The Power of Ritual

When was the last time you paused to experience something as truly sacred? In a culture of nonstop notifications, endless productivity, and chronic loneliness, many of us long for a sense of purpose and connection yet struggle to find it in traditional religion. In The Power of Ritual, Casper ter Kuile offers a transformative reframe: our daily habits—reading, walking, eating, resting—can become pathways to meaning when we infuse them with intention and attention. The challenge, he says, isn’t that we’re unspiritual. It’s that we’ve forgotten how to notice the sacred already surrounding us.

Ter Kuile, a Ministry Innovation Fellow at Harvard Divinity School and cohost of Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, invites readers to embrace a new kind of spirituality: one that honors ancient wisdom while blossoming in modern, secular life. Rather than attend church, you might gather around a dinner table or a podcast. Instead of formal prayers, you may find transcendence in music, sport, or literature. The essence isn’t belief, but practice—what he calls the art of ritualizing the ordinary.

A Changing Spiritual Landscape

Ter Kuile begins by describing a dramatic cultural shift: the rise of the “nones”—people who identify with no formal religion. He cites data showing that nearly a quarter of Americans now place themselves outside traditional affiliations. Yet spiritual hunger hasn’t vanished; it’s simply migrating. Communities like CrossFit, SoulCycle, or mindful maker-spaces recreate the fellowship, discipline, and transcendence that once thrived in churches and temples. Ter Kuile’s research with Angie Thurston (in their landmark study How We Gather) revealed that these environments mirror religious communities in offering belonging, transformation, moral purpose, and care.

But what’s missing in many of these modern collectives is the deep wisdom of ritual—the capacity to structure experience so that meaning becomes visible. “Just because we’ve left church doesn’t mean we’ve left our need for sanctity behind,” he writes. The book is his guide for unbundling traditional ritual forms (like sabbath or sacred reading) and remaking them for today’s lives.

Four Levels of Connection

To ground this practice, Ter Kuile proposes four interlocking levels of connection that together form a “latticework of meaning”:

• Connection with Self – cultivating authentic selfhood through reflection, reading, and rest.
• Connection with Others – creating community through shared rituals of food, body, and vulnerability.
• Connection with Nature – reawakening our sense of place and belonging to the earth.
• Connection with the Transcendent – accessing awe and mystery through prayerful attention and creativity.

Each chapter pairs ancient practice with a modern expression: sacred reading meets Harry Potter; sabbath reappears as a tech-free weekend; pilgrimage becomes a mindful hike. Through story and scholarship, he demonstrates how these rituals offer antidotes to alienation and a framework for joy.

Rethinking the Sacred

For Ter Kuile, the sacred isn’t confined to temples or doctrines. Drawing from sociologist Émile Durkheim, he challenges the sacred/profane divide, insisting that sacredness is not a category but a verb—something we do. When we treat an activity as sacred, we lift it out of routine through intention, attention, and repetition. This echoes the wisdom of Buddhist mindfulness and Quaker stillness: meaning arises not from belief but from presence.

He encourages readers to use three core elements to transform ordinary acts into rituals: an intention (why you do it), attention (how you focus), and repetition (how you sustain it). A morning coffee shared with gratitude or a weekly walk could become as spiritually potent as formal worship. As author Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it’s a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.”

Why This Matters Now

The power of ritual, Ter Kuile argues, is not nostalgia for religion’s past but a humane response to today’s epidemic of isolation, burnout, and disembodiment. He cites research showing that loneliness harms health as much as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day and that young adults increasingly crave community yet distrust institutions. Ritual offers a grammar for belonging—a way to “make visible our invisible connections.” Through shared meals, intentional pauses, pilgrim walks, and sacred texts, he envisions a culture where meaning-making becomes a collective act again. This is not about believing something new—it’s about remembering what we are already part of. As the book’s final chapter declares, “Connection isn’t something to build; it’s something to remember.”

In a world that keeps us busy, loud, and distracted, reconnecting to yourself can feel impossible. Ter Kuile calls this the first and foundational layer of connection: not self-improvement, but self-integration. True spirituality begins, he says, when you stop performing and start noticing who you already are. Chapter 1, “Connecting with Self,” explores two ancient practices made secular and personal: sacred reading and sabbath rest.

Sacred Reading: Finding Yourself in Fiction

After a near-fatal accident left Ter Kuile immobilized in his early twenties, he learned that reflection could heal what achievement could not. Years later, at Harvard Divinity School, he and Vanessa Zoltan began reading Harry Potter “as a sacred text”—a practice that blossomed into the worldwide podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text. Sacred reading, he explains, is not about treating novels as scripture, but about reading with reverence: letting the text change you. The Bible, Torah, or Qur’an all became sacred because communities returned to them again and again, discussing how their lives mirrored those stories. The same can happen today with any beloved book, poem, or film.

