Opening the Atlas of the Soul

From The (Baltimore) Sun of Sunday, September 24, 2006: "Holy day rites of passage help us find meaning in our lives" is Arthur J. Magida's paean to the annual ritual celebrations that commemorate and revisit, for members of every religious faith, the "moment when we are brought into the fold, into the tent, into the wisdom and the practices and the duties of being a member of that faith."

The occasion for Magida is this year's beginning of the Jewish High Holidays that began at sundown last Friday and will run until Yom Kippur next Sunday. The overarching point is that every religion, every faith, has such rites of passage and ritual commemorations. Any such rite, Magida says, represents "elaborate theater that helps us traverse crucial episodes in our lives." Any one of them "transports and instructs, alleviating the confusion and uncertainty that are so much a part of life."

Atonement is basic to each rite. It is the "humbling confrontation of self and past" that serves as "a rehearsal for the competence and the general, all-around bravura we need to get through life, with all its disruptions and annoyances and exasperations." To Magida, author of the reecently released Opening the Doors of Wonder: Reflections on Religious Rites of Passage, "life is a series of hunches and guesses strung together into a story — our story: a story that's perplexing, charming, entertaining, confusing, confounding and, maybe best of all, thoroughly unexpected."

Each of us, says Magida, is a "story in the making, a splendid narrative still being told." Because "our tales have endings that we haven't quite figured out yet," we are in dialogue with our own life narratives. They are asking each of us, "Who are you? Where are you?"

"These are questions," writes Magida, "that the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber says are 'the beginning of the way. ... We can let God in only where we really stand, where we live, where we live a true life. If we maintain holy discourse with the little world entrusted to us ... then we are establishing, in this our place, the Divine Presence.'"

"Maps to ourselves" is what Magida calls these holy rituals. They are "an atlas of our soul." And:

They introduce us to a Presence; they introduce us to our self; and they remind us that our lives have the profound possibility of being more charged, more potent and more glorious, and carry far higher stakes, than we ordinarily suspect, especially when we are stuck in the everyday that so often overtakes us. Burning off the haze of the mundane and the ordinary, these days turn us toward the light — never blinding and always illuminating.

Is there anything in Magida's description that disqualifies it as a characterization of specifically Christian commemorations such as, say, Lent or Advent? Not at all, I would say. In fact, the most profound thing Magida says is, "Everyone, in every faith, approaches God in his own time and his own fashion."