Kaitlyn Finchler
Contributing Writer
As times are changing, so is religion and its traditions. While some may look at renewing and revitalizing tradition as losing its meaning, it can also mean a fresh start.
Wendy Horwitz, former pediatric psychologist and author of Milkweed and Honey Cake: A Memoir in Ritual Moments, will deliver her lecture at 2 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy for the Week Nine Interfaith Lecture Series theme, “Past Informs Present: Traditioned Innovation in Spiritual Life.” In her lecture, she aims to discuss rituals by sharing her own experiences.
“Overall, I’m going to use my own stories, because I’m a storyteller (and) I’m an essayist, to examine three aspects of ritual in modern life,” Horwitz said. “One is the very definition of ritual — What are the boundary conditions? What are
the parameters that contribute to what we mean when we say there is a meaningful ritual?”
Horwitz said she will also focus on how people revise ritual to suit either a “current zeitgeist” or changes in their own lives to “keep something fresh and keep it meaningful.”
“The other thing is, not only in terms of a zeitgeist, but in the lifespan in our own development, how is our relationship to the ritual life changing?” Horwitz asked. “What does it look like, perhaps, when we’re younger? How does that change, and what does that mean for implying how we make those revisions?”
Along the course of the lecture, she said she’ll raise “a lot of questions,” such as to what extent people can enter each other’s virtual communities and spaces in ways that maintain the integrity of those spaces, as well as enrich the community and the person as a guest or witness.
Although her career was largely as a child clinical psychologist, Horwitz said she’d always been a writer and has worn “several professional hats.” She was a history major in college and trained in graduate school for child clinical psychology.
“But, all the while, I was engaged in the humanities and indeed discovered late in my teaching career, leaving the clinical realm, that there was a field called health humanities — which is related to narrative medicine,” she said. “Medical humanities, related fields, which marries or combines the health professions with the humanities, and I realized that I’ve been doing that all along.”
Horwitz explained the career change as an “emergence of and an acceptance that” she wasn’t into doing social science research anymore and “gradually” switched lanes.
“It was the kind of embrace of, quite a while ago, personal narrative and nonfiction, memoir writing and essays and other travel pieces and stuff, realizing that one could do that and have this complex career going on,” she said.
Her lecture will also be based around her book Milkweed and Honey Cake, which is largely centered around Jewish tradition and heritage, with two caveats.
“I think there are broad applications that don’t disturb the integrity of my particular background,” Horwitz said. “The second caveat I would make is that … I talk about and write about the idea that there are rituals in life — at least in my experience and observation — that are fully in the nonreligious realm, and I tell stories about that.”
By revising rituals, she said this refreshes tradition, rather than make it lose its meaning or purpose.
“My stories, I think, reflect this idea that we can revitalize, we can renew and refresh through that provision,” Horwitz said. “I think there’s a balance there. There’s definitely a balance that may be challenging to strike, but it’s definitely there.”
Her lecture is not intended to be geared as a “how-to” or “self-help” talk, Horwitz said; her hope for the audience is to “perhaps notice something new in their own practices if they have them, or perhaps, in their communities or in nature, reflect on a different way of thinking about it. If they just enjoy listening to the stories, then I feel it’s fruitful as well, because I think stories can resonate with people, and they can carry that with them.”
