A review by hfjarmer
For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World by Sasha Sagan

emotional funny hopeful informative inspiring lighthearted reflective sad fast-paced

5.0

 I can’t shake the feeling that this book was written specifically for me. Much of my life has been spent contemplating my own spirituality, perhaps since I first grasped the concept of religion. Despite my desire to do so, I could never compel myself to believe. I felt out of place at church services and found myself uncomfortably agreeing with the "they’re in a better place" rhetoric at funerals, knowing deep down that I didn't share the sentiment. However, over the past year or so, I feel I've really grasped my personal spiritual beliefs, and I only wish I had read Sasha Sagan’s book much, much sooner. 

Having attended Catholic school, I often heard the argument that belief in God doesn’t require evidence; that’s why it's called faith. However, as someone who has always been very logically and scientifically minded, with a compulsive need to understand everything, this argument didn’t hold up for me. Sagan writes that the more fervently we believe in something doesn’t make that thing demonstrably true. In this first bit of early wisdom alone, I was hooked on Sagan’s narrative. 

Sagan writes for those of us that can’t separate out the illogical aspects of religion and spirituality. She discusses her own upbringing, rooted in facts and data, and her family’s Jewish heritage, which led to intriguing holidays and rituals. The book, equal parts memoir and spiritual exploration of ritual across cultures, reminds reader that while these diverse cultural practices exist, they all seem rooted in similar celebrations of seasons, death, birth, marriage, puberty, etc. We are all tied together as humans by our inclination towards ritualization, which is a beautiful, unifying aspect of humanity. This ritualization, we then begin to learn, can take shape in truly any way imaginable. 

While the author is culturally Jewish, she and her parents were not religiously Jewish. Her husband was raised in a more Christian tradition, and Sagan discusses how they have built their lives together taking bits and pieces of ritual from their respective upbringings to form their own. She discusses her skittishness of using the “language of belief” - sacred, holy, miracle - to describe things in her life. But most importantly she discusses how to find meaning in your own way and, more importantly for me, how she uses what she knows to be true about our world to develop her own beliefs. For instance, even though she fasts for Yom Kipper that does not mean she believes her sins need to be brought before God, because she doesn’t believe in God, but instead she has found meaning in the ritual of fasting in her own way, a sort of way to check her privilege and be grateful for the food on her table. As someone with a highly logic-seeking mind, her frequent references to “I don’t do this because I believe it has mystical meaning, but rather because it is a creature comfort and a time to hold space for a specific moment” reframed the idea of ritual and spirituality in a way I had not previously considered. Quoting her late father, Carl Sagan, “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” and that alone contributes significantly to what she “believes” in. 

I could go on about this book likely forever, but I will just leave with this key takeaway: Ritual is subjective. It is about finding personal meaning and creating space for what matters to you. If you want to celebrate the blooming of the flowers each spring, throw a party for your daughter’s first period, make up your own Christmas traditions, or just enjoy coffee in bed with your partner on Saturday mornings, well that is your prerogative, all of this is made up anyway by animals who happened to evolve to seek patterns and mourn their dead. All of this, as Sagan often reminds us, has happened because of a random chance, and I personally, find that incredibly comforting and extremely lucky.