The Sign of The Cross

Extract

This article is concerned with gestures in religion not I with religion in gestures, with the action seen rather than with the prayer prayed as when the hand touches the forehead and completes the sign of the Cross upon the breast. It begins with the story of other actions in a large pageant or spectacle in order to give the setting to so small a gesture as the Sign of the Cross, because that contrast follows my own experience; I saw the Miracle many years before the Sign of the Cross ceased, with my conversion, to be merely a sign of superstition!

Reinhardt’s Miracle happened forty years ago in Olympia, London. It was a good ‘period’ piece, modem in production, medieval in inspiration, and may be described as an example of religious mime; although its theology was faulty and its actors hired only to reproduce the shape or picture of a medieval pageant, it was clearly intended to appeal to the religious instinct of the beholder.

Since that time (1910) pictures, pageant and mime have become more popular. Europe has suffered the upheaval of great wars. Most big cities have become cosmopolitan with large numbers of inhabitants ‘illiterate’ save in their own tongue and therefore avid for the common language of picture and spectacle—a fact which propagandists are not slow to appreciate.

Twenty years ago, a branch of the Moscow Olympiad of the Revolutionary Theatre (M.O.R.T.) in New York ‘where one of the strongest dramatic councils’ then existed (according to a Bulletin of the ‘International Workers’ Theatrical Olympiad’)