Catching moonbeams in a jar

"I did, you know, I did see man kel-ly closs in palking lot and I wondel, why would man kel-ly clos in palking lot?" ("I did, you know, I did see a man carry cross in parking lot and I wondered, why would man carry cross in parking lot?") Siriphong, a Thai ornithologist (scientist who studies birds), was twiddling over some small loose branches as he told me this as we sat on the stairs near a fountain in a campus in Bangkok. I asked him if anybody else saw the cross-carrying man that he did, and he said "no." But he said that scene in that parking lot changed the way he viewed and lived his own life. I had been talking to Siriphong for a few days before he shared that "experience" with me and I had no reason to suspect that he was clinically caged in hallucinations of having encounters with the divine. So I respected his encounter with his own meaning and since he seemed to be really happy with the change, I felt happy for him.

When my grandma died many years ago, my only brother who was the oldest male among the grandchildren, had to kneel at the head of a procession, before the cemetery’s gate, with all the other grandkids, including me, behind him, as he held one end of a long black veil which marked our mourning. We all marched from there. That was the first elaborate death ritual for a loved one I had ever been part of that closely. I remember my brother kneeling dutifully and softly crying. He was still a pre-med college student then but took care of my grandma in the hospital and insisted to the hospital staff that when my grandma’s body had to be turned over to every stage that led to the morgue and the funeral parlor, that he be there to make sure that our Lola Abua was most lovingly carried to her rest.

In a subtropical forest a couple of years back, my two close friends and I were asked to join in a tribal dance around a bonfire. I did not know how but when I saw one of the sherpas, who was usually so tame and quiet, dancing to his heart’s delight as if he was having a most intimate celebration of his sense of being home, I wanted to enter the experience he was in, to have even a hint of that kind of "belonging" he was feeling there in the altitudes of Nepal. The dance ritual was a good door to enter into that experience.

Why do we have rituals? Do other animals have them? Some evolutionary scientists like neuroscientist Steven Pinker, in his book How the Mind Works, are also nonplussed as to why we engage in rituals that do not seem to make sense, that is, they do not help us physically cope with the social and material problems of life. But he also goes on to say that the human condition is peculiar in that we consider things whose answers are beyond the realm of what our limited human minds can conceive and understand. So, he says, we then give birth to rituals. Anthropologists like Dr. Pascal Boyer who wrote a book called "Religion Explained" tells us that rituals, particularly involving religions, any kind, are not all simply instances demonstrating "the sleep of reason" period, end of debate. Like Pinker, he thinks that people are aware that what they believe in as faith defies the very physical laws that they also abide by and trust while they live. But both Boyer and Pascal think that these people do not necessarily see a crack in the core of their character or even intelligence to accommodate both. In other words, they acknowledge that in some deep unknown in the mystery of being human, we quest for meaning that the reach of reason cannot solely satisfy but that gaping hole for meaning needs to be filled and rituals are the best things we have come up with so far.

Animals seem to engage in elaborate rituals, but scientists almost always discover them to be related to their survival and their ability to produce through generations. We seem to be the only animals who pass on not only our genes but the meanings that we attach to the seasons and objects that our generation found ourselves in. We also write about what gives us meaning and this is the truth behind the books of many religions. It is also what drives "common questers" like the personal diaries of people like Anne Frank, and now in this electronic age, the blogs of those who want to reach out beyond their own private questioning, so they can join this community of questing minds through the entire history of human civilization, grasping at meaning.

The only way we can find meaning is to be startled by a pattern that we can resonate with. This is how rituals serve us. They "reorganize" ordinary events like walking, keeping still, singing tunes, into some pattern that excites us because it hints on the things that there are no easy answers for – like why are we here and why do we die. This recognition of pattern is a moment of passion that drives centers for reason and emotion to just sort of collapse in on themselves to render you face to face (or if you will, neuron to neuron) with the limits of your own understanding. In Diane Akerman’s Alchemy of Mind, she cites the work of the late DNA Nobelet Francis Crick who describes how electro-chemical passion looks like in those microscopic vessels and messengers of object and the meaning we find in them – our neurons: "When nothing much is happening, a neuron sends slow irregular spikes down its axon at a background rate of 1 and 5 hertz" but as it gets even more excited, it can fire as fast as 5-100 hertz. Such is the measure of passion in hertz – passion that accompanies your own recognition of a cadence and puzzle-fit sense that gives your life, or even a moment of it, some meaning that makes you feel like a bundle of light just crept up within you and you feel, even for that short instance, that your life is worthwhile.

Without rituals, every person who dies, regardless of who they are and whom they have touched, will be faceless to all of us. Without rituals, a cup of coffee done in the same process by the Starbucks fellow behind the counter will be the same as the one prepared by your loved one every morning. Without rituals and only armed with pure logic, we will probably all just kill ourselves, frustrated at the senselessness of it all – bad things happening to good people, children dying before really experiencing life, etc. We need rituals also to inspire our otherwise banal lives. All the social scientists and economists can theorize all they want about why injustice happens but they will not take the peculiar place that rituals serve in the human mind. But rituals have to be constantly meaningful to those who take part in them. As soon as a ritual ceases to do so, especially for those who are already forced to take part in it, such as the female mutilations that are still prevalent in some parts of Africa, then they lose their value and transform into an oppressive veil, embroidered with empty acts.

Without rituals, some people feel they will sway directionless without moral anchor. This may not be logical because one can do good without anchors in rituals, BUT those who feel that way about moral anchors are not insane because that is how they feel and no one has the right to tell someone how they feel. Personal sentiment is a personal map within which only the involved sentient can navigate. What I find unkind and arrogant is when this personal navigation goes out and forces others who are each involved in their own personal quest for meaning, to follow this same map he or she has chosen. A monopoly of truth is a most dangerous thing.

So in this season of rituals, of passionately elevating otherwise ordinary walks, wishes, and reunions, into processions, prayers and an embrace of kindred human spirits, I hope you all find a glimpse of that richness in meaning, in a meld of emotion and reason, that all humans, starting from the first human who looked up at the endless night sky and wondered about the meaning of it all, has done, to try to catch it like he could, as he would a moonbeam in a jar.

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