The Surprising Ritual Renaissance
Bruce Feiler on what happens when the traditional ways we gather and mourn start to disappear
What happens when the traditional ways we gather and mourn start to disappear? Bestselling author Bruce Feiler joins host Zachary Karabell to discuss his latest book, A Time to Gather, and explore the modern celebration recession. Instead of yielding to isolation, Feiler reveals a surprising grassroots renaissance of human connection happening right now.
Feiler shares deeply personal stories, from navigating his father’s funeral to establishing a meaningful family ritual following the recent loss of his sister-in-law. Karabell and Feiler also discuss the dual nature of social media, highlighting how it acts as an amplification tool that helps democratize new traditions, like hospital honor walks for organ donors and even Taylor Swift-themed divorce parties.
While acknowledging the very real threats of loneliness and the isolating effects of our digital lives, Feiler explains why he remains optimistic about our collective future.
Watch the full conversation below:
All episodes of the What Could Go Right? podcast are available here.
Transcript
Zachary Karabell: What could go right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network. In a world full of noise and a world full of armageddon porn, how do we take a different view on the human condition at a time when, admittedly, people are feeling, it would appear, pretty grim, and are losing faith in institutions, are losing faith in communities, and may even be losing faith in themselves?
And yet, is that really the whole story? Are we in the midst of a recreation, even in the midst of a dissolution? I’m going to talk today to somebody who has been traipsing around the world and observing the human condition from a whole series of angles, and this question of not just what are we losing, but what are we finding? What are we gaining? So I’m going to be speaking with Bruce Feiler, who has a new book out, and I’m going to hold up the book. I wanted to do this in real life. Hold up an actual book. Look, it’s an actual book. It’s called A Time To Gather: How Ritual Created the World — and How It Can Save Us. A modest, modest statement, a modest promise.
So Bruce has written a lot of books. He and I have known each other for an inordinately long amount of time, and we’re going to have a conversation about ritual, but we’re also going to have a conversation about the pressing question of this season of the podcast, which is, what are we missing by only looking at the downside? What are we not seeing by assuming the worst? So Bruce, hi.
Bruce Feiler: Hi. Nice to see you. I love that introduction. It captures everything that I know and love about you and have for a long time, and I actually think it’s crazy relevant to the topic we’re about to talk about.
Zachary Karabell: Well, that’s a wrap. Thank you so much for joining us all today. We’ve had a great time. Please go buy the book. It’s called A Time To Gather.
So, gratuitous softball question: Why this book? Why now?
Bruce Feiler: Well, let me answer that question by using the frame that you just used. Are we in a period of collapse, or a period of renewal? So the short answer to your question is 21 years ago next week, as we tape this conversation, my wife Linda and I went from being empty nesters to full nesters in 32 minutes.
We have, as you know, identical twin daughters, and 18 years after that, we became empty nesters, and we went from full nest to empty nest in 32 minutes. We dropped our girls off at college, and we came back to Brooklyn, where we lived, and I walked into my home and I had this feeling that I’d never had before, which is that I felt homesick in my own home.
And my first response was, my gosh, don’t use that word. That’s what kids are supposed to feel when they go to summer camp. What I was going through is a certain period in my life of loss and re-imagination. My dad had just died. My mom was aging. My kids are off to college.
Suddenly, we need to redefine our marriage, which had our kids at the heart of it. And I had been writing, as you know, for 10 years about life transitions, right? Life is in the transitions. A book I wrote called The Search about work transitions, and I thought, I’m ready for this. What I need is a ritual.
And that’s when I stumbled into the story that in forty years of writing books professionally is the greatest story that I have encountered, and one I’m a little shame-faced that I didn’t know before, and that has to do with how we hold together. So, to now bring it to the frame you used at the beginning of this conversation, we know that ritual works. For 300,000 years, the initial human act was when someone died, we’re going to get together, we’re going to bury them. Religion did not create ritual. It’s the other way around. So humans have been using ritual before we were anatomical humans.
So for 100 centuries, that’s 10,000 years, in any culture anywhere in the world that we’ve looked, people have used ritual to connect us in times of change. What do I mean by that? When someone comes in the group, like a birth, like a wedding, when someone leaves the group, like a coming of age, a funeral, when someone gets sick or moves, people reconstitute the group with a ritual.
Until this century, when we’ve abandoned them, and that’s the loss part of your frame. No one’s having birth rituals anymore. No one’s having coming of age rituals. As you know, in 1960, 90% of human adults married. Now that number is below 50% for the first time. And also, no one’s having funerals anymore, which was the shocking thing to me. In 1970, 5% of Americans were cremated. Now it’s 65%, going to 80%, and only one in five has a funeral or a ceremony of any kind.
So we have abandoned the traditional way that we’ve held together. That’s what I call the celebration recession. That’s the loss, the falling apart, the giving up of traditions that you alluded to at the top of this conversation.
