The board game from 1956 that is saving me

Conventional wisdom holds that you shouldn’t blog about what you do with your partner in bed. But I’ve always been a rebel.

Just about every night, right before Ashley enters sleep mode, we hop into bed with (one of our two copies of) Rack-O, an old and almost pointless board game. Technically it’s a card game. The classification and rules of the game don’t really matter, but for the curious: it’s a game based largely on luck, and each player tries to replace numbered cards in a plastic rack until the numbers are in ascending order.

One of the jokes Ashley and I have always had about Rack-O is that she loves it and I hate it. And truly, in an objective and meticulous ranking of games, I would place it very far from the top of the list. But here’s the thing: I love our nighttime tradition.

I may hate Rack-O, but I really appreciate Playing Rack-O with Ashley in Bed Almost Every Night. I’m not sure I completely understand why, but the quest to figure it out is the occasion for this blog post.

There are probably several reasons this little habit feels salvific, and perhaps chief among them is that it’s a ritual. I’ve had a funny history with rituals. I was always (and, truth be told, still am) suspicious of religious ceremonies and rites because they were full of what I deemed to be “empty ritual.” It was why so-called high church—Catholic, Episcopal, and other smells-and-bells traditions—never appealed to me. And still don’t. But outside the walls of churches, I was a ritual fiend. I had a Valentine’s Day tradition of predicting friends’ romantic futures. I hosted an annual all-night game party each December.

In other words, I think what I was actually doing in my 20s was sorting out which types of rituals are meaningful to me and which types aren’t. But at the time I came to view all ritual as a bad thing—and just ignored the fact that I had instituted some fun ones in my life.

Playing Rack-O at night is, on one level, a good ritual for particular reasons: it’s quality time with Ashley, it takes place in a bed so comfortable we call it The Cloud, it allows for debriefing the day we just had. But on another level, it shares the goodness of rituals the world over: it’s reliable, it’s consistent, it facilitates relationship and identity, it brings a sense of normalcy and control in an often chaotic world.

In case you share some of my hesitation over the concept of ritual, there are two quick reads from the editors at the Christian Century that you may want to check out:

• “We need ritual for our collective grief”

  • Going through the motions together can move us toward healing.

• “Fighting climate change one small act at a time”

  • Light bulbs and solar panels won’t solve the climate crisis. They’re signs of something greater.

  • (This one isn’t about rituals per se, but I think it makes the case that even if a ritual is one of the empty ones I used to criticize so much, it can still hold meaning as a symbol or sign.)

Which tradition in your life could use some more attention or energy? Is there a new ritual you’d like to explore in your daily, weekly, monthly, or annual rhythms?