In this article, I explore how ritualistic practices can interrupt familiarity and offer the potential for human beings to enlarge the space of what seems possible. My reading of Mark Salzman's (2000) novel entitled Lying Awake created the commonplace within which my interpretations were developed. Through reading this novel, I was provoked to examine artifacts collected during a Catholic Retreat I attended as a high school student, and to wonder about how certain interpretive practices can create conditions whereby familiar perceptions can become interrupted.
              The writing that follows is not meant to be complete or necessarily self-explanatory. Although it resembles prose, I would urge readers to read it poetically. Like a poem, each section (I could say stanza) contains an image linked to an experience. Although the transitions between and among these sections are at times ambiguous, the images are meant to be associated with one another. My aim in this writing is to present readers with an interpretive challenge. Just as readers of poetry must do considerable inventing in order to evoke personal meaning from the reader-text relationship, this writing asks the reader to stitch together the images with personal knowledge.
              As I worked through various draft copies of this work, I felt compelled to offer concluding statements. I thought that perhaps I ought to reiterate points, particularly those that hinted at the importance of ritual, the significance of "the mysteries," or the value of meditation. In the end, however, I decided that if this text were to "enlarge the space of the possible" I had to resist the urge to complete the interpretive circle. Like the novelist who creates characters to enact ideas that eventually are controlled as much by the reader as they are by the author, I offer this writing as a partial representation of thinking that requires the reader's engagement before any conclusions can be drawn.

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