But then at the same time, all of these new ways of gathering and meeting are arising, and some are silly, promposals and gender reveals, but some of them are profound, like not just marriage, but divorce, not just fertility, but infertility, not just becoming an adult, but entering aging. So there is this renaissance of ritual around the world. That’s the story that I stumbled into and I wanted to tell. And you said to travel, so 16 countries, six continents, three years of joining these rituals and trying to figure out: Is there a blueprint of togetherness that can hold us together?
Zachary Karabell: I mean, that’s one of my favorite aspects of what you look at in this, which is, you start with what is not obvious but is intuitively clear, right? All the things that we don’t do, that we have lost in losing communities. I think we’re probably beyond peak nostalgia for small-town America, when Bowling Alone came out 20-plus years ago.
Bruce Feiler: In 1999, 2000.
Zachary Karabell: We’re deep into the — social media has, I guess to use the ritual thing, put the nail in the coffin, a ritual that we no longer have anyway. And yet what you show is yes, but. Like, okay, that’s true. But we’re missing the green shoots while we’re mourning all that we’ve lost, and that’s not serving us either.
Bruce Feiler: Well, I think that’s right, and that’s what’s great about what you’re doing on this podcast and in The Progress Network in general. It’s, what are we missing in the doom and gloom? And my joke about this is we’ve thrown out the baby shower with the bathwater. That’s my pun for it. But I think you’re exactly right.
So what is lost? To be very precise about it, what is lost is top-down, institutionally mandated, patriarchal, hierarchical, pre-scripted life rituals. No one wants those meaning-free gatherings where you have no say in it.
One of my favorite chapters in this book is, I went to Ireland. I went to 10 funerals in a week in Ireland. And the traditional Irish wake, where the ladies from the neighborhood show up and wash the body, and then it’s in repose, and then it exits, that’s not happening anymore. But nor is the traditional Irish Mass. So I went to 10 of these funerals. Half of them took place in churches, and the way that the Catholic Church ran the Mass for a long time is, it was not about the deceased. It was about the life of Jesus, and it was about honoring that, and there was no personalization. And people want the personalization. So the one I went to, the guy was a Liverpool football fan, right? So they had the scarf, they had the soccer ball. The family stood up and talked about his life, which had not been done for the traditional funeral for 2,000 years. The personalization. So that’s what people want: bottom-up, bespoke. Not only does the ritual need to be personalized — and you mentioned social media, by the way. People get these ideas from all over. That’s another thing about social media, is that people go — I was in Vegas. I went to six weddings in a day in Las Vegas, as you know. And the wedding designer I was talking to said she has a rule. If someone comes in and says, I want to do the sand ceremony thingy, she has a rule that if you say “thingy,” that means you saw it on the internet and we’re not doing it. So what’s a sand ceremony thingy? You and I are getting married. You have a vial of sand, I have a vial of sand. There’s a third empty vial.
Zachary Karabell: I thought you’d never ask.
Bruce Feiler: But we go back and forth and we make it. And I was in Chile, actually on my way to the Andes and then on my way to Easter Island, and I was at a big event sitting next to a guy who just got married and he said, yeah, of course we did a sand ceremony.
No one even knows where this came from, but people are seeing it on the internet, and young people especially want their rituals to pop on the internet so that their friends pay attention.
So even social media, with all its destructive forces and algorithmic division, also is serving to democratize these rituals as people suddenly have access to what others are doing far outside of their own tradition.
Zachary Karabell: We’re in peak social media dystopian view, and everybody you talk to, there are two conversations now, maybe there are three. There’s Trump, there’s social media and there’s AI, and they’re all bad. Meaning the conversations are all bad, no matter what you think about any of these things.
And in the social media one, we’re kind of losing the fact that there are all these things that people discover, and discover of community. There was that brief halcyon moment where social media was that thing that was going to bring communities of interest together.
Bruce Feiler: Yes, yes, yes.
Zachary Karabell: It was going to remove isolation.
Bruce Feiler: The teenage jugglers, which I was, in Savannah, Georgia. There were no jugglers in Savannah, Georgia. I could have found a community of jugglers as a kid if that had happened.
Let me just say two things about that. Thing number one is that all of those problems, ritual is the answer. If your problem is loneliness and isolation, ritual is the answer. If your problem is political division, ritual is the answer. If your problem is AI, ritual is the answer. Because it’s basically URL or IRL, and that to me is the tension. And what we’re seeing, what I say in every conversation I get into about AI, is that there is going to be a human response to it.
I was on TV recently and an interviewer said to me, oh, 5,000 people lost their jobs from AI last month, and there’s a Goldman report this week, as we tape this conversation, 30,000 people a month losing their jobs to AI or whatever.
In the 19th century, a third of Americans lost their jobs because of the Industrial Revolution. Twenty-five million people left rural areas and went to urban areas, and another 25 million came from Europe as immigrants.
