Amo, Amas, Amat:
Christianity and Culture
Divisions between the Churches prevent them from giving a common witness to life, justice, peace, human dignity and solidarity in a world which urgently needs such a common testimony.
By Robert Louis Wilken
About the Author: In a career that has taken him to professorships at the Lutheran Theological Seminary, Fordham University, the University of Notre Dame, and now the University of Virginia, where he holds the William R. Kenan Jr. Chair in the History of Christianity, Robert Wilken's contribution to the study of early Christianity is both substantial and multifarious. His pioneering work in the social and intellectual history of the early church is well known, and his many books, such as The Christians as the Romans Saw Them are widely acclaimed. His other publications include The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought, John Chrysostom and the Jews; Rhetoric and Reality in the Late Fourth Century, Judaism and the Early Christian Mind and The Myth of Christian Beginnings. He is an acknowledged leader of patristic scholarship in the United States, and his books reflect his interests in the history of Christianity and of Christian thought. His most recent book, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God, provides a fascinating look at the thinking of early Christian writers such as Celsus, Origen, St. Augustine and Gregory of Nyssa.
Last spring on a trip to Erfurt Germany, the medieval university town famous for the Augustinian cloister where Martin Luther was ordained to the priesthood, I learned that only twenty percent of the population professed adherence to Christianity. When the topic of religion came up in a conversation with a young woman in a hotel lounge I asked her whether she was a member of a church. Without hesitation she replied: Ich bin Heide. I am a heathen.
It is hardly news to discover pagans in the heart of western Europe where once Christianity flourished. The steep decline in the number of Christians has been underway for generations, even centuries. What surprised me was the complete absence of embarrassment in her use of the term “heathen”. She did not say she no longer went to Church, nor that she was not a believer. For her, Christianity, no doubt the religion of her grandparents if not her parents, was absent from her horizon. Two days earlier my train had stopped at Fulda where St. Boniface, the apostle to the Germans, was buried. Boniface had gone to Germany to convert the heathen, and in a spectacular and courageous gesture felled the sacred oak at Geismar. The astonished onlookers soon hearkened to Boniface’s preaching and received Baptism. It would seem that if Christianity is ever to flourish again in the land between the Rhine and the Elbe a new Boniface will have to appear to fell the sacred oaks of European secularism.
Yet what made an even deeper impression on me in Europe was the debate over the preface to the new constitution of the European Union. I was living in Italy at the time and had been following the discussion in the Italian press. All the nations of the European union are historically Christian, and the very idea of Europe—which is not the doings of nature—was the work of Christian civilization. The Carolingians, Christians kings, first brought together the peoples west and the east of the Rhine to form a political alliance with the blessing of the bishop of Rome. The story of Europe is a spiritual drama fueled by religious convictions, not geography, economics or technology. Yet the framers of the EU constitution refuse even to invoke the name of Christianity in its preface. While readily acknowledging the inheritance of Greece and Rome, and even the Enlightenment, in a wilful act of amnesia, they excise any mention of Christianity from Europe’s history. Not only is Christianity excluded from a role in Europe’s future, it has been banished from Europe’s past. One wonders whether the new Europe, uprooted from its Christian soil, will continue to promote the spiritual values that have made western civilization so unique.
Talking to the young woman in Erfurt and listening in on the debate about the EU constitution I found myself musing on the future of Christian culture. In my lifetime and in the lifetime of others in this room we have seen the collapse of Christian civilization. At first the process of disintegration was slow, a gradual and persistent attrition, but today it has moved into overdrive, and more troubling, it has become deliberate and intentional, promoted not only by the cultured despisers of Christianity, but often aided and abetted by Christians themselves.
Take for example the calendar. I am not thinking of the displacement of the Christ child with Santa Claus or the Resurrection of Christ with the Easter bunny, nor the transference of festivals that fall in midweek, e.g. Epiphany or Pentecost or All Saints, to the nearest Sunday, but most dramatically the wholesale evacuation of Sunday as a holy day. At 11:00 A.M. on Sunday morning at Home Depot or Lowe’s the lines of folks with gallons of paint, 2x4s, or joint cement stretch out almost as far behind the check-out counters as they do on a Saturday morning. The only lingering difference between Sunday and other days of the week is that the malls open later and close earlier. The churches, particularly the bishops of the Catholic Church, were complicit in the de-sacralization of Sunday as a holy day when they introduced late Saturday afternoon liturgies, called Vigil Masses. A more fitting name would be McMasses. The faithful can fulfill their obligation by slipping into Church for a half hour or 45 minutes at 5:00 or 5:30 on Saturday afternoon and have Sunday to themselves without the pesky inconvenience of getting the family roused for Church.
