Is man religious? The testimony of anthropology, archaeology, history, mythology, and art would seem to oblige us all to answer Yes to such a question. Temples, altars, statues, tombs, frescoes, scrolls, mosaics, murals, barrows, ziggurats, minarets, inscriptions, dances, amulets, sacrifices, mumbo-jumbo: it would be a highly idiosyncratic view of man that reached any conclusion here other than that we are deeply religious creatures, quintessentially and incorrigibly so.

But do we not see the emergence in our own time of postreligious man, or a-religious man? Man-come-of-age was thought to be a useful category in the years following World War II, when the works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer were disseminated widely among theological colleges in Europe, England, and North America. The notion here was that it is all very well for man to be erecting great temples in honor of Athena, or invoking Baal with slaughtered bullocks, or kneeling, all gloved and brushed, for Matins in British India: but this all arises in the childhood of the race. To accept the yoke of our adulthood as homo sapiens is to come to terms with the bleak awareness that the only “gods” there are, are those of our own making. To be free is to take responsibility for one’s own existence and destiny. Human dignity derives from our having come to grips with our solitude. There is no one there speaking to the sibyl. There is no one there receiving all the supplications and invocations. There are no divine nostrils being regaled with the smoke of the incense and the burned fat. All of your Te Deums and Exaudis evaporate into the ether.

Timorous and unwilling souls recoil from the bleak tidings. But we men-come-of-age, we citizens of the Secular City, greet the news as the very herald of our enfranchisement. Today, for the first time, we stand tall. Now we take up our true task, as postreligious Man.

There is a massive sense in which the priests themselves must admit that such indeed would at least appear to be the case. The temples are emptying. Only a few heads, white and bowed, dot the nave. And outside bustles Contemporaneity, with its exhilarating agenda.

In other periods of history your skeptics and atheists were your odd men out. Zeno, Lucretius, Voltaire, Huxley, Russell: they stood out. But one has only to visit any faculty club, coffee shop, or quad in any university in the West or take soundings among the vastly urbane singles and couples hurrying out of Paris, London, Rome, or New York for the weekend, or to thread one’s way through the crowds in any high-school corridor to find oneself asking whether it might not after all be the case that you can have a species of human being that is not religious.

So far has the religious question (“Who art Thou?”) receded from contemporary consciousness that the term post-atheist might be brought into play. The question of whether there is a god is not a question for this generation. People aren’t atheists: they don’t admit, or even so much as dream, that there ever was a category God. No shouting match at Marble Arch will be stirred up over the matter from this generation. It cannot even be said that they are bored by the religious question. There is no such question.

This would seem to be the case in our own epoch. To be sure, millions of people still troop off to churches. And they are not drawn solely from the ranks of the valetudinarians. There is a whole breed of householders who, upon finding themselves raising children, have reanimated the religious question for themselves. There has got to be some center of gravity for human existence, they tell themselves. The din scattered abroad by the culture of rock music can’t possibly be a trustworthy guide toward authenticity. Perhaps the Church might help.

But this mass of people lives its life where such masses have always lived their lives: outside the pale of influence and power. It took only a few philosophes in France to create an entire culture of unbelief. It took only a few thousand Bolsheviks to replace tsarist Russia with atheist Russia. Thus it is in our own epoch. No one knows which are the chickens and which are the eggs: but affluence, drugs, rock music, feminism, “humanism”, deconstruction, the media, and various sexual lobbies, along with the phenomenon known as “multiculturalism”, have a generally antireligious power in modern culture that the great ballast of “the people” lack. In this connection, by way of an example of a tiny minority obliging a whole culture to conform to an ideology, one need only consult the grammatical rigors that have been clamped on our own culture by a small cadre of people: all broadcasters, ministers, academics, and public speakers have to pick their way gingerly along among the traps of he and she and persons, and so forth, at peril of awful litigation.

It might, then, be said of contemporary Western culture that it has been made postreligious, and even postatheist. All the signs would seem to suggest such a state of affairs.

Perhaps mankind itself is on the point of emerging, once for all, from its religious phase.