And if you look at what we think of today as the institutional kinds of rituals, everything about a wedding was invented at the time. Queen Victoria wore the first white wedding dress. The registry came up with commercialization, the shower, the photo, all of that popped up. Whenever there is this kind of dislocation, there is a human response, and I think that what’s happening now is that human response.
So let’s just tell another example of a story that was fed by social media. So my book opens. I interviewed 100 ritual designers. The best single story is at the beginning of A Time To Gather. A woman named Missy Holliday, she’s in a small town in Ohio, father’s the mayor and fire chief, her mother teaches Presbyterian Sunday school, a service-oriented family. She grows up and gets married, moves to Indianapolis, becomes a nurse. She comes back on Super Bowl weekend, and her sister says she’s getting engaged the next week. Gets into a car, drives to work. It snowed the night before. She wraps her car around a tree.
So the family goes and rescues her to take her to the hospital. They come in and the next morning she’s had two brain death tests. She’s an organ donor. We’re taking her, goodbye. Wrenches the family apart. And this woman says, I don’t want this to happen to any other family. She quits her job. She joins the donor support network in Cincinnati, and she realizes there’s this tension between and among the families, the hospital and the donor organizations, and she said what they need is a ritual.
The organs are donated not in the room, but in the OR. It’s a surgery after they’re declared medically dead. So she puts the body in a gurney. They put her phone with a Spotify account, the first family picks “Annie’s Song.” They push the gurney into the hallway. The entire hospital staff, busy saving people who are sick to prevent them from dying, has stopped to honor this dead victim who is donating his organs. They stand there with flameless candles. They push the body down. Everybody pays tribute. They say goodbye at the operating room door. She calls this an honor walk, and she makes a rule. No one can have a picture. But she makes an exception with the widow of the deceased.
The next morning, Missy’s phone blows up. “How do I do an honor walk? How do I do this? How do I do that?” The woman took that picture, posted it on Facebook. It got two million likes.
There are now 50 donor support organizations in the country. They all do honor walks. Dozens of countries around the world. They have a quarter of a billion views on YouTube.
And it’s an example. This was a thing. The institutions never did this, religious institutions, civic institutions. This is an individual that says, here’s a pain point. I want to help solve it. Social media helped spread it. It brings comfort and connectedness in a horrific time for a family.
Zachary Karabell: Yeah, and that’s such an important point about social media. It’s an amplification tool.
Bruce Feiler: Yes.
Zachary Karabell: It can absolutely amplify all that is the worst and the ugliest and the most destructive, but it can amplify all that is the best and the most connective.
One of the things I’ve been noodling around with the past couple of years, somewhat to my surprise, is one of the reasons why I’m less pessimistic about the American and even the global present is because I’m much more negative about the past.
And by negative about the past, I mean I’m much more acutely aware of just how ugly the human legacy has been. Also how magnificent it’s been. But meaning, that gives less credence to the idea of — contra Dickens — we don’t live in the worst of all possible worlds. And we probably don’t live in the best of all possible worlds, but it might be the Sydney Carton, it’s the worst of times and best of times simultaneously.
But I wonder about this. You made a comment just before that there was a ritual framework that was patriarchal.
Bruce Feiler: Yes.
Zachary Karabell: It’s also true there was a ritual framework that was matriarchal. Young women becoming a woman, always within a female sphere.
Bruce Feiler: Birth happening at home. It then gets hospitalized. Now we sort of seem to be going back to hospitals being more humane. I like this train of thought, so keep going.
Zachary Karabell: But there was also a rigidity to that ritual. It wasn’t an opt-in, right? And if you tried to opt out, you did so at great personal peril. It was part of the lattice of things that at least a lot of contemporary society decided were doing harm to the human spirit and not enlivening it. So how does one distill out those factors?
Bruce Feiler: This is a great question, I think, and you framed it so very well. Let me work my way to answering that question by first giving some basic definitions of what we’re talking about here.
So what is a ritual? A ritual is a shared unnecessary act that makes us feel at home. It’s shared in the sense that it connects us. It’s unnecessary in the sense that you don’t have to get down on one knee to get engaged. You don’t have to wear black to mourn. But these are unnecessities that become social necessities because we’ve agreed on them. And it’s fundamentally an act. It’s a doing. It’s not a telling.
But the most important part — and in fact, what I’m adding to this definition — is, go back to the homesickness. I felt homesick in my own home. It restores a sense of home when we feel that we have lost it. The reason that’s relevant to what you said is that a lot of the rituals that the institutions did not observe were ones that did not fit the institutional narrative. I call them the shadow rituals. Not just marriage, but divorce.
My wife Linda, whom you know, her favorite chapter in this is the Taylor Swift divorce party. So there’s a woman who grew up, both of her parents got divorced. She’s like, I’m not going to get divorced. She got married, had two kids. You can imagine where this story goes. She gets divorced on Long Island, and what did she do? Her husband moves out, takes half the stuff. She takes the rest of the stuff, puts it in the middle of the living room and on the dining room table. Her sisters come over, they donate everything. She comes home, and she says — this is the moment — You know what I need right now? I need a registry. So she forms the world’s first divorce registry.
