Everyday Greatness, Inspiration for a Meaningful Life first caught my eye as a result of the name Steven Covey being on the cover. I am a big fan of Covey’s Seven Habits and principle based living. This being said, I was disappointed with this book.

Perhaps I didn’t read the fine print, but what I was expecting was a book by Steven Covey. Everyday Greatness is instead a compilation of stories taken from Reader’s Digest with commentary by Covey. The book is arranged into seven sections, each with three subcategories that are meant to inspire one to a life built around positive choices. Covey is the man responsible for presenting this structure and I would imagine had a great deal of influence in choosing the particular stories in this anthology. He makes the case that each of us have the choice to act, the choice of purpose and the choice of principles and uses various anecdotes from the pages of Reader’s Digest to illustrate how making good choices can result in any person achieving great things, even if limited to the ordinary.

Perhaps my lack of enthusiasm for this book is my general dislike for the style of writing found in the magazine from which the stories are taken, but my recommendation on this book is to take a pass. There are better books on similar subjects to be read.

I received this book free from Thomas Nelson Publishers as part of their BookSneeze.com book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Chapter Six of the book begins to address prayer that takes the form of a fixed rite. He begins by defining the word liturgy which can best be described as “the work of the people”. Howard makes the point that the Christian liturgy is not designed to be a general thanksgiving, but is very unique in the same way that our lives are unique. One then encounters these very powerful words that describe what we are doing when we participate in Christian worship:

This divine love is such that not only does God give Himself to us and for us but, unimaginably, takes us into this very mystery of self-giving and makes us one with His Son, calling us the very Body of this Son who offers Himself to the Father for the life of the world.

Howard reminds us in this statement that our very reason for being Christians is to participate in the life of Christ and “to be broken and given” for others. This is a very deep way of praying when we enter into worship of this sort. It means we place our whole selves on the altar each week as an oblation to God. One of the key things to note is that we follow the pattern of Jesus in this being a voluntary act. No one forces the self-sacrifcial life that marks the life of a Christian. Like our Savior, we are to enter into death freely.

Another argument against this type of ritual that one often hears spoken is the emptiness of doing the same thing again and again. Howard points to the words of C. S. Lewis in this case who shares that every Christmas meal the same food is brought out, but everyone recognizes the special nature of the same food each year. One might also look in the modern sense to some of our sporting events. Here in Knoxville there is a great love for the Tennessee Vols. Each football season the same people gather with the same rituals of tailgating, making their way to the stadium, watching a game that is essentially the same each time, with the same rules, playing the same teams year after year. But to the one who understands what is going on at a game, and for one who sees this as important, the fact that the same things are repeated is not a negative, but rather a positive for those who are participating. How much more does this apply to worship?

Lastly, Howard touches upon the disdain among many modern Christians for outward signs seen in the Liturgical based Churches, such as the sign of the cross, bowing, etc.  Here he makes two observations that I find useful. First is that bowing in itself should present us with no problem if our intent is to bow to the one true God. It is only when we are bowing to false gods that we run into a problem. Then he comes back to the problem noted in earlier posts on this book, that being a less than full understanding of the Incarnation. He notes,

The only difficulty with that sparse and practical approach is that it treats us as though we were disembodied intellects.

We are indeed people who are created by God to have bodies, minds and souls that are not able to be separated any more than one can separate the three persons of the Trinity. They are one and distinct at the same time. In the same way that faith engages our mind and soul, it should too engage our bodies. It is a way of learning how to be a Christian in the full sense of the word. Howard states,

By bowing with our heads as well as our hearts, we testify to the restored seamlessness of outer and inner.

This is exactly what we mean when we say we are sacramental people. In Christ, God came to redeem the world, the entirety of creation. Our worship should never fail to proclaim this to others.

Perhaps one of the most disturbing parts of Roman Catholicism and the Orthodox Church for Evangelicals is our stubborn insistence upon giving honor to Christ’s mother, Mary.  Thomas Howard’s discussion of the subject brings us back around to the importance that Christianity places on the physical. He notes that in the Old Testament we see worship of God that almost always involves a blood sacrifice of some sort or another. He then asks what happened as a result of Christianity,

But that was all primitive. Surely something spiritual would emerge from those elementary lessons. Surely thoughtful men might anticipate the day when all of this would be put behind and be replaced with elevated thoughts and spirituality.

Indeed it was all put behind. There came an end to those gory altars and all that slaughter. But it was not a tissue of elevated thoughts that replaced them. Rather, an angel appeared to a woman and said, “Hail!” What we now had, far from the summons away from the physical realm that highminded men might have wished, was gynecology, obstetrics, and a birth. Whatever we may imagine about the spiritual rhapsody that might have attended this angelic visitation to the Virgin, the one thing we know to have occurred was a conception. The Virgin’s womb teemed.

