Communal rituals, sacred hospitality, and building a world of joyful belonging

A Q&A with writer and community-builder, Casper ter Kuile

Casper ter Kuile is a writer, researcher, and gatherer whose work focuses on “deepening community and making meaning.” He’s the author of the bestselling book, The Power of Ritual, creator of the popular podcast, Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, and co-founder of the Sacred Design Lab, which is “devoted to understanding and designing for 21st-century spiritual well-being.” Recently, he launched the Joyful Belonging newsletter on Substack, which offers “weekly insights on growing community, deepening spirituality, and changing culture.”

Casper and I first connected in 2023, and perhaps more than anyone I’ve met who writes about and works on “community,” Casper walks the walk. He’s one of the genuinely kindest and most joyful, hospitable, and caring people I know. He’s personally supported this newsletter since our very early days — hyping it up at every turn, encouraging others to read along, and, most recently, becoming a Founding Member 😊. Often, I’ll publish a piece and within minutes, receive a text that says something along the lines of “Go Sam, go!” I consider myself very fortunate to have Casper in my corner and to call him a friend (despite being on the “B list” for his next birthday party).

So I was extra excited to have the opportunity to interview Casper for this week’s Q&A. Our conversation covered a lot of ground. We explored the evolution of his work and spirituality since his first big publication, How We Gather. We explored the relationship between practicing hospitality and making others feel wanted and needed. We even explored his latest area of experimentation and practice: re-embedding rituals into our communal structures.

This was one of my favorite Q&As that we’ve done yet — and not just because I’m a big Casper fan. The interview has an aliveness and spirit to it that I think many of you will really enjoy. Please consider giving it a read.

-Sam

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PS - If you want to take this conversation further, we’ll be hosting our first-ever Connective Tissue AMA with Casper next Thursday at 4PM ET. You’ll have the opportunity to join live, meet Casper, and ask whatever follow up questions you have. This event is exclusively for Connective Tissue members, so become a member today and then sign up here to participate. It’s going to be a fun one!

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Photo of Casper ter Kuile, courtesy of Casper ter Kuile

Sam: Long before we became bros, I first heard of you and your work through How We Gather, which you published in 2015. I’m curious: How has your thinking and practice around community and spirituality evolved since then?

Casper: When we published How We Gather about a decade ago, there was a real narrative of “Why are all the young people leaving religion?” Pew had just published “The Rise of the Nones” in 2012, and there was this really pronounced anxiety within religious institutions about their decline.

What we wanted to argue was two things: Yes, younger people were less religious than in the past, but no, religion wasn't declining, it was transforming. People were showing up in secular spaces doing very religious things. They were asking their spin class trainer to officiate their wedding. They were hosting talent night fundraisers at their CrossFit gym. All this stuff that you would expect to see in religious congregations was happening in these secular spaces, and people weren't drawing those connections as clearly as we hoped.

That brought with it all sorts of exciting questions like, “What's possible in terms of community organizing these spaces?” But also, “What are the responsibilities that you have if you're in a pastoral leadership role?” If you're the person someone goes to to talk about their divorce or the death of their mother, you can't also date them. Our expectation was that we would be writing for that audience of new spiritual or new secular community leaders.

But what was interesting was that a lot of the response actually came from religious institutions. Over the last ten years, I’ve found myself with my co-founder, Angie Thurston, in this conversation between existing religious institutions that care deeply about community and justice and spirituality, and this new landscape of spiritual innovation that can benefit from the wisdom and traditions that these institutions might be able to offer.

And one of those pieces of tradition, to my surprise, is good theology. How we understand God, if we think about God at all, states, fundamentally, how we understand ourselves and think about each other. In some ways, I've ended up quite conservative in my religious orientation: I really see the value of what has come before. I’m trying to marry that sense of tradition with a similar awareness that religion is going to look different; in fact, it needs to look and feel different for it to have cultural currency.

Can you say a bit more about your personal experiences — and the transformations within yourself — that led to this realization about the importance of theology?

There's one moment that I'll never forget. It was my 30th birthday, and I had been invited to a gathering of “Nuns and Nones” for Catholic Sisters and millennial, unaffiliated community leaders. Now remember that there used to be something like 200,000 Catholic Sisters who provided the labor for just about every Catholic institution, and today there are less than 40,000 with an average of 80. That expression of religious life is coming to an end. We're not going to see a new wave of young nuns resuscitate these institutions that they ran, and the leaders had accepted the end of an era. So their question was not one of survival or resuscitation, but really, to use my language, transference. How can we give the gifts of our tradition to people who are doing the same thing, but in new ways?