But then doubt is cast on the matter straightaway when we recall that we are speaking here of only a very small scrap of time—shall we say twenty years, from 1975 until the present? Who knows? Certainly the roots of unreligion can be traced back through mid-twentieth-century French existentialism, nineteenth-century scientism and German romanticism, eighteenth-century rationalism, seventeenth-century inductionism, and so on. The more you ferret, the farther back the quarry recedes. (I had a Jesuit polymath for a professor once who demonstrated fairly convincingly that he had located a crux in the figure of Petrus Ramus in the sixteenth century.)

But unreligion, if we may bring such a term into play, was very far from corralling the whole of humanity in any of those eras. Your ordinary citizen got on with his life, if not exactly pursuing sanctity with any great zeal, nevertheless vaguely assuming that God was in his heaven. Unbelief was the province of academia.

Now things look different. Has man himself undergone a massive overhaul at the hands of modernity, and may we now look for the final atrophy of religion?

Not altogether so. Pietas will not go away so easily. If you destroy our temple, we mortals seem to say, we will make for the woods. If you chase us from the woods and hound us into prison, we will cry out “Domine!” from our chains. On the gibbet we will sing out “Kyrie!”, even as you fix the great knot. And when you have eliminated all of us, so that no crone may be found left in any Sicilian or Balkan or Irish village, munching toothless gums and mumbling over her beads, and no psalms ring out from any convent, then . . .

Then some savage will creep out with punk and flint and kindle sacred fire somewhere. Or some woman will lift up a prayer as she keeps vigil at the fevered cot of her infant. Or some physicist at his chalkboard will stand back, eyes starting out at the symmetry he has stumbled upon, mop his brow, and whisper “O altitudo!” And finally, with a great roar, all the dragons and great deeps that you have lulled with your drowsy mantras appealing to Secular Man will leap and boil upon you in a titanic religious apocalypse.

Overblown rhetoric? Yes. But if we reached for the flattest possible prose, we would have to find a way to speak of the might, the ubiquity, and the depth of the religious impulse in us mortals. A scant and hasty few, especially theologians, may chase fatuity to the point where they announce briskly to us all, “Man has come of age! God is dead!” But the brave parade organized to celebrate the news trails off into the side streets presently. The very youth so ardently recruited by the no-god theologians are found buying amulets to hang around their necks and invoking the spirits of owls and polar bears. When Marxism finally keels over like a palsied brontosaurus, the celebration of the Divine Liturgy in the Cathedral of the Assumption in Moscow finds itself suddenly packed with the wards of the state who have been drilled for seventy years in the credo of unreligion. And, almost more piquant if possible, we find, now and again, but often enough to make an inquirer wonder, refugees from success itself—the men and women whose world has been the board room, the yacht, the Lear jet, and the chambers of academe, government, industry, and communication—decamping to ashrams and desert monasteries and therapists in the effort to simmer down, slough off illusion, and get in touch.

With what? Oneself? Many go to the desert or to the therapist with just such a quarry in mind. But “myself” turns out either to be eluding me, like the egg in Alice in Wonderland, or to be a less satisfactory prize than I had supposed, our own epoch having drilled into me the notion that the question “Who am I?” is the Golden Key.

Not so, says history. Not so, say the sages. Not so, say all the myths. And above all, not so, says religion. The quest for yourself leads to solitude. It is a vortex from which escape is almost impossible. On and on you will go, from therapist to medicine man, rifling into your viscera, swallowing the pills, identifying the syndromes and neuroses, discovering how you have been victimized and abused, and embarking on ever fresh techniques. But, like Palomides chasing his chimaera, never apprehending your quarry.

Alas! you mortal soul, the voice of the bard cries out to us. It is not yourself but rather the Apples of the Hesperides that you seek. It is Arcadia, say the poets. It is the Garden of Adonis. It is the Well at the World’s End. It is the Grail.

No, no, whisper the therapists: those are illusions, wrought from the fever of your own estrangement from yourself.

Wrong, say the bards and the prophets, the sages and seers: you lost yourself because you had, long before, lost the god. Who is he?

The answer, from far beyond the myths and oracles and pantheons, comes to us from the burning bush: I am that I am.

The ineffable Name, so holy as to place in great peril the man who even presumes to pronounce it. It is the name of the One above the many. Baal, Ashtaroth, Phtha, Ahura-Mazda, Zeus Pater: these must flee from his presence. It is I whom you seek, he says to all the priestesses and sibyls at their braziers. It is I whom you seek, he says to the savage with his punk and flint, to the woman with her child and the physicist at his chalkboard. I am the One who made you, who has redeemed you, and who seeks you like a shepherd among the crags looking for a lost sheep.

