In defense of ceremony

Warning: I'm about to sound like a cranky traditionalist.

Yesterday's inauguration drove home the abiding and useful place of custom and ritual. In societies both primitive and advanced it has always been, and will remain the case, that human beings prefer established ceremony rather than spontaneity to mark our momentous occasions. Yet the average person today has (or is supposed to have) a negative reaction to ceremony while venerating the spontaneous. "Get real!" "Be yourself!" Now I'm all for celebrating diversity and the improvisational aspect of life -- for one thing, I love jazz! -- but even Miles Davis did his best improvising within set parameters. Paradoxically, artificial restraints (i.e., ceremony and ritual) enable us to attain the genuine. This is the argument made by Professor Thomas Howard in his essay The Power of Wise Custom from which I'm going to quote.

Howard writes that the late twentieth century prejudice in favor of impromptu self-expression and against anything that looks like ritual has resulted in "an impoverishment of human life so tragic that famine itself is not too strong a word to bring into play." This impulse has played out in society, but oddly enough has found its most fervent advocates within the church. The idea that public worship of the Triune God should be governed by custom, and even ritual, was a given for most of history, but not any more. I thought it was a brilliant idea for Rick Warren to end his invocation yesterday with the Lord's Prayer. I recall wishing that Donald Miller would have done the same in his much publicized prayer at the Democratic Convention. Leaving aside for now the differences between a Presidential inauguration and a public service of Christian worship (or whether we should even have an invocation at a civil ceremony), that moment reminded millions of viewers that the Our Father has been a normative part of corporate prayer across the centuries. I'm guessing, though, that at Pastor Warren's Saddleback Church, the Lord's Prayer and other "relics" of liturgical worship, are ordinarily not part of Sunday services.

Professor Howard argues that, no matter how hard we try, form and ritual in worship are impossible to avoid. Even the most freewheeling service or revival meeting has a predictable form and phraseology recognized by those in attendance. I can remember as a child being in meetings where one could almost predict the exact moment when Brother or Sister so-and-so would get up and run laps around the church. It wasn't written in an Order of Worship, but it might as well have been. The question is which forms of worship point us toward God and away from the subjective self. Howard also points out the distinction (often lost) between private and public piety. "The private (my own prayers and praises and devotional exercises) may take any of a hundred forms, depending on what I like, or want, or need. But, from the beginning, public worship has been ordered." Thomas Howard is Roman Catholic, I'm Presbyterian -- so we would disagree on the specifics of the ordering -- and so probably would you, but let's at least agree that our corporate worship loses something essential when "wise custom" is ignored. Coming before God can never be a casual or haphazard affair. It never was in Scripture. Toward the end of the essay Howard enlists C.S. Lewis to help make his case for the value of ritual. I love this quote from Lewis!

C.S. Lewis felt rather strongly in this matter (though he considered himself a man who did not naturally like ritual; it embarrassed him). Speaking of ritual, he wrote, in Preface to Paradise Lost, "those who dislike ritual in general--ritual in any and every department of life--may be asked most earnestly to reconsider the question. It is a pattern imposed on the mere flux of our feelings by reason and will, which renders pleasures less fugitive and griefs more endurable, 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."