Of course one might retort that in the U.S. (unlike Europe) the churches are flourishing and the number of Christians is growing. Yes there are many Christians in the U.S., but we can no longer claim to be a Christian society. If one uses some other measure than individual adherence (what people say if asked) or even church attendance, the influence of Christianity on the life and mores of our society is on the wane. And the decline is likely to continue. Which leads to a question: Can Christian faith, no matter how fervent, how enthusiastically proclaimed by evangelists, how ably expounded by theologians and philosophers (at CTI), or how cleverly translated into the patois of the intellectual class by apologists, be sustained for long without the support and nurturing of a Christian culture? And by culture, I do not mean high culture, Bach’s B Minor Mass or Caravaggio’s, The Calling of St. Matthew, but the “total harvest of thinking and feeling,” to use T.S.Eliot’s phrase, the pattern of inherited meanings and sensibilities encoded in rituals, law, language, practices, stories, et al. that order, inspire, and guide the behavior, thoughts and affections of the Christian people.
When one understands culture in this way, the classical distinction between Christ and culture, popularized in H.Richard Niebuhr’s 1950s book by that title, gives us little help. Some have observed, accurately in my view, that one difficulty with his analysis is that “culture” is really another term for “world,” the unredeemed territory in which human beings live. For Niebuhr the question is how the gospel, Christ, can penetrate the world, culture, without losing its distinctive character.
It seems to me, however, that the deficiency with the Christ and Culture scheme lies not in Niebuhr’s understanding of culture, but in his view of Christ. For Niebuhr Christ is a theological idea, and most of the book is taken up with an analysis of Christian thinkers who illustrate five basic types of the relation between this theological idea and culture. Niebuhr is largely silent about the actual historical experience of the Church, culture on the ground, institutions such as the episcopacy or papacy (there is no mention of Gregory VII and the investiture controversy), monasticism, civil and canon law, calendar, the ordering of civic space (the church standing on the central city square), et al. But Christ entered history as a community, a society, not simply as a message, and the form the community’s life takes is Christ within society. The Church is a culture in its own right. Christ does not simply infiltrate a culture, Christ creates culture by forming another city, another sovereignty with its own social and political life. Christ is culture as Robert Jenson has recently argued. With the admittedly sketchy observations in mind let me turn to three moments in the Church’s history to illustrate how Christ becomes culture and endures as culture.
By the middle of the second century Christians were beginning to be known in the Roman world, but they did not bear the marks usually associated with a distinctive community. In the oft-cited passage from the so-called epistle to Diognetus (it is really an apology), Christians are distinguished from others neither by nationality (Egyptians, Scythians), nor by language (Aramaic or Berber), nor by customs. They do not have their own cities, and their way of life is inconspicuous. It was known that Christians honored Christ as God, refused to venerate the gods and goddesses of Greece and Rome, and gathered regularly for a ritual meal. Yet, there was little else to identify them. They met in the homes of the wealthier members, in their worship they used the language of the city in which they dwelled, they owned no land, they had no temples, in fact no buildings at all, no cemeteries of their own, no religious calendar. The bishop was not a public personage and the church, as a social entity, was invisible.
Take for example the earliest Christian art. If a Christian living in the year 200 wished to have an object in his home that gave artistic expression to Christian belief, what would he purchase? One would go to a workshop, e.g. of lamps, and select one stamped with a conventional symbol that could yield a Christian interpretation, a dove, a fish, a ship, an anchor, or a shepherd carrying a lamb. When placed in a Christian home, a symbol which had one meaning to the Romans was invested with a Christian meaning, the dove for gentleness, the fish for Jesus Christ Son of God Savior, the shepherd for philanthropia or Christ the good shepherd. In buying and displaying objects such as lamps or ring or seals Christians created the first Christian art (of which we have knowledge), but what the symbols represented lay in the eyes of the beholder, not in the object. As far as Roman society was concerned Christianity was invisible.