To practice sacred reading, he adapts the 12th-century monastic method lectio divina—reading (understanding the literal plot), meditating (making associations), praying (connecting to personal experience), and contemplating (asking for transformation). For example, the opening line of Harry Potter—“Mr. and Mrs. Dursley were proud to say that they were perfectly normal”—becomes a meditation on our own masks and judgments. Through imagination, empathy, and reflection, you learn not just literature but yourself. (This echoes Parker Palmer’s idea of “rejoining soul and role,” healing the split between who we are and how we act.)

Sabbath: Rest as Radical Resistance

The second practice, sabbath, is about reclaiming presence by ceasing production. Inspired by Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel’s classic The Sabbath, Ter Kuile introduces the “tech sabbath”: one day a week with no screens, no email, no productivity—only being. Lighting a candle on Friday night, he quietly welcomes this palace in time. At first, he feels withdrawal, then clarity: his breath deepens, his inner noise quiets. In hesitating less and feeling more, he realizes rest is not a pause from life but the height of life.

Through research and humor, he illustrates sabbath’s modern variations: solo sabbaths for reflection, tech-sabbaths for focus, and creative sabbaths for play. The “Nap Ministry” founder Tricia Hersey calls rest “a form of resistance” against capitalism’s demand for constant output. Ter Kuile agrees: stopping isn’t laziness—it’s liberation. In sabbath time, you remember that your worth is not in your work.

Whether you’re reading a favorite novel or lying quietly under a tree, these rituals ground you in self-awareness. Spiritual connection starts not by climbing higher but by sinking deeper—into the truth that, as Ter Kuile writes, “we are already profoundly good enough.”

If connecting to yourself is about authenticity, connecting to others is about vulnerability. The second layer, explored in Chapter 2, draws on ritualized eating and embodied movement as timeless means of community. From ancient temples to modern fitness studios, Ter Kuile shows how shared meals and synchronized motion bind people together.

Eating Together: From Communion to the Dinner Party

The simple act of eating together, he argues, may be the oldest human ritual. Whether it’s the Christian Eucharist, the Jewish Shabbat meal, or a backyard potluck, breaking bread transforms strangers into kin. Ter Kuile tells the story of Lennon Flowers, who founded The Dinner Party, a network that brings young adults together to share grief and memory over home-cooked meals. Like communion without clergy, these gatherings turn loss into connection. “No topic is off the table,” Lennon says. In that openness, participants rediscover belonging.

He invites you to reclaim mealtime as sacred space through small rituals: a blessing, a candle, a simple toast—“It’s good to be together.” A short pause before eating re-centers attention on gratitude and interdependence. Sociologist Clifford Geertz once said that ritual makes the world as lived and the world as imagined “the same world.” Every meal can do that, reminding us that being alive—sharing nourishment—is enough.

Moving Together: The Spirituality of Sweat

Ter Kuile also explores how today’s fitness communities echo religion. CrossFit “boxes,” SoulCycle classes, and Tough Mudder races create belonging through physical endurance and symbolic suffering. During a SoulCycle class led by instructor Angela Davis, he watched riders cry mid-workout as she preached: “There’s a blessing waiting for you on this bike!” In those dark, candlelit rooms, synchronized bodies discover something beyond fitness—what participant Zoe Jick called “my religion.”

Even extreme events like Tough Mudder, where teams trudge through mud and electric wires, cultivate selflessness: “community is built through shared suffering and laughter,” CrossFit’s founders like to say. The vulnerability of exertion—sweat, exhaustion, tears—lowers our defenses, making genuine empathy possible. These spaces meet deep social needs in a time of isolation.

Eating and exercising together might seem mundane, but when done with intention, they become sacraments of modern life. They affirm what Benedictine monk John Main called “the sacrament of the present moment”—where human presence itself becomes holy. Ter Kuile concludes that community, as L’Arche founder Jean Vanier once said, is “both the most wonderful and the most terrible thing”—because real connection demands both joy and struggle. Yet we need it now more than ever.

How can we feel at home in a world of concrete and screens? In Chapter 3, Ter Kuile explores the third layer of connection—our relationship with the natural world. For most of history, spirituality grew from the soil: our myths, seasons, and gods reflected our landscapes. Today, as more than half of humanity lives in cities, he argues that alienation from nature has become a kind of spiritual amnesia. The cure lies in pilgrimage, seasonal celebration, and radical belonging.

Pilgrimage: Walking as Awakening

A pilgrimage, Ter Kuile explains, doesn’t require Mecca or Santiago—it can start at your doorstep. Drawing from his walks with the British Pilgrimage Trust, he redefines pilgrimage as “a transformative journey on foot to a place of meaning.” The key is intention, sensory awareness, and return. On one walk to a small English church, he drank tea made from wild herbs and circled a 300-year-old yew, realizing how movement, touch, and story awaken the land’s spirit. “Walking a pilgrimage is like living a question mark,” he writes. Each step invites curiosity and wholeness.

Celebrating the Seasons

Seasonal rituals, from equinox to harvest, help us remember that time itself is sacred. In his childhood village, Ter Kuile celebrated May Day with maypoles and Midsummer fires—echoes of ancient agrarian worship. Each festival, he says, can become a pause in our over-scheduled lives, much like Alexander Schmemann’s “liturgical calendar,” where feast days restore joy as an act of resistance to burnout. Even modern celebrations—Thanksgiving, Pride parades, sports seasons—can be reimagined as urban liturgy marking nature’s rhythm.

