A Time to Gather

1.

Welcome With Joy

Circling St. Peter's Square

The front door of the Vatican is surprisingly hard to find. The Old City of Jerusalem, which is one third of a square mile, has seven entrances; Vatican City, which is half that size, has six. The one I was looking for is located just to the left of St. Peter's Basilica and just inside the two hundred eighty-four columns that make up Bernini's welcoming colonnade. Because the mother church of Catholicism is "almost like a womb," Bernini wrote, the elliptical porticoes were designed "to maternally open her arms to Catholics to confirm them in their beliefs."

But on this Sunday morning in late October, when the pope was hosting a contentious summit on women in the church and I had been invited to witness a novel approach to one of the more widely practiced life rituals in history, the entire complex seemed far less welcoming. I first had to walk through a temporary gate, then pass through security, then introduce myself to the Swiss Guard, then make my way to the parish office. The door was open, but the entrance was empty. For a few minutes I waited awkwardly.

Then someone called out my name. Instead of a prelate in cardinal-and-white finery, it was a burly man with a salt-and-pepper beard, a black friar's frock, and sandals. I reached out my hand, but he swatted it away and gave me a bear hug.

"Welcome!" Brother Agnello Stoia said. "Sorry to keep you waiting. Let's go for coffee. The baptism begins at noon."

After all that time I spent trying to get into the Vatican, Brother Agnello promptly led me out the back door and across the street to a café.


Exactly twenty-five years before this trip, I was strapped into the front seat of a car, speeding past tanks in war-torn eastern Turkey, careening around corkscrews in the Caucasus Mountains. Behind me, the Israeli archaeologist Avner Goren was punching numbers into a GPS. After several hours, he tapped on my shoulder. “Look!” Through a break in the peaks, thousands of feet higher than anything around it, was the snowcapped summit of a triangular mountain, like Mount Fuji, only taller.

"Mount Ararat!" Avner exclaimed.

It was my first glimpse of the highest spot in the Middle East, where Genesis says Noah's ark landed, and my first taste of a fundamental truth: Our most enduring cultural artifacts have a strong sense of place. Just as you can't understand the Bible without understanding its connection to holy land, you can't understand life rituals without understanding their connection to holy ground.

The first rule of life rituals is that they need sacred space. They are nonordinary acts that demand nonordinary settings. They literally take place: whether an altar, circle, pool, hill, ashram, temple, shrine, or wat. One place that has come to embody this lesson around the world is a day's drive from Mount Ararat; Avner and I visited during our journey.

Göbekli Tepe is Turkish for "potbelly hill." Located near the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates, at the intersection of Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, this dusty crossroads has seen more than its share of storied visitors, from Lawrence of Arabia to Alexander the Great to Abraham. But the most important visitors may be the unnamed ones who came twelve thousand years ago and built one of the earliest human settlements.

Startling excavations since the 1990s have revealed twenty circular enclosures of limestone megaliths with strong echoes of Stonehenge and striking similarities to the Vatican colonnade. Some pillars are carved with animal forms, including scorpions and lions; others are covered in humanoid forms, among them torsos and hands. The site has become known as the birthplace of ritual. A million tourists now visit every year.

Before we can understand the future of ritual, we must first understand its past. That effort begins with a simple point: that ritual has a past. Ritual itself has a history. While it may be tempting to assume that humans have always gathered together and thus always agreed on how to make meaning together, the truth is more complex-and more illuminating. The history of ritual shows that we're constantly changing our views of how we mark turning points in our lives. That history can be told in four places: Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican, the Château de Vincennes outside Paris, and the Little White Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas. Let's begin with the first.

