Peripheral Visions

Christians have regarded tears shed in memory of the crucifixion as a divine gift, and Jews gather at the Western Wall, all that remains of the temple in Jerusalem, to mourn its destruction. The cadences of poetry or phrases of music in a minor key can bring tears to the eyes; eyes may sting and a lump form in the throat at the wedding of a stranger. At age three, Vanni turned to me at a poignant moment in a Disney film and said, “Mommy, why do my eyes have tears?” We seek these moments out and are refreshed by them, small and recurrent instances of catharsis.
    Ritual mourning is a form of practice in both senses, for all peoples learn to use social forms both to mask emotion and to focus it—as ways of going about feeling the right feelings and performing the right actions, ways of achieving that intensity of response which is itself unifying. During the Iranian revolution, individuals risked their lives to walk ceremoniously in processions for the dead that were affirmations of political protest.
    Other people’s rituals may be bizarre and inaccessible to empathy, because they have been shaped and elaborated over time, encrusted with unintelligible detail become sacred. One of my mother’s students in a class on field methods, who had grown up in a family where there was no religious observance whatever, was told to attend a religious ceremony of some group not her own and take notes. She took herself that Sunday to a Greek Orthodox mass, but some twenty minutes into the service, through which she had dutifully been writing down everything she saw, she was struck by the extraordinary and to her horrifying thought “They do this every week.” After that she sat, bemused, taking no more notes. Someone with no previous experience of ritual can learn to grow through the recurrence of the incompletely understood, but the necessary patience is not often taught. In order for ritual to lead to learning, ritual itself must be learnt.
    Some rituals are explicit about the learning process, like the Passover Seder, in which the ritual includes the asking of questions by the youngest person present. The first Seder I attended, in 1957, when I was seventeen and living in Israel, was in the home of a Yemenite rabbi. A scholar of Arabic at the Hebrew University had arranged for the invitation, explaining that hospitality to strangers is appropriate at Seders, which echo other festive meals in the Middle East. He pointed out the piles of lettuce leaves to be dipped in sweetness and the baked lamb eaten as a main course, contrasting them with the more schematic elements of an Ashkenazi Seder, the exotic compared with the ordinary, although both were new to me. The form followed is based on the Haggada, a text composed of multiple layers, some in Hebrew, some in Aramaic, reflecting recurrent experiences of conquest and liberation. The layering process continues; today the story is retold in dance and drama, in nonsexist or even feminist versions, with the horrors of the holocaust and the dramas of Zionism woven into the layers of historical memory, and the events of the twentieth century prefigured in the exodus.
    The annual celebration of Passover has fixed elements and a fixed sequence, reflected in the schematic design of the Seder plate on my desk, but its meaning is subtly altered each year by the new historic context, just as historic events gave new meaning to the Shiite martyrdoms. The Seder is also different for every person at the table, for at any annual ritual the experiences of the year past are spiraled into dialogue with hopes and memories, generating some new measure of insight as life cycles through the seasonal round. Weddings and funerals recur as well through a lifetime of coming to terms with endings and transitions, and even weekly and daily rituals contain the possibility of growth as they return over the same ground in new ways.
    In American culture today, we acknowledge the usefulness of some kinds of repetition and the comfort of habit, but still we regard repetition as tedious and artificial, scanting both rituals of courtesy and those greater and ancient repetitions that affirm and sustain faith, preferring words never before spoken that come spontaneously to the lips. The formality and repetition of previously elaborated and sanctioned materials are contrasted with unique moments of visionary or ecstatic experience. Yet ritual, like my daily walk through the woods in New Hampshire, can be like