“I need the help now.” What does she do? She goes online. Actually, what happens is she goes into AOL chat rooms.
Zachary Karabell: Kids, there was a thing called AOL chat rooms.
Bruce Feiler: So she goes onto AOL chat rooms and starts saying, my husband’s doing this. Is this normal? My husband’s doing that. Is that normal?
And the women say, no, that’s not normal. My husband’s doing that. And then older women got on and started saying, you know what? My husband was doing that, and I lived with it for a long time, and you don’t have to be unhappy. So there is community forming exactly at the moment you feel most isolated.
So she starts this registry, it takes off, and then she realizes that’s not enough. She needs to de-stigmatize the divorce. So she says, who’s the queen of breakups? Taylor Swift. So she writes a blog post about a Taylor Swift divorce party with “Shake It Off” cupcakes and “we are never, ever, ever getting back together” — I’m not looking at you as an expert in Taylor Swift lyrics — and the whole thing goes crazy viral.
My favorite chapter perhaps, is late in the book. It’s called “The Garden of Lost Children,” and it’s about something that organized religion — let’s remind, organized religion comes very late in the history of ritual gathering. We have ritual for 300,000 years. We have organized religion for 2,500 years. And so it basically takes it over in an incredible coup, expands it. Five of the seven sacraments are about rituals. This ritual calendar gets introduced by these organized religions of all varieties. But they didn’t celebrate divorce. Maimonides, the greatest Jewish thinker, if a child dies within 31 days of being born, it’s as if the child never lived. No funeral. St. Augustine, Catholic law until the late 20th century: if you were not baptized, then you could not be buried in a Catholic cemetery. So bereft fathers, after their wives give birth to a stillborn child, would carry that child to the end of the town and bury them in homemade graves, often underneath abandoned churches in what were called eavesdrop funerals because the water would come down and they would hope it would baptize their child. And the entire town would follow them. There have been scores of these found across Ireland called cillíní. And they are examples that humans were reacting to the experience, even though their institutions did not honor it.
And now what we do, now that being in an institution is no longer mandatory, millennials and Gen Z are saying, I’m having a double mastectomy. My institution doesn’t have one. I talked to the first woman who entered a Jewish cemetery, who wrote the Jewish ritual around miscarriage or stillbirth. So basically everyday people are saying, I’ve got a pain. I need it now. I’m going to do it, and I don’t need your validation, my parents, my grandparents, my neighbors, my institutions. I want it now. And that’s the great opportunity of this renaissance of ritual around the world.
Zachary Karabell: Yeah. And I always feel like that’s the challenge when one legitimately nostalgizes something, the awareness of, there was a time when, there was a time when we celebrated communally. There was a time when local communities, by dint of just the human existence, were in touch with the cadences of nature. And so you celebrated the harvest, and you celebrated the planting, and you celebrated the change of seasons. You celebrated life. You celebrated death. You did so both within an institutional framework and a pre-institutional framework, because the origin of a lot of those rituals is the natural world and being in the midst of it.
And yet if you were in a 1950s American idyll, the Leave It to Beaver town that we all romanticize, that was great as long as you weren’t gay, as long as you weren’t a woman advocating for working outside the home, as long as you were not an African American, as long as you weren’t a Native American. The list of exclusionary “as long as you weren’t” was long.
And while I am not saying this as a way of denigrating the beauty of the human spirit that was engendered by a lot of this, and again, go around the world and pick your correlate, right? Hindu caste systems that were rigid, and still are to some degree. But you can’t just go, I wish we had that, without recognizing that that came with a set of baggage.
Bruce Feiler: My favorite story that exemplifies the point you just made is the story of jumping the broom. So jumping the broom: There were examples even in the ancient world of poets talking about jumping a broom being a symbol of marriage. But jumping the broom becomes a popular way of marking marriages essentially in the British Isles in the early modern period. And it was specifically designed for people who were unchurched, non-legal, non-normative in some way. And jumping the broom goes essentially from poor whites in the British Isles in the 19th century, jumps the Atlantic, and enters the world of enslaved Africans in the antebellum period before the Civil War.
So again, unchurched. They’re not legally allowed to marry, but they want to marry. And half of weddings of enslaved people in the 19th century were marked by jumping the broom. This is from a scholar who went back and looked at all of these diaries of enslaved people.
After the war, it becomes less popular. First of all, in Reconstruction, if that was the way you had marked your marriage by jumping the broom, then you were not allowed to have inheritance, or a pension if you had been in the military. So the formerly enslaved rushed to have traditional legal weddings, or church weddings if they were Christian. So jumping the broom fades from history.
