Ay, there's the rub ....

Like many others I'm sure, I spent Saturday morning watching U.S. Sen. John McCain's funeral at Washington's National Cathedral --- a magnificent tribute to a national hero. The music was wonderful, the orations elevating and the liturgical pomp and circumstance familiar and reassuring to any Episcopalian.

I live-streamed the ceremony via National Public Broadcasting, a stream that included running commentary from the online audience. And it was evident there, among other things, that many found the "National Cathedral" concept puzzling.

This grand building has a formal name, too --- the Cathedral Church of St. Peter and St. Paul --- and although it is chartered by Congress as a "National House of Prayer" it is the seat of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, D.C.

Sen. McCain was a lifelong Episcopalian who had worshipped during his final years, while in Arizona, at a Southern Baptist-affiliated church in Phoenix. So the liturgical framework of this service would have been a familiar one, integral to the farewell he carefully orchestrated himself during those final months.

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Meghan McCain's tribute to her father, drawn from a deep well of grief and anger, was the most compelling, I thought --- and this line among her best: "The America of John McCain has no need to be made great again because America was always great."

And then there was President Obama, speaking of McCain: "So, cancer did not scare him. And he would maintain that buoyant spirit to the very end, too stubborn to sit still, opinionated as ever, fiercely devoted to his friends and most of all to his family. It showed his irreverence, his sense of humor, a little bit of a mischievous streak. What better way to get a last laugh than make George and I say nice things about him to a national audience?"

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The current occupant of the White House never was mentioned by name, but was I'm sure on everyone's mind during this ceremonial leavetaking, as Sen. McCain had intended.

Reading commentary after, I thought Jeet Heer, a Canadian writer on staff at The New Republic, summed it up well in a series of Tweets that included, "The message of the funeral was, 'The American establishment has a bipartisan contempt of Trump.' What was missing was any sense of responsibility by the establishment for creating Trump."

Ay, there's the rub.

The United States always had been "great" --- in its aspirations. But certainly not the "greatest" nor necessarily "good."

"Good" involves excising the sources of rot at the core of the American experience --- racism, exceptionalism, nativism, triumphalism. We've made progress on this front as the centuries passed, then taken steps backward.

It's not clear that the old way of doing things, if restored with ceremonial flourish as it was briefly on Saturday morning, can carry us forward to actual as well as aspirational greatness.