Jews and Christians agree that the One speaking to Moses from the bush is indeed the One. Oh, to be sure, there are other powers in the universe: but they are either obedient to him, like the seraphim and dominations, or they are in rebellion, like the devils. (Was Satan himself behind the cults of Baal and Moloch? Some of the Fathers of the Christian Church suspected as much. No one can say.)

And Christianity goes on to say that this One came among us at the Incarnation. In his Introduction to Christianity, Cardinal Ratzinger puts the matter this way:

The notion that God names himself, that it becomes possible to call on him by name, moves, together with “I am”, into the center of [St. John’s] testimony. In John, Christ is compared with Moses in this respect too; John depicts him as him in whom the story of the burning bush first attains its true meaning. All Chapter 17—the so-called “high priest’s prayer”, perhaps the heart of the whole gospel—centres round the idea of “Jesus as the revealer of the name of God” and thus assumes the position of New Testament counterpart to the story of the burning bush. . . . Christ himself, so to speak, appears as the burning bush from which the name of God issues to mankind. But since in the view of the fourth gospel Jesus unites in himself, applies to himself, the “I am” of Exodus 3 and Isaiah 43, it becomes clear at the same time that he himself is the name, that is, the “invocability” of God. The idea of the name here enters a decisive new phase. The name is no longer merely a word but a person: Jesus himself.[1]

All Christians agree on this. Jesus Christ is Immanuel: God with us. We find this affirmed by all Christian bodies.

In some of these bodies all the usual paraphernalia of “religion” has been jettisoned in the effort to distinguish Christianity from heathendom. Smoke, bells, muttering, bowing, holy objects, ceremonial: the house has been fumigated and we have, no longer the temple or the shrine, but the building understood as the structure where the faithful convene, not for mumbo-jumbo, but for the Word. Ceremonial belongs to the antiquum documentum, the “old” Covenant with Israel, where the One himself had dictated the elaborate furnishings of his sanctuary and had actually taken up his place mysteriously between the golden cherubim on the Ark. But when he became incarnate and lived and died among us and rose from the dead, why, then he put all the furniture of “religion” away. He does not dwell in temples made with hands; and there is no longer any need for altars. In His own self he has both fulfilled and put away all of that. Now, “we see Jesus” and have no need for anything supplementary.

Vast sectors of the Christian faith organize themselves along such lines. While there was a thin thread of tradition of this sort all through Christian history from the beginning, this outlook mushroomed into prominence five hundred years ago, at the beginning of the modern epoch, with the Protestant Reformation.

In its early stages, and to this day in many groups, the faith was articulate and robust. The Bible (sola Scriptura, said Luther) constitutes the center of gravity here, although in a deeper sense, of course, Christ himself is the center. The stress in Reformed Protestantism, and in its stepdaughter Evangelicalism (and, a fortiori, in Fundamentalism), is on the individual Christian’s conscious, intelligent, and volitional response in faith to the gospel of Jesus Christ, that is, to the summons put by St. Paul to the jailer in Philippi, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.” Christians of all descriptions have been made familiar with this rendition of the faith in the preaching of Billy Graham. Salvation is overwhelmingly a personal matter, having its inception in an explicit transaction and flowering in the individual who, with his inner man suffused by Scripture, associates himself with that great, loose, invisible global skein of other believers that Protestants call the Church.

In Protestant churches we find the worship exercises proceeding from this bibliocentric faith. The reading of Scripture, the singing of hymns, and the preaching of Scripture constitute the characteristic activities. The very architecture indicates the vision: row upon row of the people, ranged below a great lectern, seated most of the time, listening. Immense quantities of data—biblical, theological, and spiritual—form the staple, and all of it urged upon the faithful in an earnestly hortatory fashion. The whole point is that Scripture be taught and that the Word thus spoken be vouchsafed to each hearer and, in turn, translated into Christian fidelity and piety in those hearers’ beings.

What may look to Catholic or Orthodox Christians like a spareness even to the point of gauntness in Protestant worship is the very thing sedulously sought by Protestants for their public worship, for two reasons, really: first, they would urge that Christian faith is a wholly interior matter, and in Jesus Christ we have both the fulfilling and the putting away of all ritual and ceremony; and, second, Christian worship ought to be starkly distinguished from the steamy jungle of ceremonies we find in pagan worship.