Until in 1976, Alex Haley, in Roots, which spends an entire year on the New York Times bestseller list, he wins a Pulitzer Prize, and it becomes a TV series filmed in my hometown. I went to see the place where they sold Kunta Kinte into slavery. We skipped school to go in Savannah, Georgia. So it goes on the air. Eighty-five percent of households watch Roots, the biggest TV show before or since.
In episode 2, Kunta and Bell jump the broom, igniting a tradition of the idea that enslaved Africans invented this. Well, we now know they didn’t invent it, but it becomes popular. And there’s a woman who watches that as a teenager. She grows up, marries a photographer in North Carolina. They have a child. She has an accident. She has a Marcus Welby moment where the doctor comes in and says, we can’t do surgery on you, you are pregnant. So she can’t have the surgery. She’s lying in bed. She remembers watching episode 2 of Roots. She writes a small book, a 60-page self-published book called Jumping the Broom.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch — I’m telling this story because you’re such a media geek — it gets picked up by The Wall Street Journal, the AP, and USA Today. And she says, I know exactly what’s going to happen. I am going to be inundated by Black couples who want to jump the broom. But that’s not what happens.
The first call she ever got? A gay couple in Florida who liked the idea of a ritual for people who were not legally accepted at the time. Interracial couples. Intergenerational couples. So eventually the Black couples call, but jumping the broom suddenly, Oprah does it, The New York Times writes an article, there’s movies about it, plays about it. It becomes a symbol of weddings for people who were outside the system. It’s everything you were talking about, and now you can buy $200 heritage brooms. The whole thing.
And the reason it’s great to be a writer and stumble on these people and that they share their stories with me, she tells me that the child that she was pregnant with, she says to me, he’s... and then she kind of mumbles it. And I’m like, I didn’t hear you. She says, he’s gay. And I’m like, of course he is. That’s how the universe works. And now he’s a dancer and he performs jumping the broom.
It’s an example of these stories. There is no pure ritual. They change with the times, and now that we can design them from the bottom up, it gives us all permission to do that.
Zachary Karabell: Yeah, and it’s amazing how quickly human beings create these rituals that then become kind of reified as if they always were.
Bruce Feiler: Yes.
Zachary Karabell: And then you forget. It’s so beautiful, the weaving of the history into that story, none of which is evident for the people performing the ritual today.
And the ahistorical nature of a lot of this, and the ease with which, particularly in the social media age where everything is moving so quickly, where something evolves, becomes a thing, and then suddenly it’s just a thing.
Bruce Feiler: Yes.
Zachary Karabell: It’s a thing you do. Well, I don’t know why we do it. We do it because we do it, because it makes us feel good. It makes us feel connected. It’s something we can collectively share. And in many ways we’re in this golden age of ritual creation, which I really got from your book. There’s this efflorescence of human beings just creating ritual, ritual, ritual, left, right, and center. And all you need, it’s like the Jewish thing, you basically just need a minyan for a ritual. You don’t need that many people to invent your ritual, celebrate your ritual, have your ritual, pass down your ritual, create a family one.
I feel like I didn’t do a good enough job creating ritual in a conscious way in a familial context, but I’m always very impressed with people who do so with the kind of discipline behind it. You need to repeat it. There’s a repetitiveness —
Bruce Feiler: Not necessarily. I would challenge that. A wedding, a funeral, they’re not going to repeat that. So I don’t think — there is a view about that. Look, I’ll make it easy. There are five things you need for a successful ritual.
Number one, you need a boundary. You need to create some sort of circle or sacred space. Outside we were that, inside we were this. Could be a candle, could be a room, could be a circle. Circuses have circles and trials have courtrooms and walls, trees, whatever. So you need a sacred space.
The second thing you need is stakes. We are here because someone’s welcoming in. We’re here because someone has died.
Zachary Karabell: Oh, I thought you meant actual —
Bruce Feiler: No. Well, steaks could be the first one, but you do not need red meat. And by the way, one of the problems people have with rituals is they don’t want to do the dishes. So maybe not having that would be helpful. But you need some sort of skin in the game, I call it. I went to this adolescent tooth-filing, where they file your teeth down in Bali. So you need some sort of sense of importance. It matters.
Number three, you need compromise. Back to the wedding. You and I are going to get married. Your want a big wedding, I want a small wedding. You want steak, and I want vegetables.
Zachary Karabell: I said we weren’t going to talk about this here.
Bruce Feiler: Yeah, okay. But the point is, that’s one of the reasons that people don’t want it. There is conflict. You believe in God, I don’t believe in God. All these things. But that’s the purpose of it, is to titrate the conflict. Because if we don’t do it when we get married, are we going to have kids? Are we not going to have kids? Who’s going to work? Who’s not going to work? Who’s going to do the dishes and who’s going to go do the shopping? So it’s a way to practice it. You need boundaries, you need stakes, you need compromise, you need empathy. You’re going through a difficult time or a joyful time, you want to share it with people.