For city dwellers, a single tree or houseplant can serve as altar. He calls this “musing on the micro.” Attending to one living thing—its changing leaves, its scent—becomes meditation. “Beauty,” writes theologian John O’Donohue, “is where the beyond touches us.” Seeing a window’s sky change each morning, as Ter Kuile does from his Harvard apartment, reconnects you to that rhythm of life.

World as Lover, World as Self

Finally, he invites readers to move from seeing nature as scenery to recognizing ourselves as nature. Citing Buddhist teacher Joanna Macy, he contrasts four paradigms: the world as battlefield, as trap, as lover, and as self. Only the last two heal our separation. Loving the world—as you would a partner or friend—turns environmentalism into kinship. Seeing yourself as the world reminds you that caring for the planet is self-care. “I am part of the rainforest protecting itself,” says activist John Seed. Ter Kuile ends by urging us to notice—even in the city—that belonging to the earth is our oldest faith.

Spirituality often crescendos in experiences we can’t explain—moments of awe, surrender, or love that feel larger than life. In Chapter 4, Ter Kuile explores prayer as a universal human practice, redefined for secular seekers. Prayer, he argues, isn’t asking favors from a sky-god but paying radical attention to what matters. It’s about telling the truth of your inner life and orienting it toward something greater.

Four Movements of Modern Prayer

Guided by Sister Carol Zinn, a Catholic nun, Ter Kuile adopts four classical pillars of prayer—Adoration, Contrition, Thanksgiving, and Supplication—and translates them for contemporary life. In Adoration, you decenter yourself, focusing on beauty, art, music, or nature to feel part of the whole. In Contrition, you acknowledge shortcomings—not as guilt but as honesty. Ter Kuile finds power in confession-like groups where people share struggles and hold one another accountable, echoing the psychological healing found in AA meetings or Brené Brown’s “vulnerability groups.”

In Thanksgiving, gratitude shifts perception. He draws on psychologist Robert Emmons’s research showing that gratitude rewires the brain toward joy. The memento mori—reflecting on mortality—reminds us life itself is the ultimate gift. Finally, in Supplication, we hold our fears and loved ones in awareness. Blessings, he says, are “circles of light drawn around a person.” Inspired by Celtic poet John O’Donohue, Ter Kuile even blesses fictional characters on his podcast, prompting listeners to claim those blessings for themselves.

Prayer Beyond Religion

He reimagines prayer’s physical and creative dimensions: lighting a candle, dancing, journaling, or even singing fears into the air. His “shower prayer” combines vulnerability with humor—naming anxieties aloud and ending by softly singing a simple mantra. Borrowing from Jesuit Walter Burghardt, he calls prayer “a long loving look at the real.” In that sustained attention, divinity becomes tangible. Whether through journaling, yoga, or quiet stillness, prayer opens us to awe and self-compassion.

Ultimately, connecting with transcendence is not about escaping life—it’s about embracing its mystery. “Talk to yourself,” Ter Kuile advises. “Talk about who you are, who you wish to become, and what you most love.” Whether you name it God, Universe, or Love, what matters is remembering, again and again, that you are part of something infinitely larger.

The final chapter brings all four dimensions together in a call to remembrance. We don’t create connection, Ter Kuile insists—we uncover it. The book ends not with new rules to follow but with an invitation to live by a Rule of Life: a simple framework that helps anchor your daily habits in deep purpose. Drawn from Benedictine monks’ centuries-old tradition, a Rule of Life isn’t about obedience but rhythm—a pattern that shapes who you become.

Crafting Your Rule of Life

You can start by naming core virtues—presence, compassion, rest, courage—and then outlining small practices that embody them. Ter Kuile’s own rule centers on his weekly tech sabbath: no emails from Friday sunset to Saturday dusk. He writes a personal manifesto reminding himself that rest is “a responsibility to the work I care about.” Like a compass, your Rule of Life points you back when you wander.

He urges readers to treat practice as relationship, not performance. We return to our rituals like we return to trusted friends—sometimes eager, sometimes weary, but always sustained by commitment. “What we practice, we become,” he writes. Unlike fleeting trends or self-help hacks, spiritual practice matures slowly, like a tree taking root.

From Building to Remembering

Ter Kuile ultimately reframes the goal: we don’t build connection, we remember it. Connection is woven into existence. The task of ritual is not invention but revelation. Drawing on theologian John O’Donohue, he reminds us that “community already is; our work is awakening to it.” When you light a candle, share a meal, read slowly, or walk under open sky, you align with what has always been true—that you belong.

The paradox of spiritual life, he concludes, is that connection and isolation coexist. Loneliness teaches the value of belonging; yearning deepens joy. The real work is remembering, again and again, that “both are true.” The Power of Ritual ends not as a manual of belief but as a map of remembrance—showing that divinity isn’t elsewhere. It’s here, in the rhythms of ordinary life, waiting for us to notice.