This winter has been the season of astonishing chats. It began with a neighbor who suggested that it was time for a cup of tea by a cozy fireside. Not two sips into teatime, the conversation turned unexpectedly to what goes on in our respective houses of worship. By the time the teapot was empty, we had worked our way to the conclusion that the elements of ritual — prayer, song and reading sacred texts — were, in both our cases, the same. My neighbor and I could probably switch houses of worship for a day and figure out what to do and when to do it without blowing our cover.

A few days afterward, a friend called from Utah. I was caught completely off guard when, out of the blue, she asked whether I thought ritual is the heart of religion. Blaise Pascal, the 17th-century French math whiz and Catholic theologian, prescribed ritual as a cure for those of us who are skeptics in the department of divinity. Enter your house of worship, go through the motions, follow the script, observe the ritual, he advised, and faith will follow. Really? Ritual is all it takes to find the pathway to religion? My Utah friend pooh-poohed the possibility.

The third chat proved my friend had been right to be skeptical. A former officemate chimed in from Seattle that Pascal may have been a math genius, but his ritual-plus-time-equals-faith formula has nothing to do with religion, he said. Ritual makes you observant, but being observant isn’t the same as being religious.

Now we were getting somewhere. No one is certain about the etymology of the word “religion,” but the word does suggest a relationship with the Latin verb “ligare,” meaning to bind or to tie. You would think, wouldn’t you, that the bond in question is the one that ties you to some divine power. You would be only half right, according to Seattle. You can’t get that far without help.

And that’s where the house of worship comes in. You don’t go there to worship in a community. You go there to worship with a community. You go there for the sense that, when you enter your house of worship, you have come home, you are welcome to your place in this space, you are where you are because everyone else has been waiting for you to get here. That’s because we can’t get from here to there unless we move beyond ourselves and reach out to pull all of us along. Until that happens, we can be as observant as we want, but that’s not a religion.  If you’re looking for that magic link to what lies beyond you, a whole community is waiting for you. All you have to do is walk through the door.

This winter may be confused as to the season it’s supposed to be, but three astonishing chats have made everything else as clear as crystal.

—Susan Rosenstreich