We sat in that meeting, and for two days, people told stories about what their hearts longed for. At some point, my friend Lennon Flowers, who founded The Dinner Party, said something like, “Well, all I want to do is transform myself with my friends in community to serve the world.” And Sister Nancy Schreck, who was a former President of the LCWR, just took a breath and said, “That's what we call religious life.” It gives me chills just thinking about it now. It was such a moment of confrontation: All the things I thought were new, and all the hubris of my youth was, in that moment, met with this compassionate encouragement and witness from these women who had been through it. I felt such a sense of inheritance from them.

In that room was my friend and mentor Mary Dacey, who died earlier this year. Mary and I are very similar. She was a big loudmouth and so much fun. She was also a former principal and later became a President of LCWR — and when she talked about God, I believed her.

When I was starting Nearness, I thought a lot about ordination. I was like, if this is a spiritual community and I'm going to lead it, that comes with real responsibility. I wanted the support and accountability that should accompany the caring of souls. So I visited Mary in Philadelphia where she lived, and I said, “Mary, I know that when you became a nun, you were given a religious name. Would you bless me with a name?” I wanted to be part of her lineage, to receive her blessing. And she looked at me with delight, smiled, and then burst into tears.

Three weeks later, I got a text from Mary saying “I've got a name for you.” I replied, “Well, you better come to Brooklyn to give it to me!” So she got on the train and came up to Brooklyn. She joined me on the roof where I would go to pray. She brought this little kit with some oil and poetry that she prepared — and a liturgy that she’d made. And she blessed me with the name Paul, which, if you know the New Testament, is quite a name to be blessed with. She said Paul means “humility,” and she said, “Humility doesn't mean making yourself small, it means telling the truth.” That's really stayed with me.

When you ask me, “Why is theology important?” It's because the people who I respect the most — and who I see living their lives with such deep integrity, courage, and hope — are the ones who have taken religion the most seriously. I don't mean that in a scholarly way; I mean it in how they live. When Mary gave me that name, what she was giving me was a mantra to remember about my own sense of worthiness and my own humility. The people who have lived like Mary — where I've been close enough to to see it — they knew things about God. And I want to know that too, so I can be like that, too.

Mary and Casper, courtesy of Casper ter Kuile

Today, your newsletter is called Joyful Belonging and you often describe your work as “building a world of joyful belonging.” We’ve written a lot on this here Substack about how joy is an essential ingredient for civic life (see here, here, and here). You know we’re pro-joy and humor and weirdness around here. But how did you land on this framing and approach for your current work? And what does “joyful belonging” look like in practice?

We always give the gift that we most need ourselves. So, it's no surprise that in me there is a lonely 13-year-old, closeted gay kid in an English boy's boarding house who feels like he has no one to talk to. Out of that pain and exclusion has come this hyper-awareness about where the boundary of belonging is in every room that I'm in. My commitment is to create experiences and communities where that invitation to belonging is really explicit.

The older I get, the more I realize I'm basically becoming my mother, and one of the things she always did so well was create spaces where the door was open. She'd bake a cake, and everyone was welcome around the table. When people walked into our kitchen, their shoulders would relax and there was just a sense of like, “Oh, this is a place that feels nice to be in.” One of the greatest gifts that I received from my upbringing was a sort of innate knowledge of how to make people feel at home. It's silly little things like giving someone a task when they arrive, or passing around fruit or cookies. I learned how to help people feel like they were wanted — that this was a place that wanted them there — and we would miss them if they left.

At my core, I want people around. I like hosting, and thankfully, I married a man who's great at cooking and baking, because those are not my strong suits. But I'm good at making up a silly game or getting people to explore a question they haven't before, or making music and dancing together. Those embodied practices that get us out of our fear and into play are central to what I do. That's not to say there isn't a need for things like grief and engaging with conflict — that happens in any community, whether you want it to or not — but my community work is all about joy. That’s what sustains me.

I just had a light bulb moment while you were talking, and maybe this sounds super basic. But the capability of the host to cultivate a hospitable environment and the experience of feeling wanted as a participant or guest are two sides of the same coin. I've seen those as two separate concepts, but you connected them for me. I think a lot about how strongly people are yearning for that hospitality, and how strongly people are yearning to feel wanted or needed.

