Why ‘You’ve Got Mail’ is the Greatest Movie of All Time

by CASPER TER KUILE

The following is an excerpt from “The Power of Ritual” by Casper Ter Kuile

As a teenager, I was convinced: You’ve Got Mail was the greatest movie of all time.

Kathleen Kelly and Joe Fox, played by Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, meet online in the early days of AOL chat rooms. (We’re in 1998 here—think Monica’s “The Boy Is Mine” and Bill Clinton’s sex scandal.) All they know about each other is that they love books and they love New York City—nothing else. Not even one another’s real name. And through the back-and-forth emails that they send each other, they fall in love. They’re honest with each other about their secret fears and hopes and pain. They share everything that they don’t tell even their partners. This is the best of online anonymity—feeling intimately

And connected and safe were two things I didn’t feel at all.

I was a gay kid living in an English boarding school with fifty testosterone-fueled teenage boys. I stuck out like a sore thumb. A look around my bedroom, shared with three others, revealed all you needed to know. As you walked in there were posters of half-naked supermodels and racing cars to the right, pictures of the band Slipknot in their horror masks to the left, and then in my corner, a complete collection of Agatha Christie books and glitter gel pens.

Needless to say, I wasn’t the first boy chosen for the rugby team. Or the soccer team. Or anything, really. (I did join an aerobics class, breaking boundaries for all future queer kids in the school, I hope, but that’s another story.)

I felt lonely all the time. I would go on walks and pretend I was a hairdresser asking myself out loud about any vacations I was going on. I tried to ingratiate myself with the older boys by making them toasted Nutella sandwiches like a baboon trying to demonstrate submission on the savanna—please don’t hurt me, I will bring you food!

So, you can imagine why a movie about love and connection and joy meant so much to me. And it’s important to say that (spoiler ahead) the two characters in You’ve Got Mail don’t actually meet until the final—my least favorite—scene. The movie is about the promise of love and connection, more than the actual experience of it. I longed for that kind of connection. And a tiny part of me trusted the universe enough to know that perhaps, one day, ideally in glamorous Manhattan, I might find my own version of a literary multimillionaire who had a dog called Brinkley.

I’ve re-watched You’ve Got Mail many, many times. But it represents so much more to me than just a movie now, because I’ve made it more meaningful. I have very specific rituals for when and how to watch (always alone, always with a tub of Pralines and Cream Häagen-Dazs ice cream). It’s not an “Oh, what shall we watch?” kind of movie; it’s an, “I’m feeling lost and alone, and I need everything I’ve got to bring me out of this slump” kind of movie. Certain lines are inscribed on my heart, like mantras. Characters are totems of how I want to be—or not be—in the world. While for most people it’s just an-other rom-com, for me, You’ve Got Mail is sacred.

That’s what this book is all about—taking things we do every day and layering meaning and ritual onto them, even experiences as ordinary as reading or eating—by thinking of them as spiritual practices. After more than half a decade of research and thousands of conversations with people around the country, I am convinced that we are in the midst of a paradigm shift. That what used to hold us in community no longer works. That the spiritual offerings of yesteryear no longer help us thrive. And that, just like stargazers of the sixteenth century had to reimagine the cosmos by placing the sun at the center of the solar system, so we need to fundamentally rethink what it means for something to be sacred. Paradigm shifts like this happen for two reasons. First, because there is new evidence that refutes previously held assumptions—think of how Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species transformed our understanding of evolutionary biology and the historical accuracy of the Bible, for example. Second, because older theories prove irrelevant to new questions that people start asking. And that’s what is happening today. In this time of rapid religious and relational change, a new landscape of meaning-making and community is emerging—and the traditional structures of spirituality are struggling to keep up with what our lives look like.

I’ve written this book to help you recognize the practices of connection that you already have: the habits and traditions already in your bones that can deepen your experience of meaning, reflection, sanctuary, and joy—perhaps at a yoga class, or by reading your favorite books, looking at the setting sun, making art, or lighting candles. It might be through lifting weights, hiking nature trails, meditating, or dancing and singing with others. Whatever it is, we’ll start there by affirming those things as worthy of our attention, and we’ll notice how they make up a broader cultural shift in how we build connection to what matters most.

Religious traditions that were supposed to serve us have often failed. Worse, many have actively excluded us. So we need to find a new way forward. Drawing on the best of what has come before, we can find ourselves in the emerging story of what it means to live deeply connected. Even without espousing specific religious beliefs, the practices that we’ll explore in this book, whether daily rituals or annual traditions, can collectively form our contemporary spiritual life. These gifts and their wisdom have been passed on through generations. Now it’s our turn to interpret them. Here and now. You and me.

I’m so glad we’re in this together.

Click here to order “The Power of Ritual: Turning Everyday Activities Into Soulful Practices”

CASPER TER KUILE

Casper ter Kuile is the co-founder of How We Gather (a proto laboratory for spiritual innovation), and a Ministry Innovation Fellow at Harvard Divinity School.

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