In behalf of the Reformers, it should be pointed out that their sweeping away of the external paraphernalia of piety and their insistence that the holiness sought by Catholics through Masses and medals and pilgrimages and candles is to flower in the inner man alone and is therefore to be sought strictly by faith, that is, by interior exercises—their stress on this did, in fact, foster a vastly impressive rectitude, industry, and purity among their people (my own father is the icon of this for me) that not infrequently stood dramatically over against what looked to them like the laxity, not to say squalor, that seemed to obtain in Roman Catholic circles. It should also be pointed out that the Reformers were far from being the only protesters: St. Thomas More, Erasmus, and, long before them, Chaucer and the author of the enormous poem Piers Plowman railed savagely over Roman impurities. Ignatius Loyola was horrified at the dionysian romp he found in Rome.

It was the effort at a clean sweep in this connection that produced the nonceremonial character of Protestant public worship.

What does Rome say in the face of all of this? It is hard to argue against simplicity and purity.

Two matters might be put forward in Rome’s rejoinder here. The first is that Catholic ceremony, ritual, sacraments, and sacramentals, rightly understood, not only do not do violence to the faith opened up to us all in the gospel: all of this (again, rightly understood) is the very flowering of the faith. This point, in one sense, forms the rest of the content of this book so is not elaborated here.

Secondly, we mortals, homo religiosus that we are, will sooner or later give visible shape to what is in our hearts. Another way of putting this would be to point out the obvious, namely, that we are ceremonial creatures. What we find in the ceremonies of Roman Catholicism is nothing more than what we find ebulliently at work among us all, all the time.

Let us reach outside of religion for an example. Our awareness that something has happened with the birth of a child that reaches far beyond what mere obstetrics and gynecology offer takes external and ceremonial and even concrete shape: we have, on the one hand, cigars and popping corks and gifts, probably running to pink (a girl) or blue (a boy). On the other, a year later, when our memory (a wholly interior quality, it must be kept in mind here) recognizes the anniversary of the event, we give visible, external, even concrete shape to the matter with (1) cake, (2) candles, and (3) gifts again.

Somehow the interior and unseen (our consciousness of significance for a start, and then our memory) will “out”, so to speak. It cries out for a form and a presence in the world of ceremony.

Or put it the other way round: we humans, as opposed to the dogs and the crows, will mark our awareness of significance in a visible, external, and concrete way. And, more than this, our marking of significance seems to take on a formal—even a ritual and ceremonial—shape. That is, rather than simply leaving things with spontaneous exclamations of joy and congratulation, we all reach for the ritual (that is, precast text) of “Happy Birthday to You!” Somehow, oddly, this hackneyed and not especially impressive ditty, precisely because it is traditional, takes up our interior responses to the event, gives them an external shape, and thereby satisfies something in us that springs from the deepest mysteries of our humanness.

“Our humanness.” The dogs don’t organize their responses in this manner. No one has ever seen a terrier scampering along with a bone done up with a pink bow to bring to the neighboring shitzu on the birth of her litter. The dogs don’t even bark in this connection: certainly there is no synchronized barking, as in our own “Happy Birthday!”

It is we who do this, and we suspect that the oddity belongs to our humanity itself. We are ritual creatures. We are ceremonial creatures. We give concrete shape to that which wells up in our innermost being.

Otherwise how shall we give an accounting of all the elaboration with which we deck the joining together of a young man and woman in marriage—an event, surely, that exists solely in their interior feelings about each other and that takes physical shape in a form to be closely veiled from any public participation? And what shall we say of the obsequies with which all civilizations have decked death—again, surely an individual matter, to be taken care of as quickly as possible by getting the man or his ashes into the ground? But no, we insist: the matter won’t rest there. We must do something formal, something traditional. We will submit ourselves to the rites and ceremonies (slow processions and lowered voices) that our culture offers to us. The last thing we want is spontaneity. That will do for the outbursts of emotion that rush upon us as we see each other for the first time after the death in question. But then the tumult must be quieted. And the best (the only?) way to do this is to permit ourselves to be taken up by the formal ceremony. Paradoxically, it is this rigid structure, and not our heaving sobs, that summons us most accurately to our own noblest being.

