I’ve always been a social creature. Not necessarily overly extraverted, but social in a comfortable situation. I draw strength from gathering with friends over food, drink, and vibes. Over the last year or so, I’ve been thinking about the experience of gathering, and why it has such deep meaning for me. Maybe it’s a post-COVID quarantining/aging dad realization born from the fact that the further I drift away from regular gatherings with dear friends, the less I feel like my authentic self. The less shared focus of meaning with friends I engage in, the more I feel, sort-of, inauthentically given up to others. Of course, from a day-to-day perspective my family buoys my life. But there’s a special opening up that happens for me in special social gatherings with my closest friends. Something that makes it sacred.
I think many of us experience this sense of the sacred among loved ones without thinking about it, or even characterizing it as such. Those of us lucky enough to experience this flow-state with friends or family are usually just living in the moment and not typically trying to understand it. A wonderful gathering is not uncommon in concept, and in fact I’ve experienced it in incredible ways while immersed in other cultures.1 When my wife and I bought our first home we were excited to entertain. It’s a feature of bourgeois lifestyle that we swooned over as we prepared to marry and settle down. 10 years later, we still love to do so (although maybe at a slower speeds!).
It may be different for those among us who may be less extraverted in nature, or perhaps more closed off to anyone outside an inner circle, but hopefully even these personalities experience this phenomenon with the few people they keep close.
But if gathering with friends and family is so common, one might ask what is so profound about an everyday-like occurrence. Or some may say, ‘yeah, it’s great, so what?’. But when I try to understand the phenomenon of my experience of being in a world where everydayness is the norm, I have become aware of the worlds that open up to me in those moments. And I have come to understand them, perhaps, as sort-of the Why to our (or at least my) need for gathering.
To paint the picture, I’ll use the example of the phenomenon I experience while gathering with a core group of friends, although I’m aware of this sacred experience in several settings with other people in my life. Most of this specific group of four friends are in the DC area, but two of us are spread around. We are accustomed to regular gatherings, both virtually and among one another. We do Zoom happy hours on a regular basis, we group chat daily, we plan occasional trips all over the country and the world. We even gather with our daughters of similar ages in order to get them together and attempt to cultivate their life-long friendships in extraordinary settings where memories can’t help but be cemented. The agenda is simple, it is centered around settling into the vibes of the beverages and the long friendships.
These gatherings are so sacred to me that my wife tends to recognize when it has been too long since I’ve spent focused time with these friends and she pushes me to get a visit in, knowing it benefits my spirit greatly (makes me less grumpy). I am the furthest flung so it typically means getting to DC and foisting myself on my friends’ families, but it has become a happening that is required several times per year. Right now we’re planning for our second beer traipsing through Europe, in fact.2
As mentioned, these times gathered with friends are what constitute the most sacred part of life for me. There is probably, at this stage in my life, nothing comparable that draws me in more than these moments. It’s an uplifting in mood that I can feel focuses everything within me and brings out an understanding of what matters that is typically hidden in the background of my life on most days. In these moments I can be my truly authentic self with a group like this, worts and all. Even as we fire off jabs my wife finds abhorrent for friends to say to one another, the shared mood overtakes us all.3 The gathering is articulating the culture we have grown to share over so many years.
It’s as if during the moment of these gatherings there is a barrier built to hold back temptations and distractions and the moment finally wins out. The mind is focused only on receiving the mood and vibes. It is a phenomenon that seems to be given to us rather than imposed, no matter how bad one of our takes me be at any given moment.
Typically, we are simply thrown into what is already underway in life. We get caught up in the routine and day-to-day. On any random day we may get emotionally tackled by that feeling that we have lost ourselves in the everydayness of things, that we are not in control. We may go through times feeling disoriented or estranged. Sometimes I can get more focused on an outside perspective of myself, simply how I may or may not be perceived by others. This brings me a feeling of being a bit lost, of not being my own self. Our society of technological Capital where we see ourselves, nature, and others as resources, where we are so focused on achievement, takes its toll on our mental health and existential understanding of human being. This creates real consequences for the spirit.