At the beginning of the third century, however, the Christian community in Rome took a bold stride. They pooled their resources to purchase a plot of land to construct an underground burial chamber and commissioned artists to decorate the walls and ceilings with frescoes. The land was located on the Via Appia Antica outside the city and is known today as the catacomb of St. Callistus. A Roman Christian by the name of Callistus oversaw the construction and later became bishop of Rome. Only a few of the paintings have survived, but the catacomb itself is largely intact and it does not comprise a few burial nitches, it is a vast underground cemetery with chapels, ceiling and wall decorations, and paintings that depict persons and stories from the Bible. Its construction represents an organized effort (diggers, designers, plasterers, painters) on the part of the Christian community in Rome to create a distinctively Christian space. The catacombs were not hideouts during persecution, they were burial grounds and places of worship whose location was not secret. When Christians buried their dead or went to the catacomb to celebrate the Eucharist their activities were evident to their fellow citizens.
The construction of a Christian catacomb required careful planning and money. Not only was it necessary to decide the layout of the whole complex including staircases, chambers, chapels, but also how the ceilings would be decorated and what pictures would adorn the walls—and pay the workmen. Most of the rooms are square, allowing for a symetrical design to be imprinted on a ceiling of white plaster. The ceiling forms a kind of canopy over the whole room and a medallion was painted at the apex to highlight a prominent image. In some cases the figure of a young shepherd carrying a lamb on his shoulders occupies the central medalion. Other paintings included the figure of Orpheus (understood as Christ) with his lyre surrounded by animals [Christ unlike Orpheus tames even the wildest beast, human beings, said Clement of Alexandria], Daniel as a heroic nude, and Jonah being cast overboard. The form of the images is familiar from Roman art, but putting them together with wall paintings of the sacrifice of Isaac, Moses striking the rock in the desert, Daniel in the lion’s den, the Baptism of Jesus, these Roman Christians created a uniquely Christian sanctuary.
What the Christians undertook on the Via Appia Antica was being done by other Christian communities at about the same time. As the art historian Corby Finney has observed, “a cultural event of some importance was taking place”, and we can see here a “transition from models of accommodation and adaptation that were materially invisible to a new level of Christian identity that was palpable and visible.” For the first time Christians were beginning to create a “material culture”, something that is tangible, occupies space, is public (though underground), and distinctively Christian.
The Christians who planned and constructed this catacomb had given as much thought to their undertaking as bishops and philosophers had invested in defending the faith, expounding the Scriptures, or meeting the arguments of critics. Significantly Christian culture first takes material shape in connection with caring for and remembering the dead. Memory, especially of the faithful departed, is a defining mark of Christian identity. The living joined their prayers with the saints whose prayers, according to the book of Revelation, were “golden bowls full of incense.” In organizing the community to construct a burial place and decorating it with pictures depicting biblical stories Christians were fashioning a communal public identity that would endure over the generations. As the Apostles Creed has it (in its earliest meaning), “I believe in communion with the saints.” Their aim was not to communicate the gospel to an alien culture, but to nurture the Church’s inner life.
A second illustration comes from a later period and the idiom here is not space but time, the creation of a Christian calendar. Theologians and biblical scholars have made much of the New Testament understanding of kairos, the time when something decisive is to happen, an extraordinary moment long awaited. “The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the Gospel.” (Mk 1:15). But there is another kind of time, the marking of days and seasons. For the earliest Christians there was only one day, the day of the Resurrection celebrated each time the community gathered, normally on Sunday. Already in the book of Revelation there is mention of the “Lord’s Day,” the Kyriake emera (Rev. 1:10) and in the Didache, of the “Day of the Lord.” (Did. 14). By the middle of the second century Christians had begun to celebrate a yearly festival, the Paschal Feast (death and Resurrection of Christ) that began with a vigil on Saturday evening and continued through the night till the morning.
Over time other feasts were added. Christmas had begun to be observed in Rome in mid fourth century. The Chronograph of Rome, a kind of calendar compiled for Roman Christians in mid fourth century, lists Roman holidays, burial dates of Roman bishops and martyrs, and the birth of Christ, all in calendrical order, not historical order. “On the eighth day of the calends of January Christ was born in Bethlehem in Judea.” Christmas was soon complemented by the feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, forty days after his birth. Ascension and Pentecost became fixed days. The Christian year was organized into two major cycles, one centered on Christ’s birth, the other on his suffering, death and Resurrection. Like the earliest (and later) Christian art the liturgical year, as we now call it, had a narrative shape drawn from the Scriptures, particularly the gospels. Through ritual it imprinted the biblical narrative on the minds and hearts of the faithful, not simply as a matter of private devotion but a fully public act setting the rhythm of communal life.
