This weekend, I was invited to a discussion hosted by a new organization called St. Anselm’s Institute, where we had the pleasure of fellowship and the consideration of an article titled “The Power of Wise Custom” by Thomas Howard, the older Catholic brother to Elisabeth Elliot, with whom some of you may be familiar. In his article, Howard extols the virtues of ritual and ceremony over the destructive worship of more modern approaches to worship and behavior:

Two words cast a pall over the imagination of those who have grown up since 1960—during this 40 years, that is, when spontaneity, naturalness, creativity, sincerity, and what we might call the visceral, have been so earnestly extolled. The two words are ritual and ceremony.

Spirits wither straightaway. “Dull!” we hear from one corner. “Repressive!” from another. “An imposition! A straitjacket!” we hear from various quarters. “What we want is freedom to be ourselves—our natural, real, unconstrained selves. Ritual and ceremony are guaranteed to stifle all vitality and genuineness. They are a recipe for ennui.”

He goes on to explain the power of ritual and ceremony, how its artifice introduces us to deeper things than spontaneity ever could, and how even the most democratic and egalitarian of us still want some things to be accoutred with pomp and ceremony, like funerals for instance. As Howard reminds us, we don’t just dump the body in a dumpster. We demand ritual to make sense of the matter.

But then he goes on to complain about the relaxed way people dress these days. I’ve got no problem bemoaning the exposure of excess flesh, but I’m particularly delighted that men no longer have to wear neckties whither we go: to lunch, to the cinema, to the drugstore, and so on. So how do you feel about high ceremony and ritual in worship, and in life, and in the apparent decline of it in American society and religion?