If I have a superpower, it's helping activate people's individual gifts in service of the greater whole. I'm not shy about asking people to do things, and that's one of the ways in which people feel that sense of being wanted. I'll claim that gift of being like, “Oh, you're good at embroidery? Great. We actually need some banners...” Sometimes, people will say “no,” and you have to be able to accept that response, because a true invitation always allows for a “no” as much as a “yes.”

The job of a leader is to help people see how their contribution fits in with all the other people's contributions to make something that no one would have been able to do alone. That's what community is about. It involves some storytelling, some relationship-building, some strategy, and some logistics. But it’s really about trying to match people's gifts to the group’s needs as best you can. It’s about being willing to say, “We're going to do this and you’re a part of what we’re going to do!”

You have to welcome people into the world as it could be, and that means you have to see it well enough that you can invite other people into it. There’s a role for mentorship and tradition and personal practice here. But a big part of how I understand my work is reminding myself and everyone else: “The world could be like this. Why don't we make it that way?”

How We Gather, The Power of Ritual, and Illuminating Spiritual Innovation by Casper ter Kuile

This seems to connect to your work on ritual, which is equal parts memory and imagination. You published The Power of Ritual in 2020 about “turning everyday activities into soulful practice,” and, more recently, you’ve been experimenting with the idea of how communal rituals — festivals, seasonal celebrations, and the like — can become connective practices. Can you say a little more about this?

The Power of Ritual came from a noticing: non-religious people felt safest exploring spirituality through practices. Whether it was yoga or pilgrimage or fasting or meditation, if we didn't have to talk about the God stuff, the practice is what we could get into. It also came from a memory of all the rituals that I grew up with as a kid. I went to a Waldorf School and was lucky enough to have a rich seasonal calendar. And, as an immigrant family in England, we had lots of weird Dutch things that we did — I didn't know how many of them were family traditions versus actual cultural celebrations. Like, Dad carried you down the staircase on your birthday morning and you wore a crown. Or, Saint Nicholas arrived, and then you had to write a poem. My childhood world was full of ritual, and I had a sense of facility with it.

Rituals are a very efficient way of connecting people to each other. So much of the civic sector is focused on conversation as a means of communion. You can get to real depth and personal connection and stories with conversation, but it's freaking slow. If you engage ritual — moving our bodies in rhythm together, breathing in and out at the same time, dressing up together — you can make people feel part of a larger whole much quicker.

I've become passionate about thinking through the rituals that can help us remember we belong to one another. These can be rituals that happen in public space. They can be rituals that cross lines of difference that usually separate us during our normal days. They can be rituals that shift our dominant paradigm of how we think about who we are and whose we are. Shifting people's behavior shifts the story they tell about themselves, so getting people to participate in a line dance and then being like, “Hey, did you notice that we had a good time when we did this together?” It's a wonderful tool in our toolbox, and it's one that we are often too shy to use.

One of the things about communal rituals is that, historically, they’ve been baked into the fabric of village and community life. Often, they’re connected to a religious practice and a seasonal calendar — like all of the festivals for different saints in places like Portugal or Spain, for instance. People continue to host and participate in these rituals because they’ve been doing it for hundreds or thousands of years. But once these rituals go away — from out-migration, secularization, and the like — it seems like they’d be much harder to put back together or start anew. But you’re experimenting a lot with new communal rituals, like the Solstice in the Park that you recently hosted. That was a long wind-up, but can you say a bit more concretely about how you’re thinking about the intersection of rituals and communal structures?

I am curious about how tradition is always invented. Sometimes the traditions you think we’ve been doing for centuries are just a few decades old. At Harvard, there’s a convocation ceremony for incoming students at the beginning of the academic year — it's got all the regalia and gowns, and it seems like Harvard has been doing this for hundreds of years. It was actually invented in 2009, but because the generational turnover is so quick, it feels like it's been there forever. Once something's lost, you do lose a lot of that cultural infrastructure, but new rituals can also be built fairly quickly. There’s some hope and possibility in that.

Drawing on this theme of hospitality, large public rituals, especially festivals, are great invitations. I noticed this with our own celebration of Solstice in the Park. It's a moment in which people are ready to say, “Yes.” They've experienced it. They loved it. They enjoyed who they were when they were in it. And they want to be more of that person. So it's a great recruitment moment. Next year, I want to have something ready that allows us to go deeper: the small group invitation, the workshop, the campaign that we're going to run, or whatever else invites participants to go into more depth.