It was embarrassing to the religious mind. It proved a scandal. The whole ensuing story bothered and even enraged religious men, and it has continued to do so.

Once again it is the Incarnation that is the key to understanding the honor given to Mary in our Churches. We honor the fact that Christ receives his humanity from her, that God chose her to take care of His Son. How amazing it is to think about the fact that Mary was asked to share the responsibilities of being a parent with God, the Father of all creation.

I appreciate that Howard continues to point out our tendency of wanting to separate Christianity from the physical. The fact that there are still many among us who are uncomfortable with having a God who participates in even the most earthy elements of our humanity illustrates that Paul’s description of the scandal of Christ crucified is still around, even to this day.

It is also good to hear from a writer who can recognize that there are some, who in wrongly placing Mary’s place above her Son have gone too far and have need of being pointed back to Christ. Howard points equally to the folly of turning to the solution that claims that God’s glory would be diminished by giving honor to anyone else. Howard asks the question,

What king surrounds himself with warped, dwarfish, worthless creatures? The more glorious the king, the more glorious are the titles and honors he bestows…..He is a very great king, to have figures of shuch immense dignity in his train, or even better, to have raised them to such dignity.

God has indeed raised Mary to a place of honor in his kingdom. I see no reason for us not to do the same. In doing so, we are reminded not only of the great dignity He has bestowed upon her, but upon the entire human race by His glorious Incarnation.

All buildings are icons. They all bespeak something. The spare simplicity of a clapboard New England church speaks of the demure austerity and purity that should mark the Christian’s heart and , hence, the Christian’s mode of life. The World Trade Center speaks of power and commerce and money. The Taj Mahal evinces the delicate, almost weightless, grace of a beautiful woman and of a man’s love for her.

Where I myself once saw many church buildings as feeling like cold, manmade monuments built to serve a deep seated pride, I now see them as expressing in a material way the glory of God. It was Fr. Bob Barron who first pointed out to me that almost all of the beautiful European churches that I criticized with the argument that the money that built them could have been given to the poor, were in fact built by the poor. It also took time for me to see that my own words had been used first by one Jesus’ own companions, the one who was to betray Him.

Six days before Passover Jesus came to Bethany, where Lazarus was, whom Jesus had raised from the dead.and dried them with her hair; the house was filled with the fragrance of the oil. and given to the poor?” (John 12:1-3)

Once again it is the Incarnation that paves the way for representing Christ now in stone, wood, glass and paint. One of the most striking examples I can think of is the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth that symbolically represents Christ in both his divinity and humanity by having a church with two floors. The lower church is very plain and spare to represent Christ’s humanity and the upper church very lavish to represent His divinity. The steeple of the Church is an inverted chalice that represents God’s pouring forth from heaven to earth at the moment of Mary’s fiat.

Howard continues his reflection by moving away from the place to pray and on to the way in which we do so as Christians. He notes his own distrust for set prayers that follow a strict order and that are many times repeated. Like Thomas, I have encountered Christians who saw these prayers as being too rote and that it was precisely this type of prayer that Jesus came to abolish. However, if one looks closely at Jesus’ own practice we see that he in fact followed the Jewish rituals of his time. We hear that as a boy his parents took him to Jerusalem to take part in these rituals and we see this throughout the Gospels. We also many times hear him praying from the Psalms. My own experience is that both set prayers and more formal repeated prayers are important in our lives as Christians. Even after more than 30 years of hearing the same prayers of the Eucharist, my level of understanding of what lies beneath the prayers continues to grow. The prayers, far from becoming rote, have deepened.

Howard also goes on to share his realization that he needed to overcome a sense of individualism that kept him from opening up to different types of prayer. He says,

the sense in which all that doctrine and correction and instruction will take root in the Church and bear fruit in wise disciplines did not present itself to me. It was as though the Church had never really existed. It was as though the Bible had been written yesterday and I were the first man to open it.

One of the things that I have never understood in the criticism of those who do not believe in the teaching authority of the Church is how they themselves claim a sense of authority. No doubt many claim that the only true Christian authority is the Bible, in reality there is always more to it. It is not just the Bible that has been presented to me in every case when I have been faced with believers of this doctrine, but an interpretation of the Bible that came from the standpoint of the person trying to convince me that there was no need for outside interpretation. The real question that is usually overlooked is which interpretation is more in line with the truth? For most evangelicals it is a modern tradition that holds more weight and this is where I find problems in that many modern evangelicals’ interpretation seems very subjective and leans more toward placing our own experiences upon the Bible rather than searching the Scriptures as objectively as one can for the truth. In a sense we are really called upon to allow ourselves to be judged by the Scriptures, not the other way around. The Catholic interpretation of the Bible relies more on the entire 2,000 year history of the Church, paying special attention to the early fathers of the Church. We attempt, although not always entirely successfully, to take into account the wisdom of generations of Christians.

