Religious Ritual

Allegra Goodman is a marvelous writer. Intuition, her last novel, was an uncannily accurate depiction of the slog of a science lab. It captured the epic tedium of empiricism, the way experiments are ambiguous even when they work. (And they so rarely work!) I bring her up now because she just wrote a gorgeous few paragraphs on religion, faith and doubt. The piece doesn't neatly slot into the religious wars of scienceblogs - Goodman isn't devout about anything - but it manages to express an idea that I often struggle to put in words. She begins by talking about the boredom of a child when confronted with religious ritual, the interminable boredom that is shul. But then, at a certain point, she begins to appreciate the strange songs and ceremonies:

And yet, inexorably, some of my own religion rubbed off on me. Might that be the way belief works for some people? Not a sudden epiphany but a long, slow accumulation of Sabbaths. No road-to-Damascus conversion but a kind of coin rubbing, in which ritual and repetition begin to reveal the credo underneath. As I grew older, I was drawn to poetry, and I began to study the haftarah--the weekly selection from the prophets. As I grew busier, I began to appreciate time away from the world. Services became a refuge. I did not need to rest when I was a child, because I did not work. I did not want to come inside, because the outside world was still entirely beautiful to me.