Chapter 37: The Humility of Ceremony
THE HUMILITY OF CEREMONY
AMERICANS have a nostalgia for ceremony. Democracy gives us little chance for pomp and none for splendor, but you are getting a taste of those in England. Your letter yesterday told of watching the Trooping of the Colours.
“Oh, it was so regal, so majestic!” you wrote. “All those guards and bands and cavalry. The colors and costumes were magnificent. The queen mother came first in a carriage. We must have stood for three hours. A pushing, shoving mob. If it’s exciting to see the queen, imagine what it will be like to see Christ the King!”
The Bible takes patriarchy and monarchy for granted. It is natural that these notions appeal strongly to the imaginations of those who have grown up with the Bible. It is also natural that some should question whether these are purely cultural and political and therefore purely temporal notions, or whether there is something in them that has to do with eternal Reality. Are pomp and ceremony utterly without meaning, merely the curious but interesting relics of a quaintly unself-critical era? The psalmist says, “Be not afraid when one becomes rich, when the glory of his house increases. For when he dies he will carry nothing away; his glory will not go down after him. Though, while he lives, he counts himself happy, and though a man gets praise when he does well for himself, he will go to the generation of his fathers, who will never more see the light. Man cannot abide in his pomp, he is like the beasts that perish.”
Kipling wrote:
The tumult and the shouting dies,
The captains and the kings depart.
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
In a few weeks you will be home again, and we will have a couple of weeks to talk over your wedding plans, to decide on things like the guest list, where the reception will be, and what menu you’d like, and to buy a wedding dress. In your father’s biography you read his views on weddings: “The vainest, most meaningless forms . . . no vestige of reality. The witnesses dress for show. The flesh is given all the place. We Fundamentalists are a pack of mood-loving show-offs. . . . It is no more than an expensive tedium.” But he wrote that when he was twenty-one years old. If he had lived longer than the twenty-eight years he was given he might have come to understand the meaning of ritual, a thing utterly foreign to his upbringing.
You want a beautiful long white dress and the traditional veil. You want music and flowers and a train of attendants. Not to prove that you are a “mood-loving show-off.” To us, sign and sound and symbol and movement are a part of worship and celebration, and you want your wedding filled with the visible, tangible, audible signs of the invisible and transcendent meaning.
Is pomp incompatible with humility? You have heard what C. S. Lewis said in his Preface to Paradise Lost:
Above all, you must be rid of the hideous idea, fruit of a widespread inferiority complex, that pomp, on the proper occasions, has any connection with vanity or self-conceit. A celebrant approaching the altar, a princess led out by a king to dance a minuet, a general officer on a ceremonial parade, a major-domo preceding the boar’s head at a Christmas feast —all these wear unusual clothes and move with calculated dignity. This does not mean that they are vain, but that they are obedient, they are obeying the hoc age which presides over every solemnity. The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender’s inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for everyone else the proper pleasure of ritual.[12]
An acceptance of universal order shapes the imagination and prepares the ground, it seems to me, for the appreciation of ceremony. We see in earthly order a reflection of the heavenly. We find in traditional ceremonies the occasion to submit to the larger truths which they represent. Your wedding will be not merely an excuse to get all our friends and relatives together to “share our joy” (as some of the unceremonious wedding invitations nowadays coyly put it) in the particular uniting of you and Walt, but a celebration of marriage, of an institution ordained of God at the creation of man, to be entered into with solemnity as well as with joy. The ceremony provides the form, the ritual which (to quote Lewis again) “renders pleasures less fugitive, . . . which hands over to the power of wise custom the task (to which the individual and his moods are so inadequate) of being festive or sober, gay or reverent, when we choose to be, and not at the bidding of chance.”[13]