Watching the Carter state funeral at National Cathedral, I couldn’t help but notice how much attention was focused on the five Presidents. One of the few times Americans see all their living former, current, and — at Carter’s funeral — future presidents in one place is when one of them is subtracted from the club. The camera couldn’t seem to decide whether to focus on the dead one in the coffin or the live ones in the pews. Whenever a speaker, eulogist, or even preacher said something that might elicit a reaction, cameras immediately panned to the quintet.

What’s even worse, social media denizens picked and chose particular moments for (often partisan) commentary. Did George Bush snub Donald Trump while greeting Barack Obama with a friendly gesture? Who shook hands with whom? Was Joe Biden sleeping? Donald Trump? Both of them? Why was Michelle Obama not there and did Melania Trump even want to be? And so on. Yes, it’s Washington. But checking one’s biases in the narthex is appropriate for funerals. For the record, I thought neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump was sleeping. It used to be normal for a man to close his eyes in a church and do the “p” thing: pray. The commentators didn’t mention that. In any case, I have no desire to attempt to probe the thoughts or motives of those attending or not attending a funeral. That’s their business.

Maybe it’s the consequence of a Catholic upbringing, but once upon a time many held it is sinful to talk in church. Why? Because the primary talking should be with Him whose house it is supposed to be. And that privileged conversation ought not to be interrupted by our more banal palaver.

Of course, I didn’t expect the presidents to sit there like scared parochial school boys. But even if one made a comment to another, does it really need to be guessed, analyzed, and commented upon by the world? I’m not an ex-president and perhaps that exclusive club has unique perspectives, but a thought that might occur to me would be: our group mostly gets together when one of us dies. All but one of us is in at least his latter 70s. When we next assemble, will I be guest or guest-of-honor?

My gut gripe is that people more and more don’t seem to know how to act in a church, especially at a funeral. Most of the congregation seems to take cues from the two Christmas-and-Easter church-goers that act like they know what comes next. I’ve long taken umbrage at the callow line that “funerals are celebrations and for the living.” It kind of pretends that the deceased is sitting up there invisibly on some rood ledge, having a laugh with the congregation about the time he fell into Alexander’s Lake. That navel-gazing bonhomie focus may pretend to be consoling, but only at the cost of denying the reality and truth of mortality and what this moment means. And if the priest can’t talk mortality at a funeral, when can he?

In the end, it comes down to getting out of oneself, something the secularized and eulogized funeral fails to do. It comes down to Jesus saying you’ll only find yourself by leaving yourself, or keep yourself by giving yourself away. That’s hard for anybody, perhaps doubly so for a Washington politician. But unless we do that, even church loses its meaning as a house of prayer, becoming just another venue for endless politics or gossiping conducted against the backdrop of nice architecture and sometimes nice but probably “stuffy” music (occasionally uplifted by John Lennon).

Catholics can take a lesson here. While most parishes have outgrown the puerile practice of trite conversations in the pews before Mass, some still encourage this at the expense of a collected period of silence preparatory to encountering the Living God. Again, as shocking as it may be, “it’s not all about you.” If we took that insight to heart, we might even know how to act at, even watch, a funeral.

[On another note: Pace the “everybody goes to heaven” universalism in vogue in so many quarters, I thought it interesting to see several X posters commenting on looting in fire-torn Los Angeles: “there should be a special corner in hell for such behavior!” Amazing how, when evil further assaults and disrupts the normalcy of our quotidian lives, people suddenly seem to understand the rationale of traditional eschatology.]