May 29, Jill DeTemple, religious studies professor at SMU Dallas, for a piece advocating how rituals can help individuals and communities navigate their post-pandemic worlds. Published in the Austin American-Statesman: https://bit.ly/3yVA1zi
About a week ago, at the top of the stairs in the three-story building where I work on the SMU campus, two women were in lively conversation as they worked to remove markers and yards of tape laid down to keep us safely apart in the pandemic.
They scraped and scrubbed, and at the end of the day the blue line dividing our staircase and hallways, the directional arrows and X’s meant to prohibit sitting too closely to another, were gone. Despite their efforts, however, the sticky residue from the tape remains. Looking down at the stripe still dividing our stairs neatly into two parts, darker than its surrounding material, I was struck by the analogy it offered. As we think about emerging from lockdowns, hugely altered work lives, social distancing, hundreds of thousands of lives lost and irrevocably altered by COVID 19, and seemingly unshakeable social divides — we cannot simply “go back to normal.” Even if we try to wash the experience away, stubborn stickiness remains.
By Jill DeTemple
About a week ago, at the top of the stairs in the three-story building where I work on the SMU campus, two women were in lively conversation as they worked to remove markers and yards of tape laid down to keep us safely apart in the pandemic.
They scraped and scrubbed, and at the end of the day the blue line dividing our staircase and hallways, the directional arrows and X’s meant to prohibit sitting too closely to another, were gone. Despite their efforts, however, the sticky residue from the tape remains. Looking down at the stripe still dividing our stairs neatly into two parts, darker than its surrounding material, I was struck by the analogy it offered. As we think about emerging from lockdowns, hugely altered work lives, social distancing, hundreds of thousands of lives lost and irrevocably altered by COVID 19, and seemingly unshakeable social divides — we cannot simply “go back to normal.” Even if we try to wash the experience away, stubborn stickiness remains.
How we handle that stickiness matters. As part of my work as a professor of religious studies, I often teach about rituals. Most religious traditions utilize rituals to create common experiences and meaning for communities. The loss of those experiences has been one of the most painful parts of the pandemic as people canceled or postponed baptisms, baby namings, Eid celebrations, weddings, and funerals. History also teaches us that in times of social upheaval, including pandemics, ritual responses can take desperate and troublesome forms: ghost dancing, cargo cults, crusades, sacrifice, mass suicide.
These are extreme responses when the stickiness of daily life becomes overwhelming and the small, daily rituals that keep us in community fade away; when we reinforce social divisions and feel we can’t approach, but rather must defend or attack. We avoid engaging divisions – political, social, personal, left over and stuck to the floor from a different era – because we feel it’s too risky; because we’re tired; because we can no longer envision the community of which we were once a part; because our lives are at stake.
But as the tape comes off the floor, literally and metaphorically, this is our work. We need to mourn, we need to reflect, we need to celebrate, we need to hope. Some of us will do this in religious communities, but the work does not, and cannot, stop there.
In another sector of my professional life I bring people together in spaces of curiosity in order to engage across distance and difference. In that work, we often say that “community is an act of courage,” especially communities in which we feel valued and to which we are committed. We are tasked at the moment with acknowledging the past, making sense of the present, and making choices for the future.
This is not, to paraphrase the words of John Lewis, the work of a day, or a week or a year. It is not as simple as pulling up the tape and moving on. It is, rather, work we do through small, incremental and ongoing gestures of conversation, curiosity, choice and connection. It is the rituals of daily prayer, of invitations we can offer with sidewalk chalk and chairs on lawns that remain when distancing ends. It is making the choice to ask “How are you?” and “How have you been?,” even of those who may be on the opposite side of sticky political or social issues. It is committing to listening to their answers.
It is these small, brave moments of openness that can move us forward, that give us access to each other, and that work to rebuild our communities not as they were, but as they can become.
Jill DeTemple is professor and chair of the Department of Religious Studies at SMU Dallas, and academic associate, Essential Partners, Inc.