Психолог доказал: семейные ритуалы укрепляют отношения благодаря своей странности

Nick Hobson is an organizational psychologist and leadership coach. Growing up in a devout Catholic household, I was no stranger to sacred practice. There was nothing strange about lining up to receive a small wafer on my tongue, moments before a man in a long robe raised his hands overhead and, almost by magic, transformed the wafer from tiny carbohydrate to literal body of Christ. Bells chimed. Incense wafted. I chewed on God. Just another Sunday Mass for me. I marked each Sunday this way for exactly 18 years. It was a big part of my life. I was even the lead altar boy for a few years. But then, I moved away to college and moved on from church life. As so many young adults do when they leave the house, I eschewed the religious and ritualistic practices of my family upbringing. I never returned. At least not in that way. I eventually went on to do my PhD in the psychology of religion and ritual. Go figure, right? I remember a mentor saying to me once, “All research is me-search, Nick.” He was bang-on. In an all-too-Freudian fashion, it was almost as though I needed to intellectualize my childhood experiences to de-identify with the pressures put on me by my family. So I traded in my altar boy robes for a lab coat. Want a closer relationship with your partner? Find a ritual At first, as part of my “me-search” agenda, I was overly antagonistic towards religion – all forms of organized religion and their silly, superstitious rituals. Hopping on board the “militant atheist” movement, I aligned myself with the likes of Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens, adopting Mr. Hitchens’ fervent view that “religion poisons everything.” In time, the science cooled down the atheist rhetoric. I launched myself into the empirical work with my fellow researchers and colleagues. In our investigations on the psychology of religious ritual, we strove for “methodological naturalism,” a fancy way of saying that, as researchers, we only cared about the psychological causes and effects of ritual, without needing to determine whether the underlying religious beliefs were true or false. During this time, I remained an atheist (well, technically a “scientific agnostic”), but I did gain a new appreciation for religious ritual. In fact, I think we all owe a debt of gratitude to this special form of human behaviour. As the research has made clear: no rituals, no humans. Psychologist Christine Legare once wrote, “rituals are a ... behavioural trademark of our species.” It is not Homo sapiens as much as it is Homo ritualis. The reason why rituals are so central to our evolutionary story is because they facilitated large-scale group co-operation, which is the reason we exist today in our current social form. When human groups blossomed in size due to the agricultural revolution, rituals followed soon after as an elegant solution to promote group success and survival, and to ensure that a huge number of individuals were in sync. One evening, before bedtime, I picked up a bell lying around the house and rang it out. It signalled the start of our “Reading Room Corner,” a time we’d set aside to read as a family. Synchronized not just in their outward movements, as they often did in their dances and incantations, but also in their inner emotional states and shared values. Rituals were (and still are) the strongest galvanizing force in creating a state of what anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse calls “identity fusion.” They quite literally bring us together – physically, socially, neurologically. To add to this, rituals also have a remarkably unique anxiolytic effect. They bring a sense of order and control in a world that is inherently unknown and full of chaos. Their predictable and repeated patterns capable of soothing life’s greatest anxieties. I have spent the last two decades examining these unique properties of ritual life. Fast forward another decade and I’m still an atheist. Still a psychologist studying ritual. Still convinced by their immense power. And, like my 18-year-old self, still refusing to practice them in my own life. Until recently. My wife and I have two daughters, 8 and 4. We made a deliberate choice: no religion. It felt settled, obvious even, until I started noticing what else had disappeared along with it. Religion-free also meant ritual-free. Before kids, I hadn’t felt the absence. But then we had kids, and I found myself wanting to give them something more than the usual family routines. Not religion. But maybe the part of religion I’d actually missed. I began creating mini-ritual experiences for them. Nothing too over the top. Little ritual-like teasers just to see how they would react to these new experiences. Would they notice a difference compared to the more ordinary day-to-day experiences they’re used to? One evening, before bedtime, I picked up a bell lying around the house and rang it out. It signalled the start of our “Reading Room Corner,” a time we’d set aside to read as a family. At first, they looked at me a little funny. “What are you doing?” my eldest asked, looking at me side-eyed. But by the fifth or sixth evening, skepticism gave way to excitement. I even tried a little experiment with them. I started the Reading Room Corner without the bell. “Hey, Daddy, you forgot the bell!” they said. It didn’t take long for them to respond the same way to other rituals I introduced. Each time, they responded to them differently than any other bedtime routine or fun activity we’ve done over the years. It was as if their little brains were ready to receive ritual. I wasn’t all that surprised. This sort of exuberant response to ritual is normal and expected in a child. What makes ritual work isn’t meaning or tradition or even repetition. It’s the weirdness. Ritual scholars talk about the “ritual stance,” the mode of engagement we adopt when behaviour has no obvious goal-related logic. Ringing a bell before reading. Receiving a wafer on your tongue. None of it makes practical sense, and that’s precisely the point. Rituals feel psychologically compelling not despite their strangeness but because of it. Children understand this instinctively, even before they can articulate it. Psychological research has shown that children, even infants as young as six months, have a special preparedness for ritual. A child’s brain is wired for ritual’s weirdness. When a child watches a ritual rather than an ordinary behaviour, something shifts in how they process what they’re seeing. Children’s attention is naturally drawn to peculiar, repeated movements. When invited to mimic these actions, they tend to reproduce them exactly, especially when the movements are done in synchrony with others and framed as “just what people in this group do,” clearly signalling a social convention. Then something interesting happens. As a participant shifts from observing to enacting rituals, and from childhood to adulthood, their initial attention and precise copying behaviour transform into strict adherence. The ritual moves from mere action to tradition, gaining significance and becoming a core, unquestioned part of group identity. We say the actions have been ritualized. This is the transformation I’m witnessing in my family. Months in, what began as childlike interest has turned into something meaningful for our family. The Reading Room Corner must begin at 8 p.m., announced by the bell. It’s exactly 45 minutes long, and there’s only one place in the house it must be done in. And a strict “no screens” rule applies. In a bustling world, forest bathers trade to-do lists for the stillness of nature My daughters expect our rituals to be done – just so. No improvising, no changing the script. As is the case with any good ritual, the peculiarities around the ritual are now front and centre. It must be done at this time, in this way, with only these objects, for precisely this long, for no good reason other than “that’s just how it’s done.” Is that the sacred I’m watching take shape? I think it might be. Because what I’m witnessing (the refusal to improvise, the insistence on doing it this way and no other) is real sacredness. Not the grandeur we often think about. French sociologist Emile Durkheim defined the sacred as whatever is set apart from ordinary life, immune to its logic, non-negotiable by definition. The profane world is meant to be optimized and traded off. The sacred is untouchable, no matter how small. In my work, I often say there are rituals with a lower case “r” and Rituals with an upper case “R.” We’re firmly in the former camp. But the underlying psychology is the same. It’s a matter of degree, not kind. Consider the saying, “religion is just a cult plus time.” It’s meant as an insult. But the kernel of truth inside it suggests that our most sacred, inviolable rituals didn’t arrive fully formed. They began as small, odd, repeated behaviours that someone decided mattered, and kept deciding, until one day they simply did. I think about that sometimes, standing in the doorway of the Reading Room Corner at 7:59 p.m., bell in hand. The man who traded in his altar boy robes for a lab coat, who spent years arguing that religion poisons everything, who built a career studying ritual from a safe, clinical distance, now the one calling his family to it. My daughters are already in position. They’re waiting for the bell. Maybe that’s what the sacred looks like when you build it from scratch. Not passed down from on high, but small and a little absurd.