At the beginning of the third century Christians numbered less than one percent of the population of the Roman Empire of some 60,000,000. By 300 there may have been 6,000,000 Christians in the Empire, but by mid century the numbers had risen to over 30,000,000, that is fifty percent of the population. This rapid growth, the conversion of the emperor Constantine to Christianity, his vigorous program of building churches, changed public practice. Significantly the Christian calendar became a civic calendar. In 321 Constantine made Sunday a public holiday. It is shallow and petulant to rail against the political aspects of Constantinianism while ignoring the efforts of Christians of ancient times to stamp the face of Christ on the mores of society, in the ordering of time, in architecture, and law (e.g. prohibition of the exposure of infants, an ancient form of birth control). The purpose of making Sunday into a holy day was to provide time for Christians to attend public worship, but it had the secondary effect of making Sunday a day of leisure, thereby laying the groundwork for a Christian Sabbath.
It should also be remembered that the success of Christianity also altered the marking of historical time. Dionysius Exiguus, a Scythian monk in the 6th century, was the first to date events “from the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ,” i.e. Anno Domini, A.D. His scheme was adopted in the 7th century in England at the Synod of Whitby and used by the Venerable Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People.
To the skeletal framework of Christmas, Presentation, Pasch, Ascension, Pentecost were added special days remembering the martyrs and saints. Over time the turning points in the year, the changing of seasons, the planting and harvesting of crops, the slaughtering of animals, all occurred on days named for saints or events in the life of Christ. This is well illustrated in the novels of Sigrid Undset, e.g. Kristin Lavraansdatter, set in medieval Scandinavia. The foreign merchants came to traffic in their goods on “Holy Rood Day,” the day of the Holy Cross. There was St. Halvard’s day in spring, St. Lavrans in mid summer, the Nativity of the Virgin in September, St. Clement in late fall.
The liturgical calendar takes religious celebration out of the realm of the intentional and makes it habitual. The repetition of saints days and festivals of the Lord was a kind of spiritual metronome insuring that communal life moves in concord with the mysteries of the faith. In time customs grew up around the festivals and holy days.
We should not underestimate the cultural significance of calendar and its indispensability for a mature spiritual life. Religious rituals carry a resonance of human feeling accumulated over the centuries—one reason they cannot easily be created and are so hard to recover once left to languish. They touch us more deeply than national commemorations, e.g. the 4th of July or Memorial Day. The season of Advent, for example, is a predictable reminder that the Church lives by another time, marked in the home by a simple ritual, the lighting of a violet Advent candle set in an evergreen wreath on a dark evening in early December.
Because feast days and sacred seasons run at right angles to the conventional calendar they offer a regular and fixed cessation of activity and with it the gift of leisure (a sine qua non of culture as Josef Pieper taught us). Feast days become times of reflection and contemplation that open us to mystery and transcendence. How soon, wrote Auden (in his poem “Thank you Fog”), “must we reenter, when lenient days are done, the world of work and money and minding our p’s and q’s.”
Finally another way Christianity formed its own culture is in language. In his magisterial Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique, Henri Marrou the French historian, described the grammatical and rhetorical milieu in which St. Augustine was educated in the Roman Empire of the late fourth century. In Augustine’s day Christian writers were the beneficiary of an educational system that had been in place for hundreds of years. When he wrote his treatise On Christian Doctrine, an essay on interpreting and expounding the Scriptures, he could assume that his readers knew Latin grammar and the rhetorical techniques for good speaking.
But a hundred years later this world could no longer be taken for granted. For example few cities could meet the expense of paying teachers and maintaining schools. Beginning in the sixth century a number of distinguished educators emerged in the Church, persons such as Boethius, Cassiodorus, Benedict of Nursia, Isidore of Seville, the Venerable Bede. They were not charged with the task of transforming what had been received, but of preserving and transmitting what was being forgotten or translating what could no longer be read. Christianity assumed responsibility for managing the mechanisms of the Latin language.
Cassiodorus was born in 485 in a southern Italian senatorial family. During his mid-years he served in the court of the Ostrogothic kings of Italy, putting his literary talents to work compiling edicts and official letters, recording notable events during the reigns of kings. When he was seventy years old he returned home and founded a monastery at Squillace on the southernmost coast of Italy. There he moved his library and gathered a company of scholars to make copies of the Scriptures, the classics of Latin Christian literature, and to translate Greek works. He also wrote a compendium of Christian and secular learning entitled Institutiones divinarum et humanarum lectionum.