When I began traveling around the Middle East in the 1990s, the history of civilization was told in a straightforward manner. Early humans wandered from place to place, until the agricultural revolution around 10,000 BCE, when they began to settle in one place. Cultivating agriculture gave humans free time, which in turn allowed them to tell stories, which in turn led them to build religions, which in turn inspired them to create rituals. This progression can be captured in a formula:

HUMANS → RELIGION → RITUAL

The discoveries at Göbekli Tepe almost single-handedly flipped that script, revealing that long before humans settled in one place and thousands of years before they formed organized religions, they were already practicing rituals. These fundamental human acts inspired stories, which in turn led to customs, traditions, liturgies, and laws, which in turn led to religions. The new formula looks more like this:

HUMANS → RITUAL → RELIGION

The big bang of this breakthrough occurred on December 18, 1994, when three amateur speleologists in the Ardèche valley of southern France noticed a faint draft coming from the blocked entrance of a cave. Soon, the park ranger Jean-Marie Chauvet, along with Éliette Brunel Deschamps and Christian Hillaire, breached the obstruction, spelunked twenty-six feet down, and found themselves in a pitch-black, one-hundred-thousand-square-foot chamber. Late on a chilly Sunday afternoon, in what is now called the End Chamber of Chauvet, the explorers discovered an astonishing sight: hundreds of depictions of thirteen different species-leopards, bears, horses-along with elaborate images of lions hunting bison and rhinoceroses butting horns. The trio also found a child's footprint, remains of ancient hearths, and smoke stains from human gatherings.

"They were here!" Deschamps cried, referring to our ancestors thirty-five thousand years ago.

The Chauvet discovery opened the floodgates. In the next four decades, more than three hundred fifty displays of cave art were unearthed around the world, a breathtaking string of Paleolithic art galleries. Time and again, these works show detailed evidence of ritual behavior.

The ceremonial Lion Man of Germany, from thirty-eight thousand years ago, combines the limbs of a human and the head of a lion. The Python Cave of Botswana, from seventy thousand years ago, features a twenty-foot carved snake with sparkling eyes, surrounded by thirteen spearheads and a secret chamber. The Norwegian archaeologist who led the discovery calls the finding a "loud archaeological signature" of collective ritual. A Sulawesi cave in Indonesia shows evidence of rituals involving red ocher, pierced shells, and engraved jewelry dating back one hundred sixty-four thousand years-that's forty times older than the pyramids. The La Chapelle-aux-Saints cave in central France has yielded evidence of Neanderthal burial three hundred thousand years ago, before the arrival of anatomically modern humans.

Göbekli Tepe weaves these tantalizing threads into a vivid tableau of late hunter-gatherer lives brimming with ritual. The site's earliest findings suggested that the structures highest on the potbelly hill were monumental gathering places where bands of wandering people would assemble to celebrate their hunt, bury their dead, and reaffirm their shared humanity. The site was not an ongoing settlement, stressed the archaeologist who led the excavation, Klaus Schmidt, "but a ritual site for surrounding communities."

Subsequent research has shown that some people did live on the hill, but the larger point still holds. The use of collective rituals to build group identity has roots much deeper than civilization itself. To be human is to seek out sacred spaces where you can escape the fragility of existential aloneness and create a vision of intentional togetherness; these sanctified domains domesticate the dangers that threaten your survival and honor the community with whom you forge meaning out of chaos. The underground sanctuaries and sacred relics that dot the harshest landscapes of our planet show that our oldest relatives did not just want to know how things were done, they also wanted to know why.

We are not just Homo sapiens; we are also Homo ritualis.

We may choose to reject any number of the practices of the civilizations that grew out of those early experiments of the human spirit. But to reject ritual is to reject the flintstone of that spirit, to throw the baby shower out with the bathwater. Ritual is the original fire in the belly of humanity; without it, we risk extinguishing the eternal flame that burns at the heart of being alive.


Brother Agnello looks like he stepped out of an Aesop fable-a shock of sepia in a neon-colored world. A crane in a muster of peacocks. As he led me through a promenade teeming with cafés, he was summoned for hugs and showered by the sound of his name shouted in greeting. He seemed to know everyone in Rome.

"I like to turn strangers into friends," he said.

Because the pope is the figurehead of Catholicism and St. Peter's is its mother church, you might think the holy father would be the head of its parish. You'd be wrong. The pope is the pastor of the nearby Basilica of St. John Lateran. The pastor of St. Peter's is appointed by the pontiff. As part of Pope Francis's effort to humanize the church, he chose Brother Agnello, a Franciscan and a Pompeii native who comes across as the happiest mayor of the busiest town. Ten million people a year visit the Vatican; Agnello would enjoy giving every one a hug.

"San Pietro is like a heart that receives blood from the periphery, oxygenates it, then sends it back into the body revived," he said.