The dogs don’t do this. We do.

This is a point on which the Protestants will agree with the Catholics.

There is nothing more than this at work in Catholic worship. What you see in the Mass is nothing but what we have agreed upon. It is the visible, external, concrete shape we Christian believers give to matters that reach to the very center of things and that cry out to be given such a shape.

But surely words are the form to be brought into play here, our Protestant inquirers might urge. It is interior faith that grasps the great panoply unfurled for us in the Gospel—of God’s majesty and holiness, of man’s sin, and of that Love which came down from heaven. And faith is most appropriately expressed in words.

Yes. In fact words keep us all close to the center of the mysteries, for it was a word*—the* Word—that spoke to us mortals in the gospel. So indeed, words are of the essence.

And how did that Word speak? Et verbum caro factum est. And the Word was made flesh. God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spoke to us in times past by the prophets hath in these last days spoken to us in his Son. And this Son not only spoke the words of God: he was (is) that Word. The Word becomes incarnate. Words tend toward concretion. Audible articulation and syntax do not exhaust the matter.

Hmm. The Catholic Church would believe that we need only consult our own humanity to discover this principle at work. We, for example, do not leave matters with a mere “How do you do”: we grasp each other’s hands. We will not leave things at “Good-bye”: we bring our hands into play with a form (physical gesture) and wave. We cannot leave things with a mere “I love you”: we embrace and kiss. We do not settle for the mere sound of our “No”: we shake our head.

And not only this. We very quickly come to admit that this oddity, of words finding embodiment in gesture and concrete form, is not simply convenient: it is inevitable. It belongs to our humanity, which is nothing if not physical. We are not ghosts. We are not pure intellects, like the angels. The very distinctiveness, and glory, of our humanness is bound up with the fact that we are physical.

The gnostics and Manichaeans deplore this. They want us to be disembodied. Flesh belongs to the lowest echelons of the universe, they tell us, and even to evil. We humans, trapped sadly in these bodies, strive to surmount the trammels of flesh and to escape into the ether.

No, say the Catholics. And no, say the Protestants. To decry our flesh is to set oneself over against the creation, which is to set oneself over against the Creator. We not only do not grudge our flesh: we extol it as the particular badge of our identity as Man, who is the crown of creation. This “incarnacy”—of intelligent spirit appearing under the modality of flesh—is said to exhibit the “image of God”, as this is not said even of the seraphim themselves, glorious as they are.

Word becomes flesh. The word of God, spoken into the abyss, took on solidity in the stars and worlds. Even light, thin as it seems, is not an abstraction or a mere idea evoked by the words of God. It is physical, although whether it is to be spoken of as waves or particles seems to be a matter the physicists find difficult to make clear to us laymen. And the prize “product”, if we may so speak, of the creating Word of God steps forward as Man and Woman. God’s words do not merely reverberate through the vaults of the universe, although they certainly do that: they lodge themselves in orbs and granite and water and cheetahs, and in Man. It is of the nature of words to do this.

In the concreteness of the Mass, we see this truth at work. We may see it in the color of the priest’s chasuble: red for martyrs, green for “ordinary time”, and so forth. We may see it in the postures of the congregation: they kneel briefly as they enter, thus articulating the truth that we mortals ought indeed to humble ourselves in the presence of the Mysterium Tremendum. Every object and action points to that which is true. To be sure, words also point to that which is true; and certainly words constitute the articulating par excellence of that which is true. Pantomime won’t quite suffice, rich as pantomime is. On this point again, the Catholics and the Protestants stoutly agree. There is no substitute for the verbal in all of its particularity.

But in the Roman Mass we find a shape, a texture, given to the corporate worship of Christian believers that issues directly from the mystery of the incarnate Word and bespeaks that mystery in every word, gesture, and object. The model here is not the classroom, or the lecture, or the town meeting, with a man presiding from a desk at the front and an audience ranged before him in rows. What we find, rather, is an enactment.

At this point the whole mystery opens up before us. For one thing, we must pause over this word “mystery”. It is a word not commonly brought into play when we speak of the weekly public gatherings of the Christian faithful among the heirs of strictly Reformed teaching, at least among those who look to Geneva, Zurich, Amsterdam, and Edinburgh for their roots. In the German Reformation, of course, Luther did preserve a shape for worship recognizably analogous to the Mass. But most Protestants would find it odd to hear someone referring to their Sunday morning activity as “the holy mysteries”.