It's also a wonderful activation. We partnered with the Brooklyn Public Library, who I just loved. Jakab Orsos, their Vice President of Arts and Culture, was just a “yes” guy. He was like, “I love this vision. What do you need? We've got this open air program where we pay immigrants who don't have the kind of academic standing in the US system, but who know a lot about something, who give lectures at our events. Do you want to invite some of them to be part of this?” I was like, “Absolutely.” So this incredible Venezuelan guy, Enrique Enriquez, gave a workshop about bird flight and symbolism. We had a Tibetan Buddhist monk who taught a workshop on meditation. We had an Israeli woman lead an embroidery workshop. Solstice was a great way to activate both the library's resources and its audience.

Institutions are, by nature, inward-looking. They're focused on their structure. They are looking to be solid. Rituals are almost always a little chaotic. They have an energy, which is about opening and breaking, and about spirit, moving, and play. It's healthy for institutions to engage ritual as an injection of energy or an injection of vision. But it's also necessary for those public events to be grounded in solid structures. I’ve been exploring how institutions that have that solidity and spread geographically — think the YMCA, for instance — might become anchors that allow for new moments of public joy and rituals of belonging to pop up. It takes a lot of work to make them happen, and you need enduring structures to help make them last.

Photos from Solstice in the Park, courtesy of Casper ter Kuile

If we start with How We Gather and we go to what we were just talking about, there seems to be this recognition that something fundamental has shifted in the spiritual fabric of our communities. And you, Casper, seem to have this orientation to pull some things from the past and imagine new possibilities. Part of this is about a re-spiritualization of non-religious community spaces to be capacious enough to hold the spirit and provide pastoral care. The other part of this is about re-ritualization, which involves a rediscovery of the spirit, a re-“membering” of community, and re-commitment to covenant. Does this resonate at all? If so, what’s your vision for these projects? And what can institutions and practitioners do to be a part of this vision and help realize it?

Broadly, I think about a lot of this work as spiritual innovation. As you said, one of the big questions in that work is: “What do we hold on to, what do we let go of, and how do you decide?” The only way you can make a good guess is both having one foot in the world as it is, and one foot in the best of religious tradition to know what there is to pass on.

One of the things that I'm most passionate about passing on is this tradition of covenant. I'm so pumped. Literally, this weekend, I got to a definition of covenant that I'm fucking happy with! I’m defining covenant as “a dynamic, relational commitment that subverts the status quo and is sustained by love.” Essentially, this is what I think institutions can help us do — they can help bring us into covenantal relationship.

For the last few hundred years, America's religious landscape has been one that's been defined by the congregation as the core structure. In this structure, 100 or so people would gather for weekly worship in a denominationally affiliated institution, usually with a man preaching in an institutionally mandated leadership structure, which is sustained by the local congregation. But the economic structure of the congregation no longer makes sense: For the first time in recorded history, fewer than 50 percent of the American population are members of a congregation, and even members are mostly attending once a month, not weekly.

My friend Lisa Greenwood describes a mixed spiritual ecology as our future. We're going to increasingly see things like small groups and home-based communities — basically units of belonging that do not need a building and that probably are not affiliated with an institution, but therefore must find some way to know how to belong to one another. That's why I think covenant has such a powerful promise as a spiritual technology that holds people in meaningful relationship beyond their own comfort. We all like getting together for pizza and movie night or book club or whatever, but the moment it's no longer fun, why keep going? What holds us together if the point was to have fun? Covenant insists that the purpose of the relationship is not the outcome or immediate benefit it's going to give us, but that the relationship itself is the benefit.

Covenant is an invitation to stay in relationship, and therefore invite conflict and challenge, because it's actually going to strengthen the relationship if we do it well. Institutions can help people find one another, ritually commit to one another, learn how to be in dynamic relationship with one another, and even subvert some of the paradigms of what we expect from relationships. Then the theology work is naming the Love that is sustaining them throughout. This is one of the most important things we, and, therefore, institutions can be doing — especially institutions that still have the trust or pull to bring people into relationship with each other. Because, frankly, religious institutions no longer have that pull beyond their own membership, and even then, they don't always have it very much. There is a spiritual mission in my language for these secular institutions to bring people into joyful belonging.

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