By Anthony Esolen.
"Tony," said a high school friend to me, and he meant it, "you've got the brains and the good looks, but you don't know how to dress." That was in our Catholic school, and the boys all wore jackets and ties, and kept themselves clean-shaved, too, or else our good and wise Dean, Mr. Buzad, would call them into his office where they could perform that operation with an old razor and cold water.
That came just at the end of a time when boys and girls took some care to dress in a somewhat formal way, at all appropriate occasions, lest they embarrass themselves. I see now that it was far more important than I knew.
These proprieties, in school, were small acts of submission to something greater than us, and acts of charity toward one another. Among the boys, because everyone wore a jacket and tie, no one stood out as obnoxious or aggressive in dress; and what we wore was a sign that we were at school, not on the ballfield, not at the pool hall, not at the beach.
Among the girls, because everyone wore the uniform, and because they were forbidden to turn it into a miniskirt, there was no costly and distracting competition; no one's uniform said, "I am richer than you are," much less, "I am more willing than you are."
Yet this sense of propriety, or of the goodness of ceremony, was being attacked incessantly in popular culture - or I should say by the engines of mass entertainment, crushing true human culture to rubble. Nor did the Church put up enough resistance. Many a religious order and many a priest went along with the times, mistaking informality for fellowship, and permissiveness for love.
That was not only incorrect. It hurt people, even when they were a part of the demolition crew and so were not aware of the loss. But that crew was led by the elites, not by the poor or the working class. For ordinary human beings are attracted to ceremony, as they are attracted to music and art: ceremony is the music of human gesture, extended to a congregation, an assembly, a platoon, a school, in the service of what is beyond them all, and that means, though it may be but implicit or as secret in their souls as a pearl in a box, in the service of the divine.
Ceremony has a power to unite that is unlike anything else in our experience. I recall here one morning at Saint John the Evangelist Church, in Stamford, Connecticut. I had given a lecture the evening before, and stayed overnight in the rectory. Before breakfast that day, some men of the parish came together, as was their custom once a week, for morning prayer. I joined them.
We knelt on the hard marble floor - it was a men's group, you see. We prayed, and then we sat down to hear a lesson on the day's reading, given by the shrewd Msgr. Di Giovanni, who had organized the group and knew what he was about. Then came breakfast. Among those in attendance were men of all ages and ethnicities and from all walks of life: the stockbroker, kneeling on that same floor next to the construction worker, equal before the word of God.
Now, if you asked people simply to show up for an informal talk, I doubt that the Hispanic man with his marked accent would have felt nearly as comfortable doing so. I doubt then that the strong friendships I saw quite clearly, across what otherwise divides us, would have developed.
It is precisely the ceremony that sweeps such differences aside, just as, when I was a boy, the men in military uniform, marching to our town's cemeteries early in the morning on Memorial Day to fire a 21-gun salute in honor of the deceased veterans, were visible not by what they did for a living nor by what each individual chose to wear, but by their common submission to the national honor.
When I am on the road and I attend Mass at a church I don't know, the more informal it is, the more the chatter, the less comfortable I feel, because behind that informality and chatter is the message, "This is how we celebrate Mass here, because we like it this way." And you eithe...