And the last thing you need is a sense of hope. It’s a kind of utopian thing. This is the world as we want it to be. In psychology they talk about your best possible self. This is our best possible selves.
And this just happened to me. I think you know this, but if not, I’ll tell you. I just lost my sister-in-law after 10 months with leukemia 10 days ago, as we sit and have this conversation. I was told that Laura was going into hospice. Everyone’s coming to Atlanta to say goodbye. By the time I get there the next day, she had deceased. She had a brother coming from overseas, people were gathering from across the country. It was to say goodbye, and suddenly now we are in this moment.
Day 1, we kind of walk around. The body is taken to be cremated. We hug, we laugh, we cry, we eat. The next day my brother says, I think we should sit around and share memories of Laura. And I said, you know what? If we’re going to do this, let’s make a ritual. Let’s open the circle. We gathered in something approximating a circle. Their first piece of artwork was a piece of ceramics with a candle. So he lit the candle, told the story of the artwork, then everybody went around and shared. That’s the empathy part. We create the boundary. There’s the empathy. We figured out who wanted to speak or didn’t want to speak. That was the sort of figuring that out. And then we need to close the circle.
Laura had read my brother a rendition of The Owl and the Pussy-Cat from an antique version. So he pulled out the book. I read the inscription to him. I read it, and then I honored my sister-in-law and blew out the candle. People collapsed into one another’s arms. They were so grateful for it. And I talked to this designer who said, in these moments of change, we are borderless. We are liquid. We have no structure. You’re kind of wandering. You and I have been through a lot of difficult life circumstances together, had cancer and things like this. You’re drifting, and it creates a kind of vessel to hold the emotions.
A death doula said to me, trauma is when things happen too fast, too quickly, that you can’t process it. You know intellectually, but you haven’t embodied it. And what the ritual does is allow us to embody it, which helps us to go through it.
Zachary Karabell: I mean, it’s interesting. Talk for a minute about that in terms of, you know, your writing changed a lot, I think, in your life.
Bruce Feiler: Yes.
Zachary Karabell: And you’ve written a lot about your year-plus of cancer, and you really touchingly created this — for those who don’t know, Bruce wrote a book called The Council of Dads, where he wanted to make sure that your young children had father figures around them, and if it wasn’t going to be you, you were going to disperse it to a close circle of people.
I was not one of them, just so we’re clear. We were in a less intense phase of our long relationship. I’ve never really forgiven Bruce for that, but —
Bruce Feiler: As my wife likes to say, I like this idea, but she started rejecting my nominees. She would say, I like that person, but I would never ask him for advice.
Zachary Karabell: So nix on that one. So anyway, to be continued off camera. But you went from — there was a lighter quality to your books.
Bruce Feiler: Yeah.
Zachary Karabell: And I don’t mean that in a negative sense.
Bruce Feiler: I was a circus clown.
Zachary Karabell: Yeah. But you went around the world. You observed cultures. You wrote about it with a kind of hawk eye, but a detachment from. And your books since then, for the most part, have been much more about grappling with the process of being alive. I’ll just kind of use that as a general thing. And you wrote about transitions, from job transitions, you wrote about more global individual transitions, or things that happened in your book on “lifequakes” and then this book.
I’m assuming there was conscious intent behind that, but do you ever reflect on, not just the before-and-after tree of what you went through, but how it redirected you as a writer?
Bruce Feiler: I have a Substack, as you know, called “The Nonlinear Life,” and I was writing the story of my brother and his now-deceased wife, and I called him and said, I just want to give you a heads up. I’m writing about this, and I want to make sure you’re okay about that. And he said, yeah, I always say that some families have secrets and our family has you, and you tell the secrets.
I mentioned in joking that I was a circus clown. I did write a book called Under the Big Top about my year in the circus in my 20s. What I have found in my life — there was a moment where I, as a circus clown, collided with an older gentleman who was stilt-walking, and he fell from his stilts, and I had a slight injury. It was a horrifying experience, and my initial instinct was, don’t write about this because it’s too painful.
And in every moment in my life when something has happened to me that I’ve been ashamed to tell or afraid or worried what people would think about me, running into the fire has been the most meaningful thing for me.
There’s a story in this book. My book Life Is in the Transitions opens with the line: “I used to have a saying in my life that phone calls don’t change your life until I got a phone call that did.”
It was from my mother saying, your father’s trying to kill himself. My father had never been depressed a minute in his life until he got Parkinson’s, until he got depressed, and he tried to take his own life six times in 12 weeks. And it was that impulse that he’d lost control of his life story. And I didn’t want to tell this story. I was too ashamed and too afraid. And when I did, it turned out that everybody else had these moments when this happened to them. And that propelled me into this work I’ve done of collecting and analyzing 500 life stories of everyday Americans.
So when my father died eight years later, after I’d sent him an email every Monday morning for eight years to tell a story in his life until he finished a 65,000-word memoir weeks before he died, I flew back home to Savannah. We were going to bury my father in famed Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah, Georgia, kind of a classic expression of the rural cemetery movement in the 19th century, when they made cemeteries beautiful, took them away from churches, out into parks where people would go and picnic.