The term is apt when speaking of Catholic and Orthodox worship, since these ancient and apostolic churches understand that the liturgy is an enactment. It is worth noting that Catholics and Orthodox do not speak of “a beautiful worship experience”. This is significant. They understand themselves to be gathering to do something, not primarily to experience something; they are a congregation, not an audience. The ancient Church teaches that in the act of worship we enter into the mystery of Christ’s own self-offering at the Cross, which he opened up to his disciples at the Last Supper, and which he inaugurated as the pattern for the Church’s worship for as long as history lasts.

On this point great confusion has prevailed for the five hundred years since the Reformation. The general notion outside the Catholic Church (and, alas, among millions of the faithful themselves, it seems) is that in the Mass Jesus Christ is sacrificed again and again.

No, says the Church. Here is how the Catechism of the Catholic Church speaks of the matter:

God’s saving plan was accomplished “once for all” by the redemptive death of his Son Jesus Christ (571). . . . This sacrifice of Christ is unique; it completes and surpasses all other sacrifices (614). . . . When the Church celebrates the Eucharist, she commemorates Christ’s Passover, and it is made present: the sacrifice Christ offered once for all on the cross remains ever present (1364). . . . In the sacrifice of the Mass they make present again and apply, until the coming of the Lord, the unique sacrifice of the New Testament, that namely of Christ offering himself once for all a spotless victim to the Father (1566).

It is crucial to recall that the word the Lord used at the Last Supper when he said, “Do this for a remembrance of me”, is the word anamnesis, which signifies, not a mere remembering of a past event, as we remember the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, but rather a remembering that is a making present. This crux lies at the root of the Protestant confusion over the Mass as “making present” (not repeating) the unique sacrifice of Calvary.

This is a point of such weight that we may be excused here for quoting at some length the explanation given for the matter by F. X. Durrwell:

That death which St. Paul speaks of and Christ speaks of, is Christ’s death, the one and only death, sub Pontio Pilato. The Mass is Christ present in his one and only redeeming act, the sacrifice of Calvary becoming a reality of our lives too.

“How can it be a sacrifice?” ask Protestants. There is only one sacrifice of Christ: “By his own blood he entered once into the holies, obtaining eternal redemption” (Heb 9:12). “By one oblation he hath perfected forever them that he hath sanctified” (Heb 10:14). There is one of the key ideas of the epistle to the Hebrews: the sacrifices of the Old Testament had constantly to be renewed because they were always ineffective, incapable of “sanctifying” man, of immolating him to himself and bringing him into the life-giving holiness of God. Christ, on the other hand, has offered a single sacrifice, perfect and sufficient, the sacrifice of the end of time, which fulfills and crowns all mankind’s longing for salvation and sacrificial actions. By his death, Christ entered once for all into the sanctuary of divine life, and takes with him all his followers.

The Protestants are therefore quite right in their dogged affirmation of the absolute uniqueness of Christ’s sacrifice. There is but that one, which took place once and for all, never repeated, never repeatable. Yet the Church believes that the Mass is a sacrifice. She believes it because of Scripture, and because of her own uninterrupted and most ancient tradition, through which the Holy Ghost speaks. . . . She is faced with two apparently contradictory truths: the fact that Calvary is unique, and the fact that the Eucharist is a sacrifice. . . .

Of these two truths, the prime and essential one is the uniqueness of Christ’s sacrifice; the Church must hold this in all strictness. The Mass cannot be another sacrifice, a reproduction or repetition, a second, third or hundredth sacrifice following the one offered under Pontius Pilate. If it is a sacrifice, it must be that one and only one, made two thousand years ago, never repeated, never repeatable, but mysteriously brought into our lifetime.[2]

All of this is present in the Mass. Hence, Catholics do not see their coming together for worship as a “meeting”, with the principal feature being the sermon. Rather, they believe they have come, in a mystery, to the frontier that lies between the seen and the unseen, or between heaven and earth—as we all do when we pray, for example. No Christian will balk at the notion that he is, at one and the same time, kneeling beside his bed and also standing before the Throne of Grace. Faith is full of paradoxes like this, which appear to outsiders to be contradictions and hence nonsense but to believers to be mysteries.

