Rite and Wrong

His lord said unto him, Well done, thou good and faithful servant. — Matthew 25:21

The House That Faces the Memorial

Driving out of Indianapolis last weekend, I passed the Scottish Rite Cathedral on North Meridian Street, and it stopped my eye the way a great building is meant to. It is the largest Scottish Rite cathedral in the world, a Tudor-Gothic mass of carved Indiana limestone with a tower rising more than two hundred feet and a carillon of more than fifty bells. It was built in the late 1920s at enormous cost, laid out by a member-architect in measurements of thirty-three feet and multiples of thirty-three, in honor of the thirty-three years of the life of Christ. It is a serious building, made by men who took symbol seriously, and it does not waste a stone.

And it faces the war memorial. This is not my supposition; it is in the record of the building's own design. The order chose the site, paused its building through the First World War, and resumed with urgency in the 1920s, by which time a five-block memorial plaza to the war dead had been laid out directly across the street. And the cathedral was built so that all its structures but the tower pay deference to the World War Memorial. Deference: the word is the architects' own. The grandest house the Rite ever raised was oriented, deliberately, to bow toward the memory of war. I drove past it and thought: there is a whole meditation standing right there in stone, if one will only read what the building is saying about itself.

Rite and Right

Consider the word. A rite is a ceremony, an ordered form, a set of motions performed with care — and the word sits a single letter away from right, which is no accident of language but a memory inside it. The oldest purpose of a rite was to make men right: to order the disordered soul, to initiate the initiate toward the good, to take a man as he was and conduct him, by degrees, toward what he ought to be. That is what every genuine rite claims to do. It claims to be in the business of righteousness.

But here is the hard thing the word also knows, sitting as it does beside its other near neighbor. A man can be perfect in the rite and wrong in the heart. He can know every degree, every sign, every word of the ceremony, and have ordered nothing in himself at all. The form is not the substance. The ritual is not the righteousness. This is not a charge against the Rite in particular; it is the permanent danger of every ordered form, religious or fraternal or civic, that the doing of the rite comes to stand in for the becoming-right that the rite was only ever meant to serve. A people can perform the rite of remembrance every May and remember nothing. An institution can perform the rite of accountability — the acknowledged complaint, the form letter, the proper procedure — and do no right at all. The rite is a vessel. What matters is whether anything true is carried in it, or whether the vessel has come to be polished for its own sake while the thing it was made to carry has quietly drained away.

What the Rite Has Honored

So let me say to the members, the alumni, and the children of the Rite what the building on Meridian Street says without my help. The order has honored war. This is not a leap and it is not a slander. Its grandest house was built to face a war memorial and to defer to it in every line. Its history is woven through the martial and civic life of a nation that fought, and its halls have been filled, generation upon generation, with men who served and men who sent others to serve. There was a season when to be received into those halls was a prestige, when the great and the rising of a city passed through the Tiler's door, and the bells rang out over a plaza of monuments to the fallen. None of that is to be sneered at. Much of it was sincere, and much of the service was real service, and the men who built that house were not the worst of their generation but frequently the best of it.

But a thing built to defer to war is a thing that knows how to defer. That is the observation that turns into an invitation. An order that oriented its whole architecture toward the memory of war has demonstrated, in the most permanent material it could find, that it knows how to bow toward something larger than itself and build its house to face it. The faculty is proven. The capacity for deference, for orientation, for the ordering of a great institution toward a chosen object — that is all there, carved in limestone. The only question the present hour puts is the question of the object. Toward what shall the house now face?

An Invitation to Honor Peace

To say that the Rite has celebrated war is no leap. To invite the Rite to celebrate peace is, by exactly the same measure, no leap at all. It is the smaller and easier turn, not the larger one — a reorientation of a devotion that already exists toward an object more worthy of it. The men who can lay out a building in multiples of thirty-three in honor of the years of Christ are men who can read what those years were for, and they did not end in the glorification of the sword. They ended in a stone rolled away and a commission to make peace among men. An order steeped in the symbol of that life is an order that already holds, somewhere in its degrees, the key to its own redirection.

I do not write this to condemn the Rite. I have said before in this work that I do not condemn it; I regard it as one side of an old duality, a side that has at times loved war and profited from the world's appetite for it, and I hold that even this is not beyond the reach of the turning that is now underway. The invitation is simple and it is offered in good faith. Let the house that was built to defer to the memory of war learn to defer to the promise of its ending. Let the bells that rang over the monuments to the fallen ring out one day over a plaza where no new monuments are needed because no new fallen are made. Let the rite at last accomplish the right it was always meant to serve. Not by might, nor by power — the oldest orders know this verse better than most — but by the Spirit that orders the soul toward peace.

The Commendation

I will close with the blessing rather than the argument, because the members of the Rite are, whatever else they are, men who woke up this morning with a divine spark that has not been snuffed out, and the same is true of every reader who finds these words. There is a commendation spoken in the oldest of the stories, by a lord to a servant who did what he was given to do and did it faithfully: well done, good and faithful servant. It is the only verdict that finally matters, and it is available to everyone still drawing breath, regardless of which house they have passed through or what object that house was built to face.

So this is my hope, confessed plainly as hope. That all who woke this morning — within the Rite and outside it, the keepers of the arsenals and the keepers of the lodges and the ordinary unenrolled souls who never joined anything at all — may live to see the end of temporal war and the beginning of eternal peace, and may hear, in that day, the only words worth orienting a whole life toward. Well done. The rite made right at last. The house turned to face the better thing. The servant, good and faithful, having lived to see it. Unity in truth, and love that conquers all.

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This meditation is a companion to the Memorial Day reflections on witness, the holstered arm, and the war over the image of man. The factual claims about the Indianapolis Scottish Rite Cathedral are matters of public record: it is the largest Scottish Rite cathedral in the world, designed by member-architect George F. Schreiber and built between 1927 and 1929 on North Meridian Street; it was laid out in measurements of thirty-three feet and multiples thereof in reference to the years of Christ's life; and by the design's own description, all of its structures but the tower pay deference to the adjacent Indiana World War Memorial Plaza, which was planned between 1919 and 1924 across the street from the Rite's property. The reading of these facts is offered as observation and invitation, not as an allegation of conspiracy; the author has stated elsewhere in this work that he does not condemn the Scottish Rite. The wordplay on rite, right, and wrong is offered as a meditation on the permanent gap between ritual form and moral substance, applicable to every ordered institution and not to this one alone. The eschatological hope at the close is named as the author's confessed faith. The commendation is extended, in good faith, to every living reader.