Modern Rituals – How We Worship Without Religion
The Last Notch of Disbelief (Part 6/10)
I still remember the first time I read Coleridge’s phrase: “the willing suspension of disbelief.” It felt like a neat way of explaining why we watch plays, read novels, or sit through films. We know Hamlet is not real, yet we choose to believe for a while. We know the stage magician has a trick, yet we still let ourselves gasp.
But in my own life, I’ve noticed that disbelief doesn’t just get suspended – sometimes it gets chipped away, and sometimes it disappears altogether.
When I watch a cricket match, I know it’s just a game, but for those hours, it becomes more than a game. When I sit through the Ramayana on stage, I know it’s an actor in painted face, yet in the moment, I respond as though it were Rama himself walking into exile. And when I’ve witnessed Theyyam in a village square, disbelief doesn’t just hang by a thread – it dissolves. The god is present. The crowd doesn’t act as if the divine were there. They bow, because for them, the divine is there.
It’s in moments like this that I realise Coleridge’s phrase doesn’t go far enough. The last notch of disbelief isn’t about suspension. It’s about surrender. There comes a point when I no longer hover between reality and fiction – I step fully into presence. The performance ceases to imitate the sacred and becomes the sacred.
And isn’t that what prayer does too? At first, prayer may feel like make-believe – words spoken into the air, chants repeated out of habit. But sometimes, slowly, the habit chips away at disbelief. A rhythm builds, and in its cadence, something shifts. For a moment, you no longer pretend to believe. You believe!
These are the moments I live for in ritual, whether secular or sacred – when the as-if becomes it-is. When the story becomes presence. When disbelief no longer needs to be managed, because it has melted into faith, awe, or sheer wonder.
That is the last notch. Not suspension, but dissolution. Not fiction, but embodiment. And for a while, I step into a reality where the ordinary and the sacred are one and the same.
