It’s time to get nauseated. There’s a new trend in high school proms: The elaborate invitation.
It seems a boy no longer asks a girl to prom. Instead, he makes an elaborate game or ritual out of it, like this approach by a boy named “Kevin”:
Kevin, with the aid of three buddies, used a student assembly at Sunny Hills High School in Fullerton to pop the question.
In front of 300 students, they lip-synced to a recorded song, paused for a moment on stage, then unveiled T-shirts, each emblazoned with a letter of the word R-O-S-E. Next they turned around to show off the letters of P-R-O-M on the seats of their pants. And as the audience clapped and cheered, Kevin leaned down and handed Rose a bouquet.
Forget about using the phone to ask a girl to the prom. Teens today place notes in fortune cookies, make videos, burn CDs, freeze the invitation in a block of ice, arrange scavenger hunts in which the girl finds the invite at the end.
It's part of the whole prom culture, which has emerged as a multimillion-dollar industry, complete with websites and even an official book, The First Book of Prom.
What gives?
It could just be the same old story: A neat thing is tossed into the consumerist generator of American society and revved up beyond all reasonable bounds by marketers who play off a moneyed-yet-gullible public.
But I think there's more to it. Something more fundamental.
A loss of the sacramental.
The sacramental is not limited to the Big Seven. Those are the only sacraments, of course, but they point to a deeper, underlying reality: All things are imbued with holiness in their material and spiritual properties. The rituals surrounding the sacraments capture this two-fold holiness by using material means to impart spiritual grace.
The Church's rituals in general try to reflect this two-fold holiness: candles, incense, icons, even using a sacred space (the church building) to worship. They all loosely capture the intertwined nature of matter and spirit. In doing this, the Church provides nourishment that each person, as a composite of matter and spirit, naturally desires.
Because we are composite beings made for holiness, the sacramental always bears down on us and, if not recognized and developed properly, it will manifest itself in some other way.
In our culture, we've largely lost the proper sense of the sacramental, and the loss is regurgitating back to the surface, in pseudo-rituals.
Consider other areas where elaborate rituals have taken over special events, like the wedding proposal. A man arranges for a plane to fly by with the proposition in the tail; a man sings the proposition in front of a hundred fellow restaurant diners; a man fakes his death and rises from casket at the funeral and pops the question (okay, I made up that last one, but it could happen).
The birth of a baby has likewise grown beyond all proportion. It's talked about incessantly, plaster casts are made of the huge stomach, the birth is videotaped, family and friends are invited to the birthing.
Wedding proposals and the births are good things — neat things, wonderful things, stupendous things. The wedding proposal leads to a sacrament, and the babies are a normal result of that sacrament.
But they're blown out of all proportion with all sense of their normal fitness replaced by an “event” mentality.
The Thomist philosopher Josef Pieper referred to modern culture's “desacralization.” He said the desacralization leads to all sorts of heresies, and not just theological, but also “anthropological heresies.” He wrote of this:
[A]nyone who fails to realize that there is nothing in man's nature which is “purely spiritual,” but that there is nothing that is “purely physical” either, will in all likelihood be incapable of appreciating or meaningfully enacting that “structure of forms visible and perceptible to the senses” which we call sacred action.
That's a fairly difficult passage, but he's basically saying that people who have lost the sacramental (a proper sense of the intertwined nature of matter and spirit) don't appreciate and can't properly enact the sacred.
Yet the sacred exists, so they will try to appreciate it and re-enact it, no matter how fumbling their attempts, in pseudo-rituals.
And herein we come back to Kevin “popping the prom invite” in front of a school assembly with a bouquet of flowers and an elaborate ritual. It's embarrassing and nauseous, but Kevin's doing the best he can to regain a sense of the sacred that's been denied to him by a culture that has lost its sacramental sense.
© Copyright 2005 Catholic Exchange
Eric Scheske is an attorney, the Editor of The Daily Eudemon, a Contributing Editor of Godspy, and the former editor of Gilbert Magazine.
