Peripheral Visions

responded to these losses by learning to chant in Sanskrit or to daven in the style of the shtetl. I remember a conversation during that period with an elderly nun who spoke of how very difficult it was to get beyond the words of the new English translations so she could really pray.
    It is not obvious, from the outside, what form or language is most likely to support prayer, or what relevance the question has for secular people with no interest in praying. The behaviors we call religious cover a curious spectrum, from the ecstatic to the formal: we see, on the one hand, Hasidim dancing with the Torah, God-intoxicated Sufis, Pentecostalists crying out in strange syllables and convinced that these are words of praise…and, on the other hand, rigid repetition of memorized forms and gestures. Many rituals seem moribund, but the death of ritual might also be a death of delight—or rather the loss of form and courtesy as entryways to learning and participation. If this is true, the problem affects us all.
    A longitudinal epiphany seems like an oxymoron, for we are losing the capacity for epiphanies played out through time, like those that allow a man and a woman to enjoy having breakfast together day after day for forty years or to enjoy the leaves falling exactly as they did last year and the year before. When that capacity is lost, is it lost forever? Do the books and magazine articles that instruct women on how to keep husbands and lovers from becoming bored with them ever help, or is the battle against boredom lost as soon as it is joined? The struggle against boredom is, surely, like an arms race—one of those processes where the attempt at correction increases the problem.
    The damage is most obvious in the arts. The search for originality dulls the capacity to savor small variations. The flight from boredom condemns both artist and audience to increasingly mediocre performances, for good work takes patience and polishing. During the Beat era and the decade that followed, when would-be artists rushed to fuzzy and undisciplined work, it was fashionable to associate art with chaotic and ungovernable novelty rather than care and discipline. Today this fashion is fading. Most of the artists at the MacDowell Colony get up in the morning and go to their studios as doggedly as business commuters, following a planned path or systematically working their way into a pattern of variations. Sometimes the Muses do visit. Sometimes the divine descends to bless the most routine prayers. But as Gerard Manley Hopkins said of the peace that so often eluded him, “…when Peace here does house / He comes with work to do….”
    Rituals work in different ways: “a sacrament effects what it signifies.” Sometimes they transform children into adults, single people into couples, commoners into kings—transitions so profound they must be faced in ignorance, phrased as mysteries. More often, ritual is a sort of metaphysical housework, intended to sustain some continuity in the world. Many peoples perform their rituals and ceremonies again and again in the conviction that the sun rises, the tides ebb, seasons come and go, and the game continues plentiful because they are doing their part, in dance and song and prayer, to sustain these rhythms. A rain dance is not so much an instrumental way of causing the clouds to open as the human part in the orderly pattern that includes the coming of rain in its season. When the ceremonies lapse the natural order sickens.
    Rituals use repetition to create the experience of walking the same path again and again with the possibility of discovering new meaning that would otherwise be invisible. The tales that are told again and again of how the world began, how the Pilgrims landed, how Mom and Dad met and fell in love, grow in meaning rather than become boring simply because they have been heard before. Something that is said to have happened once becomes multiple by being evoked repeatedly in different contexts as ritual and myth give birth to each other. Many of the stories told in this volume are stories of discovery, of hit-and-run epiphanies, but the retelling offers a different kind of learning experience. Stories of unique and startling events—visions and miracles—are common in mythology, but to recount them is to claim a share in continuing truths. Many good rituals shaped by time have sections into which the new or the personal, the informal or even the ecstatic can be inserted, so that