As always, your comments are welcome.

This past Friday I mentioned here that perhaps my favorite book of all time is For the Life of the World, by Fr. Alexander Schmemann. It is a book about the sacraments, but even more so about the implications of having the sacramental world view that both Catholic and Orthodox Christians share in common. Though this book approaches the sacraments from the standpoint of Eastern Christianity, it has certainly helped this Western Christian to see them with new eyes and has deepened my understanding of the Christian life. With this in mind, I have decided to spend some time reflecting on the thoughts that Fr. Schmemann presents in his book and to share them here. I am not the first to reflect upon this book and will certainly not be the last, but I hope that by spending some time with this book to encourage a greater dialogue about the sacraments here at this blog.

I will be taking a very slow approach to the book, examining small sections at a time and do not plan to focus the next few months exclusively on the book, as I enjoy the variety of subjects that have been part of this blog from the beginning. My hope is that this will allow readers and myself the opportunity to digest Fr. Schmemann’s words and enter into a more full dialogue.

Fr. Schmemann begins his book by quoting one of the great atheist philosophers, Ludwig Feuerbach, who sought to use the statement, “man is what he eats,” in order to prove there was nothing beyond our material world. Contrary to Feuerbach’s belief, Schmemann reminds his reader that this idea is a very Biblical one:

He (man) is indeed that which he eats, and the whole world is presented as one all-embracing banquet table for man. And this image of the banquet remains, throughout the whole Bible, the central image of life. It is the image of life at its creation and also the image of life at its end and fullfillment: “…that you eat and drink at my table in my Kingdom.”

Fr. Schmemann goes on to present the question of what it means that Christ gave Himself for the life of the world. He points out that there are two general patterns to this answer among Christians. One group of Christians believe that this life is limited to religious life, in other words a world that is separate and opposed to the secular world. Those who take this viewpoint believe the purpose of Christianity is to invite as many people as possible to enter into the “spiritual” life and as a result it is only in the activities of church, prayer and piety that any real meaning exists. On the other side of the coin are those that believe Christ came “for the better life of the world”. These are those who could be described as activists, those who believe that through our actions as Christians we can restore the world to what was lost in the fall. They place less importance upon worship and much more on what has sometimes been called the “Social Gospel”.

Fr. Schmemann responds to these two interpretations of the life offered to us by God with the statement,

Whether we “spiritualize” our life or “secularize” our religion, whether we invite men to a spiritual banquet or simply join them at the secular one, the real life of the world, for which we are told God gave his only-begotten Son, remains hopelessly beyond our religious grasp.

My observations of the modern Catholic Church are that we have in many places fallen into looking at our faith in the same inadequate categories described by Fr. Schmemann. We have too often accepted this so called divorce of the spiritual and the secular, needlessly separating the two. One of the first places I encountered the struggle to bring the two together was in the Catholic Worker movement inspired by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin. Catholic Worker communities insist upon engaging in both worship and work, in prayer and action.

What has been your experience of seeing these categories either united or divorced within the Christian community?

First, I must thank Elizabeth for recommending this book. So far it has been challenging and thought provoking. I do not share the experience with the author that she does of having grown up in an evangelical church, but can relate to much of what is presented in chapter one from growing up in an area where Catholics were the vast minority in an area of the country saturated with evangelicals. One of the qualities that strikes me as I continue to read the book is the way Howard is able to point out the strengths of this group known as Evangelical, while at the same time showing what is lacking. One perspective I would like to bring to the conversation is that of a member of the Catholic clergy who still believes we have much to learn from the evangelical tradition. There seem to be areas concerning our faith where we could stand to learn and grow while not losing sight of the places where we might share our strengths.

Howard begins his book by stating,

I have never come upon Christian believers of any ilk who exhibit more clearly than do the evangelicals the simplicity, earnestness, and purity of heart that the gospel asks of us.

