MICHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: A few days ago, we left our Washington, D.C., studios to join a group of seniors who were gathering together for an hour of meditation and journaling.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOORBELL CHIMING)
MARTIN: Hey.
LIANA KING: How are you?
I'm Liana King. I'm the Around Town DC program manager at Iona. And this is the mindful journaling session.
MARTIN: King greeted us and a handful of regulars to her group.
KING: This is Nancy (ph) and Synthia (ph).
MARTIN: Hi.
NANCY: Hello, how are you?
SYNTHIA: Hello, hello.
KING: And Jan is coming late. Hopefully, she'll be in, in a few minutes.
MARTIN: The group was originally scheduled to meet for just four weeks. But they enjoyed the practice so much, they asked if they could keep coming.
KING: They wanted to continue, and I wanted to continue.
MARTIN: First came the short meditation session.
KING: Well, thank you all for joining today. It's nice to have a full table.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Did you get a nametag?
KING: Do you need a journal?
BRUCE FEILER: I will. I'm Bruce.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: OK, Bruce.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Pick your color (laughter).
FEILER: Pick the color of the name?
MARTIN: Yeah, there's this little - I got you.
The Bruce was Bruce Feiler. You might recognize his voice from his PBS miniseries about the Bible or from talking about one of his many books. His latest, called "A Time To Gather," is about exactly that, gathering, why it matters so much and what we lose when we don't. And while this group was busy journaling, we moved next door to ask him why he says we need rituals like this more than ever. I started by asking him why, after writing books about everything from the Bible to surviving cancer, he got interested in this topic.
FEILER: I was going through a difficult time. I had lost my father. I was losing my mother. We dropped our children off at college, and I had this very distinct feeling. I felt homesick in my own home. And what I craved more than anything was a means to reconnect with people. And that's when I stumbled into what I now think of as maybe one of the great untold stories of our time, which is that around the world, there is this groundswell, organic movement to find new ways to connect.
MARTIN: With this book, you're not just describing a thing. You're reporting, but you're also advocating for a thing. So what is that thing? What are rituals?
FEILER: A ritual is a shared, unnecessary act that makes us feel at home. It was a German anthropologist, Arnold van Gennep, who coined the phrase rites of passage a century ago. And when he did that, he said that we have four big life rituals, birth, coming of age, marriage and death. They must happen in order. And those are the ones that everybody has. The idea that that is going to be sufficient today, it no longer captures the nonlinear lives that we have. We go through many more twists and turns.
The new rituals that are popping up? NICU graduations, sober-versaries, cancer-versaries, death doulas, loss of a job doulas. Daddy-daughter dances, mom proms, adoption ceremonies, honor walks for organ donation. And many of these new rituals honor things that institutions did not. So not just marriage but divorce, not just fertility but infertility, not just birth but stillbirth.
MARTIN: Is this mainly a problem of the developed world, as it were, or the more affluent, industrialized world? Because one of the things about your book that I liked is that you actually went all over the world.
FEILER: Yes.
MARTIN: And looked at rituals that people experience elsewhere.
FEILER: So I went to rituals in 16 countries on six continents. I'll tell you a story. I was in Lagos. I was in the capital of Nigeria. And I met the pastor of one of the fastest growing Pentecostal churches on the continent of Africa. And he told me that they would open up Friday nights to, whatever life transition you're in, come and we're going to have a collective ritual. It started at 10 p.m. and it would end at 4 a.m.
And people came for all sorts of things. And the No. 1 issue was infertility. So he started a special Wednesday night ritual gathering that he called Fruit of the Womb. Then this pastor shares that he and his wife had struggled from this, had two adopted children. So that's a kind of vulnerability that he's now sharing. And here's a community of people trying to get pregnant and trying to find the difficulty in the middle of Lagos.
MARTIN: But what about some of these things that we have accepted for years that we no longer do, like hazing to join a fraternity or a sorority? Like, what do you have to say about that?
FEILER: Let's go back to one of the first things I said, which is that rituals work. And they are successful at knitting groups together. They can be done so for healthy reasons, and they can be done so for unhealthy reasons, right? So part of our challenge is to try to identify what makes them work and to harness that for positive reasons.
MARTIN: What do you make of the fact that certain rituals just keep exploding? And I'm thinking right now, we're talking - it's the spring.
FEILER: Yes.
MARTIN: So we're talking about it's prom season.
FEILER: Yes.
MARTIN: So prom used to be - you can understand it, prom, as a kind of a coming-of-age ritual, right? But now it's become prom-posals.
FEILER: Yeah.
MARTIN: And that's got to be elaborate. And it's got to involve, like, a flyover or something like that. And then there's the prom send-off where you have, like, the whole thing being videotaped, like, going off to the prom. And then it's just - I don't know. What do you make of that?
FEILER: We are moving away from the idea of rites of passage. And we are moving in the direction of what I call bites of passage, right? Small nibbles of connection that help keep us alive.
MARTIN: So what did you see in the meditation group that we just visited?
FEILER: I saw a shared unnecessary act that makes you feel at home, right? Like, that is not a generation that grew up meditating, right? That is not a generation that grew up with mindfulness practice. That is not a generation that grew up with journaling and with sharing. And yet, the smiles on their faces and the advocacy was incredibly powerful. And it is a perfect example that this was a one-off opportunity that they were given. And at the end of it, everyone said, can we do it again? And when you ask them why they were there, they were like, we like being in the group.
MARTIN: So before we let you go, you're making some big claims...
FEILER: Yeah.
MARTIN: ...About the power of this. The book is titled "A Time To Gather." But you also say - the subtitle of the book is "And How It Can Save Us." How is it going to save us when you consider just how much division there is not just in the world, but just in this country?
FEILER: So if you look at what the problems are, if loneliness is the big problem, ritual gatherings are the answer. If division is the big problem, then ritual gatherings are the answer. If it's AI and the larger threat to humanity, ritual gatherings are the answer. I'm saying this because it's not happening from the top down - it's coming entirely from the bottom up.
MARTIN: That's Bruce Feiler. His latest book is "A Time To Gather: How Ritual Created The World - And How It Can Save Us." Bruce Feiler, thank you so much.
FEILER: My pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.
(SOUNDBITE OF GUITAR'S "AKIKO") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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