And we were in a conversation with the rabbi about how to run the funeral. And my mother says, my mother deep into her 80s at this point, she doesn’t like throwing dirt on the coffin. She finds it barbaric. So my mother says she wants yellow long-stemmed roses.
My sister says, that’s too Hallmark. The dirt’s the best part of the funeral to me. I want that, and I don’t like the roses. So they’re kind of going back and forth. And so I’m like, rabbi, I’ll call you back. And I then proceeded to middle-child my way through a compromise, because as I said, rituals are about compromise rehearsal.
I was like, okay, Mom, what are you after? And Kat, my sister, what are you after? Can we come up with a compromise? And so what we did was — I was like, she lived with the guy for 62 years. If she wants yellow stem roses, I’m not going to tell my mother no. So we got two dozen long-stem yellow roses. We didn’t do dirt. My dad loved to walk on the beach. Tybee Island, Georgia — one of my girls is named Tybee. We got little bags of Tybee Island sand, and we gave people the choice.
And by being personal in telling this story, first of all, I’m saying, I’m not wagging my finger and telling you what to do. I’m saying, I’m like you. I’m struggling. But this is how we work.
A year later, I was in Ireland. I took an Uber to a funeral in a church with the head of the Irish Funeral Directors Association. And in the end she says, how are you going to get to the cemetery? And I’m like, I don’t know. She’s like, ride with me. And I, not thinking, said yes, at which point she opened the door of the hearse, popped up the jumper seat, and I rode to the cemetery next to the reposed life of Marjorie Burke.
And when we got there, there was a short service. In Ireland they bury people in the same graves for space and cost reasons, so they don’t use coffins or caskets with steel as we do here, because it won’t disintegrate quickly enough. They lowered the body into the arms of her husband, the only man she ever danced with, as the daughter said, and everybody got a long-stem yellow rose and threw it in.
And I’m sitting there and I’m bawling, because I’m at every funeral I’ve ever been to and every wedding I’ve ever been to, and it was a reminder that these are universal experiences, that it’s the oldest human algorithm.
Zachary Karabell: So I want to go from sublime to mundane for a minute. Maybe not mundane, but there’s one aspect of the book that is very Mary Roach-esque, and it’s all about the body modification part of ritual. You alluded to one of them earlier with the teeth filing in Indonesia, where I think all of us — my reaction the minute I hear the words “teeth filing” is to viscerally cringe at the sense-thought of that pain. But talk a little bit about that as an aspect of ritual that we don’t, at least in American society, easily embrace. Pain as a ritual, and permanent body marking as ritual. Now yes, there’s a whole world of tattooing in the United States.
Bruce Feiler: Losing your tooth and bringing in the tooth fairy, that’s a ritual of coming of age around teeth. Putting braces around adolescence.
Zachary Karabell: Well, you lose a tooth whether you want to or not. It’s not an inflicted ritual.
Bruce Feiler: Okay. Justin Bieber wearing $25,000 grills to his wedding to Hailey Bieber, decorating your teeth gold.
Zachary Karabell: I’m glad — it’s good you knew that little piece of pop culture there.
Bruce Feiler: So I thought, yeah, we all do this around teeth. We’ll do this around our body. Tattooing, henna — you’d be surprised. Because we sacralize the things that are most intimate to being alive. Breathing, seeing, sex, defecation, giving birth, the body.
I talked to a woman who is a professor at Vanderbilt who talks about rituals among the disabled community. Getting her first wheelchair. Living independently for the first time. Being fitted for a new walker. Things that we might not think are moments of transition that they want to mark collectively.
I have friends who have used doulas for losing a job, for getting fired, for shutting down a company, for moving. Whatever moment of transition it’s in, whether it’s bodily, whether it’s emotional, whether it’s work, whether it’s familial, these are the moments where we feel most alone and scared and afraid. Because another new thing that’s in my writing that wasn’t in the past is digging into the social science. And what the science shows us is that rituals regulate our emotions. They synchronize our heartbeats. We breathe together. We walk at the same pace or we sweat at the same velocity. And so what these rituals do is connect us biologically, emotionally, and all that helps us feel more connected.
Zachary Karabell: So is there a difference between ritual and ceremony, or are they —
Bruce Feiler: Here’s how I would put it. When I got into this, I was obsessed with these questions. There are different types of rituals. There are civic rituals like coronations and inaugurations. There are calendric rituals, as you said — the harvest, the maypole, midsummer. There are daily rituals like handshaking and bowing and namaste. And then there are these, what I call life rituals, which are these moments. And then what’s the difference between a tradition and a ritual and a habit?
I can geek out on all of that, but where I’ve ended up — and maybe the biggest change I went through while working on A Time To Gather — is the enemy’s in our pockets. The enemy is coming at us all the time very quickly.