But all the circulation masks a problem. The lifeblood of any spiritual institution is the life rituals of its members-for Catholics, those rituals include baptism, confirmation, weddings, and funerals. Yet nearly all of the eight hundred one residents of the Vatican are in religious orders, meaning they're not allowed to be married and are forbidden from having children. Few families means few family celebrations.

Agnello set out to solve that problem. He flung open the doors; expanded the number of annual life rituals to two hundred baptisms and fifty marriages; added a new life ritual that locals were demanding, marriage renewals; and convened the first confirmation class of adolescents in one hundred fifty years. He is a shining example of what the smartest religious leaders I know are becoming: a ritual entrepreneur.

"Joy is the gift of life," Agnello said. "My goal is to share whatever joy I can in a world that can sometimes feel sad. But joy needs celebrations. If we can welcome people with joy, we can soften the jagged edges of humanity."

I asked him the most effective way to make people feel welcome.

"With sights and sounds and smells," he said. "When you visit on a Sunday morning like today, you are catapulted into the beauty of song, the aroma of incense, the splendor of light. Together they are open arms of celebration."

Such rituals are not easy, he cautioned. "Someone will always complain. It's never been done like this! How dare you do that!

"But people need to come together because they need serenity," he continued. "A warm pillow, a slice of tart, a roasted chestnut, a cup of tea. Celebrations are like living rooms for people who need to escape, however briefly, the weight of loneliness and indifference, and replace them with companionship and possibility."

I asked him which celebrations he most enjoys.

"I like to baptize," he said. "You have the opportunity to interact with families, to use the most beautiful spot in the basilica, and to welcome people into a life of grace."

"My sense is that rituals need flash, they need spectacle," I said. "How many wows do you need?"

"The wows are important," he said, "They catch your attention; they invite you in; they're like the miracles in the Bible. But the real miracles occur once you're in community-a parent and child, a parent and parent, a stranger and stranger. At the moment you're most in fear, you share that fear with another, and suddenly you're not alone. The wow is the hospitality of tending that fear together."

Brother Agnello grew quiet for the first time since we met. After a moment of reflection, he bowed his head, crossed himself, and stood up to leave.

"Come, you'll see."


Walking into St. Peter’s Basilica can feel overwhelming-it’s large enough to accommodate sixty thousand visitors and tall enough to fit the Statue of Liberty, Lincoln Memorial, and Michelangelo’s David standing on top of one another. Ralph Waldo Emerson called the building “an ornament of the earth.” Henry James crooned, “Few great works of art last longer” in the imagination. Even Mark Twain, who grumbled about its bulkiness, gushed that its dome offers a panorama “more illustrious in history than any other in Europe.”

Yet it's the contentious story of building the basilica that earns it the second spot on our whistle-stop tour of the history of ritual. And no single day better captures that tension than April 30, 1586.

When we left our story in Göbekli Tepe, hunter-gatherers were just beginning to settle in communities and convert their yearning for ritual into patterned behavior. Over time, these settlements turned to narratives to explain their place in the world. From Mesopotamia to India, early cultures used creation stories, pageants, and art to introduce new levels of group cohesion. But these early stirrings of collective identity were isolated and decentralized. Rituals, from funerary rites to harvest festivals, grew in importance, but full-blown religion, from liturgy to laws, had yet to take hold.

That decentralization gave way to centralization during a remarkable period in the mid-first millennium BCE that the German philosopher Karl Jaspers termed the Axial Age. Between 500 and 300 BCE, Judaism emerged in the Mediterranean, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, Confucianism and Daoism in Asia, Hellenic philosophy in Europe. Jaspers suggested that this change represented a more cognitive approach to the world-"thinking about thinking." With leaders as diverse as Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, and Moses, "hitherto unconsciously accepted ideas, customs and conditions were subjected to examination, questioned and liquidated."

As significant as that intellectual shift was, it was overshadowed by an even greater shift. These new, universal religions launched a behavioral revolution in the form of new, universal codes of conduct covering everything from how to live to how to love, how to breed to how to bury. Ritual, which had been around for more than three hundred millennia, found itself by the first millennium CE as the centerpiece of daily life. Looked at in evolutionary terms, this once niche, adaptive human behavior had executed something of a coup over global human culture.