But we were speaking of the obvious differences between Protestant worship services and the Mass, the most immediately obvious one, to a casual glance, being the difference between a meeting, on the one hand, organized around the idea of people listening to a lecture and, on the other, an enactment. And enactment, of course, takes ritual and ceremonial form—a principle we see when we mortals come up to the great moments of human existence, namely, birth, marriage, and death, and attempt to “enter into” the mysteries at stake in these events. We do not settle for speaking to each other about these things. In some profound sense that belongs to our humanity itself, we know that we must “enter into” the significance of the events, and this entering into, inevitably, takes ritual and ceremonial form.

There may be some unhappy sect somewhere that sticks rigorously to the exclusively verbal and propositional, but such a state of affairs is almost unimaginable to the rest of us. Protestants and Catholics alike energetically play out the ritual and ceremonial ordering of things.

Protestants? Yes. It is worth noting that, despite their laudable stress on word, nevertheless Protestants cannot live without ceremony. The irony here, of course, is that there is very little comfort given in this connection from their theology and preaching. To hear some teaching, one might indeed conclude that “the Word” alone is sufficient to our humanity and that therefore Christian worship must restrict itself to the reading, singing, and preaching of this Word.

But then, of course, their ministers show up in academic regalia in the pulpit. Pure ceremony. Velvet strips, billowing sleeves, and brilliant color: nonverbal ways of saying, “I have a Ph.D.”, or at least, “I am an educated man, and it is appropriate for us all to be reminded of this as I stand before you teaching.” Or again, even among the groups that wish to pursue the greatest possible simplicity, namely, the Quakers, the Brethren, and the various Anabaptist denominations, a palpable sense of ceremony presides over the coming together of the people. Things get quiet, for one thing: a nonverbal manner of saying, “Stillness is of the essence as we mortals present ourselves before the Most High.” And a strict order is observed: even in the assemblies that allow for anyone “moved by the Spirit” to rise and offer what is on his heart, the gathered believers would be greatly put off their stride if someone rose and suggested ring-around-the-rosy, or a clambake. Not here. Those wholly praiseworthy activities do not come under the strict rubric that dictates what we may and may not do here. Indeed, even in the groups that extol spontaneity as the very cockade of worship and propose that the clapping of hands, the calling out of ad hoc exclamations of joy, and even jigging are all acceptable—even these groups would draw the line at someone’s proposing gymnastics or cigars. Not according to the ceremonial.

Certainly in the sectors of Christendom that teach the overriding primacy of word over all else, even in such circles, there comes an unabashed acknowledgment of the ceremonial principle on special occasions. Some Protestant churches have moved the once-central pulpit to one side, thus exposing the Communion Table and thus invoking the ceremonial rather than the strictly verbalist principle. Others have restored candles. Crosses (rarely crucifixes) now appear in many Protestant church buildings. And at Christmas and Easter, holly and lilies overleap the verbalist rubric in a most embarrassing fashion. Good Friday itself has, timidly, edged its way back into some non-Catholic purlieus, with things going so far as to exhibit the cross draped in a black scarf (this outside the evangelical Baptist church near my home).

We mortals are ceremonial creatures, and the most sparse sect cannot go forward on terms other than these. The classroom will not do. Indeed, we cannot so much as open our mouths in a psalm or song without giving the entire game away: tune and melody and rhyme lie wholly outside the circumference of the strictly verbal (even though rhyme, of course, is a property attaching to the sound of those words). Song takes the verbal up into the region of ceremony and lends to words the wings they cry out for.

In one sense, nothing more than this need be put forward as the rationale for the ceremonial aspects of the Roman Mass. In it we see what belongs to our very humanity taken up into the service of Christian worship, which, along with birth, marriage, and death, reaches to the profoundest depths of that humanity.

This, then, brings us to the threshold of a further consideration. The Roman Mass is not simply “a” ceremonial ordering of Christian worship, as though additions had been affixed to the matter by various “coordinators of worship” over the years. Nor has the topic the smallest connection with taste: it will not quite yield to the remark, “Oh well, some people like elaborate worship ceremonies, and some of us like simplicity.” That is irrelevant. There is nothing, actually, simpler than the Mass, since everything is explicit. No nuances or subtleties veil things. All is stark and apparent. But this brings us up to the next threshold.