This is a markedly different kind of book from the writings of Augustine or Ambrose or Jerome. Its chief purpose was to provide his readers with elementary instruction in “divine letters.” So Cassiodorus begins with a listing of the books of the Bible, the order and division of the books, how they are to be interpreted, and brief comments on Christian teachers, Hilary, Cyprian, Ambrose, Jerome, et al. But then one comes upon a chapter entitled, “On Scribes and the Remembering of Correct Spelling.” In the second part of the book on “secular letters,” he devotes a section to grammar which he calls “the foundation of liberal studies.” His aim was to transmit the basic skills of grammar and rhetoric for the purpose of copying the Scriptures accurately. “Every word of the Lord written by the scribe is a wound inflicted on Satan.” When Cassiodorus was ninety years old he wrote On Orthography, a manual on spelling for his copyists. The Latin letters v and b were particularly troublesome to copyists who worked by ear: one should spell habere not avere, laborare not lavorare [as in Italian].
Another writer known almost wholly for his grammatical, linguistic and encyclopedic studies was the Spanish bishop, Isidore of Seville. Though not a thinker of the first rank he is comfortably seated in the second. Dante places him in the fourth heaven along with the Venerable Bede and Richard of St. Victor. Born into the landed gentry of Cartagena, he was educated in a monastic school in Seville under the supervision of his brother Leander who was Bishop of Seville. In the year 600 he succeeded his brother as Bishop of Seville, and as bishop Isidore had a profound influence on the liturgy and laws of the Spanish church.
His Etymologies is a vast encyclopedia that attempted a summary of all branches of knowledge by drawing on the vast reservoir of classical writers. Isidore was engaged in an enterprise not unlike that of my colleague Eric Hirsch whose Dictionary of Cultural Literacy you may know. It lists the meanings of words and things and places and persons. He also authors books with titles such as, What Your Fifth Grader Has to Know.
In another treatise, Liber differentiarum sive de proprietate sermonum, Isidore deals with the meaning of words and the distinctions one must make to use them correctly. For example: the difference between aptum and utile, the one is for a time, the other an enduring condition; alterum and alius, the first refers to the other of two, the latter to other among many; audire and exaudire, the one meaning to hear, the other to listen; sanguis et cruor, two words for blood, one for blood as life-blood, the other blood that flows from a wound. The list is not much different from what one would find in Fowler’s Modern English Usage: the difference between sensuous and sensual, jealousy and envy, fewer and lesser, further and farther, permit and allow, congruent and congruous, brutal and cruel, depreciate and deprecate, as and like.
Reading Isidore reminded me of the critic Joseph Epstein, one of the most intelligent and humorous guardians of language in our society. “I happen to be one of those prigs,” writes Epstein, “who takes a certain quiet but smug pride in using such words as ‘decimate’ and ‘transpire’ with sweet precision. I treat the word ‘than’ as a conjunction and not a preposition, and so say ‘They are less correct than we’ instead of ‘less correct than us.’ I have a strong distaste for the adjective ‘prestigious’ and will go to great lengths to avoid it. I never use ‘presently’ as synonymous with currently. I worry about these things, in my own writing and speech and note mistakes in those of others. Being a prig, as I hope you are beginning to gather, is no easy job; The pay is low, the appreciation is non-existent, and there is scarcely any time off whatsoever.” This pretty well sums up the situation in which Isidore found himself.
Isidore recognized that grammar, “the science of expressing oneself correctly” is the foundation of education. It supports the edifice of reading, writing and speaking, but also of thinking and understanding. Grammar is not simply an affair of amo, amas, amat, or puer, pueri, puero—though it is certainly that. It is the study of the way language works and of the rules that govern the relation of words and the logic of concepts. Without the teaching of grammar there can be no transmission of the text of the Scriptures nor understanding of its content, hence no Christian culture.
Culture lives by language, and the sentiments, thoughts, and feelings of a Christian culture are formed and carried by the language of the Scriptures. St. Augustine believed that there was a distinctively Christian language, what he called the Church’s way of speaking (ecclesiastica loquendi consuetudo). He considered, for example, the term “martyr” (witness) a word sanctioned by the Bible (notably in the early chapters of the Acts of the Apostles) and hallowed by early Christian usage. It would be “contrary to the usage of the church”, said Augustine, to replace it with the conventional Latin term for hero, vir. Salvator (savior) too is a biblical word with pronounced Christian overtones: natus est vobis hodie Salvator, qui est Christus Dominus. In conventional Latin salus meant health not salvation. Latin speaking Christians, however, coined the words salvare (to save) and salvator (savior)—terms the Latin grammarians shunned.
