Ports in the Storm : Family rituals help define who we are. And in today’s harried world, their predictability gives us needed ballast.

They are four adults who share a house in Boston, busy professionals with crowded lives. Days may elapse in which they barely see one another. Most weekdays, their television set sits idle in the living room.

But every Saturday night, the housemates--three men and a woman--adhere to a practice that has become near-sacred. First, they gather for their one group dinner of the week. Then, with an eager sense of expectation, they move into the living room . . . and watch “Star Trek, The Next Generation.”

Nothing--no crisis large or small--interrupts this household habit, says Chris Tuttle, a 25-year-old researcher at Boston University. “It’s our one chance to show our closeness.” With a laugh, he adds, “It’s our ‘Star Trek’ ritual.”

In the turmoil of a high-tech, far-flung world, rituals are appealing in large part because of their predictability. And as the notion of “family” broadens, experts say rituals become all the more important. Their very existence offers a rhythm to smooth life’s rocky edges.

People “are ritual-making creatures,” says Evan Imber-Black, a family therapist in New York and co-author of “Rituals for Our Times.”

“Rituals serve the seemingly contradictory functions of providing continuity with the past and of carrying us into the future.

“In the times we’re living in now,” she continues, “people need rituals as a kind of ballast.”

The occasion may be as culturally established as Thanksgiving or the Fourth of July. It may have religious significance--as in Christmas or Hanukkah. But families also develop their own rituals. Imber-Black recalls, for example, the family that made an annual celebration of the day a disabled child was able to move into her own apartment.

To illustrate the way rituals assume new meaning as families splinter and regroup, Janine Roberts, Imber-Black’s co-author, describes the father she observed sitting behind the wheel of his car each morning, eyes trained on a little boy walking square-shouldered up the steps of his school. As he approached the entrance, the child would turn to flash a “thumbs up” sign. Just as quickly, the father’s thumb would shoot up in reply.

School officials told Roberts, a family therapist in Amherst, Mass., that the boy’s parents had gone through a bitter separation. “So this small daily gesture,” says Roberts, “was their way of saying ‘Things are going to be OK, we’re going to make it.’ ”

In the case of Arleen Thomson, a hospital administrator in Leverett, Mass., who went through a devastating divorce, rituals became a coping tool.

“I needed to work hard to keep my own balance,” says Thomson.

Suddenly finding herself a single mother, Thomson adopted the habit of joining hands with her 10- and 12-year-old daughters for just a moment each evening at the dinner table.

“We use it as a moment of silence, to bring in the light,” Thomson says. “It’s our way of showing our love and appreciation for our family the way it is.”

Thomson says she introduced another ritual when one of her daughters expressed anxiety around bedtime.

“We put her fears into a cloud, and then let the cloud float away,” she says. The fact that only the mother and daughter shared this healing image enhanced its soothing quality, Thomson believes. “I think it’s helping us all to cope.”

In any family grouping, says Helen Coale, a family therapist in Atlanta, “rituals can solidify the unit.” Daily life is unconsciously organized around rituals, Coale says, “beginning with something as basic as whether you eat breakfast together or who gets the kids up in the morning.”

The woman who lives alone and routinely takes a bath by candlelight is performing a ritual, Coale points out. So is the childless husband and wife who agree that instead of fighting verbally, they will throw pillows at one another.

Each member of a stepfamily of Roberts’ acquaintance writes down his or her grievances at the end of each year. The family then burns the resulting mound of papers, “symbolically acknowledging their problems, then sending them up in smoke.”

Another family Roberts knows sets off firecrackers every July 21, the anniversary of the father’s heart transplant.

In the Leverett, Mass., home of Tom Levy and Helaya Priest, rituals offer connections to their previous families as well as acknowledgment of their new family. Priest and Levy are psychotherapists. Each had brought a daughter to their marriage four years ago, and each had suffered the death of a child in their former households.

Mindful of the complications in blending their families, Levy and Priest started married life with an annual “sisters’ ceremony” for their two daughters. The girls wore wreaths, traded rings and shared stories about sisters. As the girls’ relationship matured, the need for the observance ended--as did their pre-adolescent patience for it.

But another ritual initiated by Levy and Priest has grown in importance. Levy, who is Jewish, and Priest, raised in a Catholic home, decided that their special holiday would be the winter solstice. The party has now become a local tradition, an event at which friends gather to celebrate the seasons.

“I just feel that time and the years are passing by so fast that marking the seasons is really important,” says Priest, who suggested the idea of commemorating the day that the sun is at its farthest point from Earth.

“It was a way of creating our own world view--something that was spiritual but non-secular,” Levy says. “Instead of trying to make the old forms fit, we came up with one of our own.”

But if rituals help to bond families, they can also be sources of conflict. Coale says that “because of the disruption, stepfamilies are particularly vulnerable” in this regard.

“There can be more conflict because there are multiple experiences to consider and also more households,” Coale says. Rituals can also be problems “in blended families, when there are repetitive kinds of patterns that keep people stuck” in what may have been an unhappy past.

Another hazard, Coale says, is “when families get into a pattern of empty rituals, occasions that are meaningless, but the family insists on doing them anyway.”

Such inflexibility flies in the face of “one of the keys to rituals,” Coale says, which is that “they have to meet the changing needs of family members.”

Imber-Black, for example, remembers a family whose Christmas gatherings became strained and hollow after the death of an adult child. No one would talk about how miserable they all were until finally, “one of the grown children took it into his hands to make a picture album of the son’s life and to set it out where everyone could see it and talk about how much they missed him. It broke a huge taboo.”

Imber-Black says she marvels at how rituals can encompass “multiple realities.” She cites the obvious examples of ethnic and religious differences.

But sexual orientation can also assume a role in the rituals of new family configurations, Imber-Black says: “If they can’t go home to their own families of origin, a lot of gay and lesbian families form communities with other gay and lesbian couples and make them their families.”

Rituals may even provide a kind of moratorium on any disapproval over gender orientation, Imber-Black says. If it means spending a festive time with their grandchildren, she explains, even unyielding grandparents can often swallow their qualms over which partner in a lesbian household is playing Santa Claus.

But wherever there is tension among families, “we urge people not to try to make relationship changes at the holiday table,” Imber-Black says. The rule of thumb, she says, is “no major changes at the holiday table, unless you want to be remembered forever for the year you ruined Christmas.”

Holidays bring out the best and worst in ritual behavior, Imber-Black believes. “Whether it’s through food or family symbols, it’s when we find out what connects us to what has gone before us, and when, in a broader sense, we think about our connections to human kind.”

No better example exists than the traditional groaning table served up by Americans on the fourth Thursday of November.

“For most of us, the Thanksgiving ritual is pretty clear,” Imber-Black says. “You have to admit, it would be a little hard to think about serving hot dogs.”

The Purpose of Rituals

In a rapidly changing world--and in wildly fluctuating family groupings--rituals serve clear and specific functions, say Evan Imber-Black and Janine Roberts. The authors of “Rituals for Our Times” identify five primary purposes for rituals in today’s world:

* Shaping, expressing and maintaining relationships, during times of happiness as well as turmoil.

* Making and marking transitions, using familiar symbols, symbolic actions and repeated words.

* Recovering from relationship betrayal (such as an affair), trauma (including violence or abuse) or loss.

* Expressing beliefs and giving them meaning.

* Affirming joy and honoring life with festivity.