Tradition and Treachery

The cardinal of Chicago, Blase Cupich, has issued a directive to demand that parishioners in the archdiocese not kneel to receive Holy Communion, on the grounds that doing so interrupts the flow of the procession and calls attention to the individual. Of course, kneeling at a Communion rail would not interrupt anything at all, or call attention to anyone at all; and it would provide in a most powerful and memorable way the experience of human community that is supposed to be, but never is, imparted by standing in line. 

I have made the point many times before. When you are kneeling at the rail, you need not worry about stepping on someone’s shoes, or about getting out of the way fast enough. You can see other people receiving Communion as the priest makes his way toward you, people of all kinds. You may very well be kneeling beside a stranger; even, perhaps, beside someone you dislike. It is hard to keep enmity entirely frigid when that happens.

That is to speak of the purely human experience. The divine experience as mediated through the body is something else, and this is hard to explain to a people so eviscerated in their culture as we now are; so bloodless and yet so carnal. When was the last time you saw these things? A boy is lying on his back in the grass in the warm weather, looking up at the sky, and thinking of blessed nothing at all, or everything. A teenage boy and girl are dancing, in a real dance with definite motions, hand in hand, in a flush of innocent fun; or the boy is dancing with his mother, or the girl with her father. A group of people are singing old folk songs together, by memory, as they sit at a fireside.

Anyone not utterly obtuse will recognize that the gestures, the postures, and the positions of the bodies are mysteriously essential to the act. To “dance” with someone by performing spasmodic jerks in their general vicinity is simply not the same kind of thing as what I have described; much less to simulate sexual intercourse in public. To stare at a computer screen is not the same kind of thing as to gaze into the sky. To play loud and unmelodic music at full blast, of no distinct origin, the same in Buenos Aires as in Berlin, is not the same thing as to feel old music welling up from your own voice, next to others with other voices, and to know that the songs you sing were once sung by your parents and grandparents, far into the past, whose presence you may well feel, as you look round you at the familiar objects of home.

When do I kneel, with my hands folded, if not in prayer? Surely, we cannot suppose that people of our time are wearing out their trousers in kneeling too much; no more than that they sing old songs too often, or spend too many minutes in a year looking up at the blue heaven, or dance with too much merry frequency, boy with girl, after the immemorial way of nature. Nor do they read too many books, quietly, in a den or study; nor recite too much poetry, once the heart’s blood of a culture. But we spend a lot of time in lines, usually with some faint irritation—at the drug store, the supermarket, the cafeteria, the ticket counter for the subway, the airport security station. And as we do so, we think, inevitably, of how many people are in front of us, and we usually wish they would clear out, fast. Such is our experience with lines.

I think that kneeling is good for the soul. It lifts you up by making you, in stature, no more than a child. But people who kneel to receive Communion are held up for contempt. We are told that they are making a show of themselves. They are breaking communion with their fellows who are not kneeling.

It is, of course, the easiest accusation in the world to make. The first reason is the most obvious. We human beings are always tempted to put on an act, to want to be seen, like the hypocrites—the playactors—whom Jesus condemned. The religious hypocrite you will always have with you because the illness itself, hypocrisy—playacting, showboating, putting on airs, parading oneself—is endemic. It is not confined to the specifically religious; and among the religious, it is not confined to those who lean toward severity. Many a religious hypocrite leans toward superficial bonhomie, or a smug looseness, even a sly desire to offend those who take their faith more seriously; such hypocrites of religious irreligion, among priests of a certain generation, are as thick as fleas on a dog’s behind.

But the second reason why the accusation is easy is that no evidence is demanded, and no defense against it is possible. How dare anyone read the soul of someone falling to his knees to receive Communion? I know plenty of Catholics who enjoy the treacly, incoherent, and often heretical songs that have descended upon us like a cloud of locusts, and some of these Catholics are downright bossy in demanding that their fellow parishioners enjoy the songs too. But bad taste says nothing about the state of someone’s soul. “They don’t know any better,” I remind myself, and, “They may be doing the best they can, right now.” If singing the execrable “Gather Us In” does not, alone, make you an apostate, how can singing “Crown Him With Many Crowns” do so?

There is another consideration. The peculiar nature of the gesture—kneeling to receive Communion—enters the memory as specifically bound up with the act of the Sacrament and with the place where you receive. Again, it is not like anything else we do during the week. To kneel at the rail is to be at a certain place, not for a mere moment, but perhaps for a minute or so, long enough to say a prayer, long enough to think of something you ought to have done, or something you ought not to have done, long enough—and if it is every Sunday, frequent enough—to make that place, that rail and no other, filled with significance. I mean the word in its precise sense: the place becomes a sign. 

And this sign is easy to associate in your mind with other people, other times. Here at this very rail, here and nowhere else, my father and mother knelt. Here I knelt when I was a small boy. Doubtless my grandmother rested her hands on this slab of marble. You can see it; you can touch it; if it is adorned with Eucharistic symbols, they can speak to you as you let your eyes rest upon them. All these things have been handed on to you. They are precious, and they bind the generations. They are a part of your tradition.

Must I make the point that a human culture without tradition is a contradiction in terms? Yes, I do know that people can make an idol out of tradition; just as they can make an idol out of iconoclasm. If you must err, do so on the side of gratitude toward those who have come before us, not on the side of assuming that they were benighted, and that their place should know them no more. If you must err, do so on the side of reverence, not on the side of the flippant or negligent. I do not know whether this or that priest who looks askance at people kneeling to receive Communion is a good or bad man. I will say that he brings the wrong medicine. He is prescribing bed rest for the slothful, sweets for the diabetic, looseness for the slovenly. Of his culpability I say nothing. It is his wisdom I doubt.