This one comes from the coffee urn at the back of the hall, the same urn that stands at receptions and visitations, poured into whatever mugs are closest. Sip it at the pace of a room where no one is rushing to leave. Allow me one caustic aside: we still love one another, we have simply stopped building weeks that put us in the same room, and at some rites I look out at a half-full room. So I find myself wondering about something small and old: what a ceremony is for, now that loneliness has been named a public health concern.
In 2023 the United States Surgeon General issued an advisory naming loneliness and isolation a public health concern. The World Health Organization followed the same year with a commission built to treat social connection the way public health treats clean water or vaccination, as infrastructure, not a private feeling. Neither agency invented the problem. They named something a lot of people had already noticed on their own street, in their own family, in their own week.
I officiate a lot of endings and beginnings for a living: weddings, funerals, the not so few baptisms. What I notice from that vantage point is not that people have stopped loving each other. It’s that the structures which used to put people in a room together, whether they wanted to be there or not, have quietly thinned out. Fewer people belong to a congregation. Fewer belong to a union hall, a lodge, a standing card game. A funeral used to be one of the last events almost nobody skipped. Now I sometimes stand in front of a half-full room and wonder where everyone went. Most of the time it isn’t that they stopped caring. Nothing in their week was built anymore to make the caring visible enough to act on.
Ceremony is not decoration for a feeling people already have. It is closer to scaffolding. A wedding puts thirty people in a room to witness two people make a promise out loud, which means those thirty people are now, formally, on the hook to notice if the promise gets hard to keep. A funeral puts grief in front of witnesses instead of leaving it to happen alone in a kitchen at eleven at night. The ceremony does not fix loneliness. It does something more specific: it schedules togetherness on a day when nobody has to invent a reason for it.
None of this requires a theology degree to act on. Go to the visitation, even the inconvenient one. Go to the wedding of a coworker you’re not especially close to. Say yes to the invitation you would normally decline because you’re tired, since the tiredness is often exactly what the room exists to interrupt. The advisories and commissions are right that loneliness is a public health matter, and the correction for it is mostly this small and mostly this old: show up in a room, on purpose, on a day set aside for it.
That is most of what I think a ceremony is for. Not the flowers, not the program printed on nice paper. A room full of people who agreed, on a particular afternoon, to stop being separately busy and be together instead.