My friend Melvyn has been to Paris many times. Whenever he goes, he stops in Notre Dame and lights a candle in memory of his parents, who were Orthodox Jews.
It wasn’t just Notre Dame. Melvyn was, in his younger days, a world traveler. He’d stop in houses of worship, the kinds of places travelers stop to see, and light a candle wherever votive candles are lit. But Notre Dame was best.
Melvyn is not a theist of any sort.
He calls his practice of lighting a votive candle a “little ritual,” which sounds right to me.
The older I get, the more I realize how important these rituals are. The lighting of votive candles helps us digest the loss we feel, even after decades. It helps us to accept that we loss we suffered so long ago is, in some way, still real, still part of us.
Years ago, a businessman told me that the only things people wanted to know about their neighbors were what race they were, what church they attended and what civic club they belonged to. I suspected that most people wanted to know a great deal more — and wanted to know different things.
I think my friend Melvyn’s little rituals add up. I think that if you took the time to notice all the little rituals practiced by a friend or neighbor and came to understand the impulse behind them, you’d know a great deal more than you would if you used the usual tired old building blocks we use to construct an identity.
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