Can a Christian ever sound the word “hyssop” (as in “wash me with hyssop and I shall be clean”) without being minded to cultivate a “humble and contrite heart”. Words like obedience, grace, longsuffering (the biblical form of patience), image of God, suffering servant, adoption, will of God, when used again and again form our imagination and channel our affections. The recitation of the psalms day after day, week after week, transforms the words of the psalmists from texts to be interpreted into our words to praise, beseech, confess, thank and adore God—as well as words by which we know ourselves before God, “O Lord thou has searched me and known me! . . . Even before a word is on my tongue, lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether.”
If there is a distinctly Christian language, we must be wary of translation. We cannot hand on to the next generation what the words signify if we do not hold fast to the words. Jerusalem cannot become Paris or Moscow or New York without losing its rootedness in the biblical narrative. Certain words must be used as they have been received in Christian speech, e.g. Father, Son, Holy Spirit, Lord (as in Lord have mercy), “glory” (as used in the Gospel of John for Christ’s passion), “sin” (“against thee only have I sinned”), “emptied” (as in “emptied himself taking the form of a servant”), “resurrection” (as in “raised from the dead on the third day”), “flesh” (as in “works of the flesh”, i.e. mental acts like idolatry or jealousy, not only sins of the body, like fornication), even “self” (as in the parable of the elder brother, “he came to himself.”) It will not do to erase the term “self” and put in its place “came to his senses” as the current Catholic lectionary has it; nor will it do to translate, out of ignorance and ideology, the first verse of Psalm one “blessed is the man” as “blessed are those who” (as the NRSV does), thereby excluding the ancient christological reading of the psalm.
* * * *
Material culture and with it art, calendar and with it ritual, grammar and with it language, particularly the language of the Bible—these are only three of many examples (monasticism would be another) that could be brought forth to exemplify the thick texture of Christian culture, the fullness of life in the community that is Christ’s form in the world.
Nothing is more urgent today than the survival of Christian culture. Yet in the last generations this culture has become dangerously thin. At this moment in the Church’s history in this country (and in the west) it is less pressing to try and convince the alternate culture in which we live of the truth of Christ than for the Church to tell its own story and nurture its own life, the culture of the city of God, the Christian republic. This is not going to happen without a rebirth of moral and spiritual discipline and a resolute effort on the part of Christians to defend the remnants of Christian culture. The unhappy fact is that the society in which we live is no longer neutral about Christianity. The United States would be a much less hospitable environment for the practice of the faith if all the marks of Christian culture were stripped from our public life and Christian behavior were tolerated only in restricted situations.
If Christian culture is to be renewed, habits are more vital than revivals, rituals more edifying than spiritual highs, the creed more penetrating than theological insight, and the celebration of saints’s days more uplifting than the observance of Mother’s Day. There is great wisdom in the maligned phrase ex opere operato, the effect is in the doing. Intention is like a reed blowing in the wind. It is the doing that counts and if we do something for God, in the doing God does something for us.
I end with some lines from a poem by Dana Gioia, the current director of the National Endowment of the Arts.
There will always be those who reject ceremony,
who claim that resolution requires no fanfare,
those who demand the spirit stay fixed
like a desert saint, fed only on faith,
to worship in no temple but the weather.
Gioia acknowledges the point:
Symbols betray us.
They are always more or less than what
is really meant.
Then:
But shall there be no
processions by torchlight because we are weak?Praise to the rituals that celebrate change,
old robes worn for new beginnings,
solemn protocol where the mutable soul,
surrounded by ancient experience,
grows young in the imagination’s white dress.Because it is not the rituals we honor
but our trust in what they signify, these rites
that honor us as witnesses—whether to watch
lovers swear loyalty in a careless world
or a newborn washed with water and oil
If Christ is culture, let the sidewalks be lit with fire on Easter Eve, let traffic stop for a column of Christians waving palm branches on a spring morning, let streets be blocked off as the faithful gather for a Corpus Christi procession. Then will others know that there is another city in their midst, another commonwealth whose face, like that of the angels, is turned toward the face of God.
