Walking the Bible: A Journey By Land Through the Five Books of Moses (2001). Diagnosed with cancer? His book Council of Dads: My Daughters, My Illness, and the Men Who Could Be Me in 2010 detailed his plan for friends to share in his twin daughters' lives if he didn't survive. (He did.)
Then two years ago, he felt a kind of "existential homesickness" and a wave of loneliness. In true Feiler fashion, it led to a book.
PW talked with Feiler about the global journey he took to write A Time to Gather: How Ritual Created the World—and How It Can Save Us (Penguin Press, May).
Why did you set off to visit 16 countries, interview more than 100 "ritual designers," and study up on the history of rituals dating back to prehistoric cave artists?
I was going through a difficult time, and my dad had just died. My mom was getting older, my kids had left for college, and it just felt like all of the relationships in my life kind of needed to be remade in some way. I've spent 25 years writing about the intersection of spirituality and family and life transitions. And I realized I need a ritual.
How do you define "ritual"?
Ritual transcends the religious and the non-religious, left and right, old and young. It's personalized and it's shared. It's the glue of society. A ritual is almost anything you do with others that stops the world, that says you—we—are not alone, and that builds a wall against all of the division and hate we hear out there. A ritual says, "We're going to go to a little special place, our own little cocoon, and we're going to say inside here. I see you, I feel you, I hold you, I listen to you, I share with you. And then we're going to go back out in the world." What I try to do in this book is show you hundreds of examples of real-life rituals, to inspire people and give them confidence.
Your book begins with quoting Ecclesiastes 3:1-5 extolling "a time for every purpose under heaven" and citing 16 examples. Don't most people associate ritual with the Bible and religion?
Not so much now. Top down, institutionally mandated, pre-scripted rituals are in decline. But bottom-up, bespoke, original, reimagined life rituals are exploding around the world. One of my favorite quotes in the book is from a millennial ritual designer who told me, "We want rituals when we want them, and when we need them, and we don't need anyone's approval in order to do them right.
Tell me about two of your favorite examples of rituals you learned about.
The "Taylor Swift Divorce Party" chapter—named for the queen of celebrating breakups—is my wife's favorite. Divorce parties are breaking out all over. Women are saying, "I'm going to share this journey with others so that I can get up off the mat and go out and make the best of the rest of my life."
But the best example, the one I begin the book with, addresses the incredibly painful experience where someone has died suddenly but is going to give life to other families with an organ donation. Missy Holliday created this ritual called an Honor Walk, where the entire hospital stops and pays tribute as an organ donor is wheeled into the donation surgery. Missy told me, "I don’t consider honor walks to be huge things, but I consider them to be small things with big power. We help people write endings to stories they never want to tell." My mission in this book is to help us all write better stories.