But in these gatherings, it’s as if a truth about being a human in this world is unconcealed. This truth awaits a moment like a celebratory gathering to come out of concealment and to show a veritas in life. It comes into its own and shows us that this is the way to be that is fulfilling and that focuses us as humans. These moments show that the hidden truths are not hidden at all, but revealed through this type of cultural engagement, through the gathering with others.
By opening myself up to the gathering and the common mood, I am automatically showing an authentic side that I do not always experience in my day-to-day life. I am being myself, I am owning myself. I am taking part in a moment that transcends what I can give to it. This seems to me one of the highest forms of human being I can achieve as a normal person in the world, and these moments draw me in to act at my best.
There’s even greater fulfillment in the sharing of the fact that the moment is shared. When we are all in the moment, talking shit, reminiscing, eating, drinking, sometimes disagreeing fervently or defending one another robustly, we are all aware that we are sharing in this focused meaning, and we are seeing the truth that is unconcealed. It’s really an awesome thing, a phenomenon that keeps us continuously organizing toward it.
On one trip last year, sitting in a bucolic Wisconsin lakeside with out daughters all around swimming and playing as we participated in the joy and gazed around, one friend mentioned that he organizes his entire life around these moments. All his work, plans, and decisions are all in an effort to find himself immersed in the vibes, right there, right then. Those exact vibes, those focused meaningful gatherings. It was the simplest way to sum up what I’m describing here. Perhaps he isn’t thinking of it completely phenomenologically, but he gets it.
All in all I can’t help but feel gratitude for it. Not thankful to any entity but just gratitude in life, I guess. I’m not sure what brings that practice out of me, or why these moments are so sacred for me specifically, but it’s there. And I think it helps to create a life well-lived. The abyss remains, it does not disappear, but the gathering opens up a space for possibilities and conceals the abyss for the moment, along with anything else incompatible with that moment.
The moods that lift us up during these gatherings will always run their course and then fade away. The clearing will disappear and that which was concealed during those moments will come back into perspective. Even in these moments the clearing can come in and out of focus as life’s distractions do their best to break the barrier of the mood. It is such a sacred event because it’s so hard to be authentic in this world. It is because it is hard and that life is absurd that these moments are so sacred. In our modern lives we cannot help but stare into the abyss more regularly then we are afforded the luxuries of these gatherings, but that’s what is to be human in this world.
I’m trying to learn to seek this authenticity in more common gatherings such as nice moments with small groups, or quickly catching up with a friend. I seek the authenticity it brings me to be in the world with them.
But the longing to return to my friends is everlasting, and that longing helps me to build and plan more experiences and more gatherings because it is fulfilling and makes life worth living in the face of its absurdity and nothingness. As we live our lives on the march toward an eventual end, this is currently one of the most ideal examples of fulfillment I can describe and experience. Try it, make note of the value it brings, seek it, and be grateful for it.
Maybe more so in cultures that haven’t been nearly completely subsumed by our modern technological understanding of being human like we have in the West
I think it’s easy to peg this as a privileged fact of our lives because it is. We have all used various amounts of will to get where we are today, but many of us have also benefited from a lot of luck too. Our individual senses of struggle are varied, with some facing more tragedy and less luck than others, but so far we are in no way prevented from sharing these profound experiences.
I think it’s important to say that this phenomenon I’m describing can be scary to some, or in certain contexts. Perhaps if I were sitting at a table with MAGA conservatives, I might find their focused sacred energies abhorrent. Or if I were an individual at a political gathering where this sense of shared community brings out uncontrolled violence or hate speech (something in our headlines more again these days) it could be a very frightening and dangerous phenomenon to experience. I’ve been in both of these scenarios and there is a sense of anger and fear, a sense of wanting to withdrawal both mentally and physically, immediately. This is when this great focus can be harmful to others, and even the person overwhelmed to take part it in.
Perhaps in these sacred moments it’s important to be grounded in the fact that we should never lose our sense of maturity to act with the courage to prevent a totally unsafe and detrimental overcoming of one’s reason. It’s easier said than done in many ways, but it is a maturity that while feeling our sense of meaning in a world may overwhelm us, we should be careful to respond in the appropriate way. I can admit that this isn’t always as clear these days, as a riot might even be something to be justified based on brutal treatment, for instance. But these conditions tend to be outliers for most of us, and it’s useful to seek this philosophical maturity and resist the power of community at times.