By JAMES MONTI
(Editor’s Note: Restoring the Sacred will be a semi-regular feature in The Wanderer, written by James Monti, who recently covered the Sacra Liturgia USA 2015 Conference and also wrote a two-part critique of the screen adaptation of Wolf Hall for us. Monti wrote The King’s Good Servant but God’s First: The Life and Writings of Saint Thomas More [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997].)
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During his eight-year pontificate Pope Benedict XVI imparted to the Church a rich and enduring legacy, at the heart of which was his endeavor to restore a sense of the sacred to the liturgy, the supreme expression of his famed “hermeneutic of continuity,” whereby, “What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too” (July 7, 2007 letter of Pope Benedict XVI accompanying his apostolic letter Summorum Pontificum).
That quest to restore the sacred to Catholic worship continues, bolstered by the recent news from Robert Cardinal Sarah, prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments (June 1), that His Holiness Pope Francis has himself asked that “the good work in the liturgy begun by Pope Benedict XVI” be continued.
Central to restoring a sense of the sacred is the realization that man has an inborn need and hunger for ceremony — richly textured, beauty-laden ceremonies, fragrant with mystery and symbolism. There is in us an anthropological longing for pageantry to express our highest aspirations.
It was not so many weeks ago that we were all celebrating the Memorial Day weekend. A few days afterward I received an e-mail with a link to a most remarkable nine-minute video of the ceremony of the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery that had aired as a Memorial Day weekend tribute on the PBS News Hour. This brief film is a powerful illustration of the remarkable similarity that exists between solemn military ceremonies and reverently celebrated liturgical rites.
The Arlington rite begins with the chiming of the bell on the half-hour, as a flag draped from a nearby archway sways in a gentle breeze. A commanding officer of the tomb’s Honor Guard appears, walking at a slow, perfectly measured, perfectly ordered pace into the plaza where the guard on duty is completing his shift before the tomb. The plaza itself is an enclosed realm, with visitors remaining outside its boundaries, just as the sanctuary is a realm where during the Mass only the priest and his ministers are to enter.
The commander’s impeccably disciplined walk brings to mind a highly refined liturgical procession to the altar. His uniform, crisp and unblemished to the last detail, is a reminder of how in the liturgy sacred vestments serve to mold the very demeanor of the celebrant and indeed that of all those present. Reaching the center of the plaza before the tomb, the commander makes a sharp right-angle turn toward the tomb and attentively salutes it.
This gesture of reverence for the sacredness of the bodies of the fallen, which will be repeated three more times during the rite, has its more exulted counterpart in the reverent genuflection that a priest or any other minister within the sanctuary makes every time he passes before that most sacred and precious body of all, the Body of Christ resting in the tabernacle or upon the paten at the center of the altar.
Turning about-face to the spectators, the commanding officer, after identifying himself and his rank, asks that “in keeping with the dignity of this ceremony” all remain silent and standing. Turning back toward the tomb, he again salutes before turning right to walk toward the new guard who has arrived to begin the next watch before the tomb, doing so with the same measured, solemn pace with which he entered the plaza earlier.
When the two come face to face, the commanding officer begins an elaborate white-glove ceremonial inspection of the M-14 rifle that the new guard will carry during his shift. The commander’s gestures in examining the rifle are complex and mysterious, bringing to mind the numerous Signs of the Cross and other gestures that a priest celebrating the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite makes during the Canon. Like the ministers who assist the priest at Mass, the new guard remains silent, motionless and standing at attention during the inspection.
The commanding officer then passes the rifle into the hands of the guard who receives it and shifts it to an upright position beneath his right arm with a series of precisely ordered movements, just as in the sacred liturgy the ministers reverently present and receive back from the priest the cruets and other liturgical objects. The commander now visually inspects the guard himself, indicating his head-to-toe scrutiny of the soldier by raising and bowing his own head as well as turning it to the left and right, gestures that recall the various ritual bows of the priest at the altar.
To an indifferent viewer the commander’s complex gestures might seem absurdly irrational and senseless. Yet what is almost as remarkable as the ceremony itself is the reaction of the spectators, which includes a large contingent of teenagers. Far from finding the enigmatic gestures of the rite meaningless and absurd, they look on seriously, intently, seeming to understand what is being expressed without words, what is being expressed by the very silence itself. For there is something about the ceremony that commands respect. The spectators have no need to enter the inner sanctum of the plaza to participate in this rite in the same manner as the soldiers do; their active and full participation is written on their faces.
Throughout the rite, with the sole exception of the commander’s introductory admonition to the spectators that they are to remain silent and standing, neither the commanding officer nor the two soldiers of the guard-change make any eye contact whatsoever with the spectators, analogous to the Roman Rite tradition of the priest facing ad orientem before the altar rather than toward the congregation for most of the Mass.
Following the inspection, the commanding officer and the new guard now walk side by side with impeccably synchronized steps toward the guard who is ending his watch, just as in the liturgy pairs of ministers advance toward and retreat from the altar and walk in processions with a perfect symmetry of motion. Each guard, when walking perpendicular to the tomb, keeps his rifle on the shoulder facing the spectators to indicate his role as a protector and guardian of the tomb, ready to bar the way to any would-be intruder just as the priest and his ministers are vigilant to protect the Eucharist from desecration and sacrilege.
Upon reaching the center of the plaza, the commanding officer halts, turns toward the spectators and issues a series of two-word commands to bring the two soldiers into position before the tomb, one to his right and the other to his left. At the commander’s order, “Present, arms,” they shift their rifles into an upright position with the muzzles facing skyward and the undersides facing the tomb, and the commander turns about face toward the tomb to salute it.
Then, at the commander’s prompting, the guard going off duty passes his orders to the new guard, telling him, “Post and orders, remain as directed,” to which the new guard replies, “Orders acknowledged,” after which he will step into position to begin his watch. But before moving away from the tomb, the commander and the two guards repeat their salute (he with his hand, they with their rifles), not unlike a priest and his ministers genuflecting once again before departing from the altar.
Everything said by the soldiers and their commander during the rite is in the form of unchanging formulas analogous to the prayer texts and readings that a priest is to say without improvisation, without changing a word, from the Missal.
After the commanding officer orders the guard who has completed his watch to “fall out,” they both withdraw from the plaza, again with precisely measured steps, as the new guard begins his pace of twenty-one steps back and forth before the tomb. As in the sacred liturgy, so too in this ceremony there is much repetition in its actions, and the whole rite is repeated on the hour through the winter and on the half-hour in the summer. It is always carried out in the same manner as it was an hour earlier, a day earlier, ten years earlier.
That is what visitors expect it to be and want it to be — adhering to a “hermeneutic of continuity.” The unbroken vigil of the Arlington honor guards mirrors the continuous watch that adorers keep before the Blessed Sacrament in the repository on Holy Thursday and whenever the Eucharist is exposed in a monstrance.
There is something very Catholic going on here — a keen perception of the sacredness of the human body as having been in life the Temple of the Holy Spirit and awaiting the day when it will be resurrected in glory. Military ceremonies such as this ably demonstrate the power of elaborate, complex ritual actions, laden with mysterious gestures, to speak to the soul without any verbal explanation.
If we pay such lavish honor to the tomb of those who have given their lives for their country, why should we give the God who has died for us anything less?
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