In many ways I would have to agree wholeheartedly. There is certainly a simplicity in those I have encountered among this group of Christians whose basic understanding of the faith is to rely on the salvation of Jesus Christ and to trust what is said about Him in the Bible. While I disagree with the maxim of Sola Scriptura and ironically see it as one of the principal traditions of many evangelicals, the attention given to the Bible by them is something many times lacking in our Catholic population. We are slowly becoming more comfortable with the Scriptures, but still have quite a ways to go. One of the things noted by Howard is the role that the emphasis on the importance of giving witness to the faith plays in motivating evangelicals to learn the Scriptures, many times memorizing large passages word for word. I had never thought about it in this light, but if one believes strongly in the necessity of bringing others daily to Christ, it would be wise to be have the Bible at our disposal without having to even pull it off the shelf or out of a briefcase. We Catholics many times use the excuse that we don’t know the Bible because we were taught as children to emphasize other things more, like the Eucharist and other sacraments or the stories of Mary and the saints. For many of us this may be true, but the longer I have contemplated this, I don’t think we as Catholics are any less capable of learning the Scriptures or making time for a deeper meditation upon them than are the evangelicals. In fact, it is amazing to me to see adult converts to evangelical churches go from zero knowledge of the Bible, to familiarity with it in very short order.

Another advantage evangelicals may have in this realm can be summed up in two words, Sunday School. I can’t remember a non-Catholic friend growing up who didn’t just go to church for worship on Sunday, but who didn’t have to stay for at least another hour for Sunday School, and it wasn’t just limited to the kids. It also seemed that we never scheduled anything in town on Wednesday nights for the same reason. I never had to go to Sunday school as a kid, since I was attending Catholic school during the week and went to mass everyday before starting classes as well as daily religion class. It was only recently that it struck me that not everyone had the privilege of attending Catholic school and therefore got much less catechesis on our faith, the Bible included. I’m not simply saying that we should adopt the same methods and strategies that the evangelicals employ, but we shouldn’t give up the struggle to change the mentality among Catholics that we are unable to engage the Bible on the same level as other Christians. I know that we can never exhaust the depths of wisdom to be found within it’s pages.

One of the points that Elizabeth mentions in her video is her agreement with many evangelicals that Christians should look different than the rest of the world. While I don’t necessarily agree with all of the ways described by the author such as avoiding dancing and card games (though I do recognize them and remember ones that were not included on his list!), there is a value to recognizing we as Christians are called in many ways to be different. Our baptismal promises call upon us to follow Christ and doing so should look like something.

It is a wonderful opportunity to take part in this book discussion and I hope some of you will consider joining in as well.

–1–

For real country sausage, the best you ever tried, pick up a pound or two of Tennessee Pride!

This has been the song stuck in my head all week long. It started with a search for Jimbo Whaley’s cover of a Journey song that I heard him perform a few months back. What I had forgotten was that he also recorded the Tennessee Pride theme song.

–2–

The news in Haiti has loomed large in my mind this past week, as I am certain it has for most of the world. It is really hard to imagine things being worse there than they already were. Many Catholics in Tennessee feel as special closeness to the Haitian people due to a longstanding Parish Twinning project that many parishes are involved in. The twinning program has given me the opportunity to visit Haiti twice. I was happy to learn from Jude Jean that in Boucan Carre most everyone was fine, but that many had lost relatives who lived in Port au Prince.

I still remember how hot it was in Haiti on my first visit and the frustration of not being able to speak the language. Then I found a guitar in the house where we were staying and several of us took turns sharing songs and playing the drum. It taught me that communication is not always about words. May our actions communicate to the Haitian people our love and concern for them in this time of need.

–3–

Many people are focusing their prayers in a special way this month on the sanctity of all human life. I came across this picture from my seminary days. Fr. John O’Neill and I both look a bit younger in the photo!

–4–

Elizabeth Esther is hosting an online book discussion on Thomas Howard’s Evangelical Is Not Enough that begins next week. I began reading the book last week and am very much looking forward to the discussion. When reading the list of his heroes in the front of the book, I came across quite a few of mine as well. Thanks for the recommendation Elizabeth!

–5–

Last weekend’s Search retreat went very well, but it certainly wore me out. I was tired for several days afterward. It was a great reminder of the power we have as Christians to build one another up through prayer and encouragement. This week following has also shown me the importance of taking time for rest.

–6–

Here’s hoping the weather continues the warming trend we have been seeing here in Tennessee. The hills seem to be calling me to strap some extra weight to my body and go for a little walk in the woods. I’m also praying for more rain as I need to do some experimenting with a tarp before committing to an idea we have that would involve leaving behind our tent.

–7–

Yesterday a surprising email arrived in my mailbox with a request from Bishop Stika that I share my reflections on priesthood with our presbyterate this coming Monday. We began this tradition of having a few priests who are celebrating milestone anniversaries speak to the group as a whole last year and it is an honor to have been asked.

I am not yet certain what I will say in the few minutes allowed to me, but it will most likely be along the lines of this reflection written last year entitled, Take this heart…