Today’s Inauguration Was a Reconsecration of Sacred Area

C’mon, acknowledge it: you experienced the Kleenex helpful though you watched the swearing-in of the 46th president with all of the attendant ruffles and prospers.

I undoubtedly did. I doubt that any other presidential inauguration in any of our lifetimes has been as filled with the feeling of answered prayer. And in no way prior to given that the depths of the Good Depression and the Second Environment War has so a lot inauguration-related emotion been suffused with the expertise of struggling. The grief we experience on January 20 flows not just from Covid’s dreadful toll but also from our anguish over the noticeable fragility of American democracy and our nation’s at any time-worsening structural injustices—appalling inequities that are also normally euphemized as “disparities.”

I want to focus on suffering and the spiritual dimension. Just as soldiers the moment insisted that no one is an atheist in a foxhole, so much too were being there a good deal of non-spiritual inauguration watchers who unquestionably felt some of the religious body weight in today’s ceremony.

There were a lot of good reasons for feeling that weight though viewing the pageantry unfold. There’s the symbolism, definitely: all those people flags and bunting and glistening marble. And along with the symbols there’s continuity: the same oath remaining sworn by all U.S. presidents on the exact same working day and at the exact same time, with the Marine Band actively playing some of the exact “airs” it performed for Thomas Jefferson in 1800.

When compared to royal coronations, American inaugurations are remarkably straightforward affairs. But our ceremonies keep their individual majesty and are able of projecting a robust feeling that one thing sacred is taking place.

Our inaugurations have constantly mirrored a mashup of civil religion—invocations of our secular sacred texts, appeals to mystic chords of national memory—and bits of bare Christian expression. Entirely secular democracies rightly dispense with issues like invocations and benedictions no palms are positioned on Christian Bibles. Those who wince at these sectarian moments are ideal to wince, I think. And although Garth Brooks, a Republican, proved to be a gracious existence today, I dearly would like to see all explicitly Christian hymns (“Amazing Grace” incorporated) retired from community functions.

But leaving the Christian bits aside, the other and far a lot more crucial civil faith elements—the oath-using, the flags and bunting, the superb band—seem to me indispensable. Retaining the suitable location at the Capitol’s West Entrance was primarily indispensable this 12 months because of what happened on January 6. In a pretty serious and palpable feeling, today’s ceremony amounted to the reconsecration of a sacred house that was profaned and defiled just two months ago—defiled not just by the rioters coming from outside but also by the 147 traitors inside of the Capitol who violated their have oaths when they voted from the certification of a legitimate democratic election.

That this marble shrine to liberty and democracy was created by enslaved men and women and then polluted once again and yet again by manifestations of an unpleasant white supremacy normally takes nothing at all away from the other moments when, we could possibly say, the glory of the Lord was current there: e.g., when the likes of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt summoned our improved angels, when the Reconstruction Amendments had been drafted, and when the caskets of Rosa Parks and John Lewis lay in condition below the soaring dome.

And all over again these days, in a ceremony marked by both of those mourning and modesty a ceremony in which white supremacy was explicitly repudiated multiple moments, in which a dazzling youthful African-American poet set a lot of hearts aflutter, and in which an amazing Black and Asian girl (with a Jewish partner to boot!) was sworn into the second-best place of work in the land.

And Joe Biden? Our new president will never be eloquent, but today he confirmed us his coronary heart. And I would say that his simply call for a second of silence in honor of the Covid dead experienced an eloquence all its have.

Completely a fitting commencing. The Latin root of “inauguration” harks again to Roman times and suggests “to consecrate by augury.” I’d say that today’s celebration augurs perfectly for a new birth of decency. What we want is revolution, of training course. But these days I will settle for decency.