They did these studies where they would set up accounts as teen boys, and within eight minutes they’re getting stereotypes, and within 13 minutes they’re being fed misogyny, and within an hour they’re being bombarded. We have to switch from, we do rituals four times a year or five times a year, whatever Arnold van Gennep said 120 years ago when he invented rites of passage. We need to move from rites of passage to bites of passage, and we need to move to this idea that we need a ritual state of mind.
And you and I both have young adult kids. They’re home. When we’re home, we need to jump at it. We can’t say, sorry, we can’t do this until you find a spouse. We need to do them whenever, wherever, because the algorithms are coming at us. Ritual is the oldest human algorithm. At this point, it’s the only thing, what did I say? “How ritual created the world and how it can save us.” It’s the only thing that’s going to hold us together.
Zachary Karabell: And on that question — held together or coming apart —
Bruce Feiler: Yes.
Zachary Karabell: I started with a softball question. I’ll end with a softball question. Are you more acutely aware of the coming together, or are you more acutely affected by the coming apart, when you travel to multiple countries, different societies, obviously the United States included?
Bruce Feiler: You used the word “green shoots,” and I think that’s right. I think there are three ways of looking at this story.
There’s either the celebration recession is real, and the coming apart cannot be stopped, and this is just a sidebar. That’s one response.
The other response, to use the language of worlds that you’ve traveled in, is that this ritual renaissance is a dead cat bounce, which is the Wall Street term for something that’s basically collapsing. There’s a bit of a blip up, but it’s going to continue to go down.
Or it’s that the ritual renaissance is the story, that these are green shoots.
So what do I believe? I believe it is real, what’s happening. It’s happening among men. It’s happening among women. It’s happening among old people. It’s one of the few things that bridges the religious, the nonreligious, and the I’m not spiritual, but I’m religious crowd.
I spent a lot of time in organized religion. I wrote five books about religion and contemporary religion and spirituality. The smartest people I know who are in that world are ritual entrepreneurs. And it’s old and young, so it bridges everybody. At the same time, it’s green shoots, and we get to decide. I believe that what I see among millennials and young people, the return to online dating, the going to bars to have lectures, going on retreats, everywhere, I see it. So I think the green shoots are becoming greener, and they’re becoming taller. But ultimately, I think we have a choice.
The greatest spiritual leaders, you’ve written a lot about religion. It’s one of the things that we both share. Jesus, Muhammad, Moses, you’ve got a choice, life or death, whatever. We have a choice. It’s virtual or it’s ritual. It’s URL or IRL. And I think if we want to preserve human relationships, choose ritual. It’s the way home.
We get to decide if we water these green shoots, and I feel more confident than ever that it will happen, but the choice is still up to us.
Zachary Karabell: I want to thank you for all of that — the book, your life, your wisdom, your lack of wisdom, your willingness to learn.
I think this question, which we’re just going to keep coming back to, I’m going to keep coming back to, Bruce I’m sure will keep coming back to in his writing — what is the elemental power of the human spirit in a world of noise that amplifies a perception of chaos, juxtaposed to the incredible human need to create some degree of order? Which was true 300,000 years ago. David Deutsch made this comment about the nature of human beings in a state of nature, and that the natural world was profoundly threatening to human life. So it’s not as if Mother Nature kind of embraced humans and now we have a modern world that threatens us. Humans have been striving for creating zones of connection and safety in a world that has felt profoundly threatening. The nature of those threats has changed. It used to be disease, it used to be the elements. Now it’s much more likely to be other humans, or the things that we’re doing to the environment. But the reality of threat remains. The nature of the threats has changed.
And our need to create “us” in the face of that remains really palpable, and has then developed this other dimension as we talked about in terms of social media.
But I think the thing that people can really learn from what you’re providing is that that need is as powerful as ever, and as evident as ever, even if it doesn’t look yet like what we think it looks like, because we’re living in a present of creation.
We can look back at the past as static. We don’t know what our present will create as future stasis. And it’ll be fascinating to look back 100 years from now and read the book and see which of the things that you discern now became rituals across generations, because some of them will.
Bruce Feiler: Yes, absolutely.
Zachary Karabell: And I think that too, just remember that we are in this constant process of creation and destruction, and indeed these rituals celebrate both. So I’m just going to leave it at that.
I want to thank Kaleidoscope for producing. I want to thank my team at The Progress Network for facilitating. I want to thank all of you for listening and watching and being and participating.
Please send us your thoughts. Send Bruce your thoughts. We’re both easily reachable throughout the airwaves, the internet waves, the URL, less in IRL, but we’ll leave that for another time.
And I hope to have you back next week. I obviously value the time. It’s all precious time for each one of us, so the fact that you’re using it for this is a privilege and an honor. So thanks so much.
What Could Go Right? is produced by The Progress Network and Kaleidoscope.
Follow us on X, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok: @progressntwrk