These are two of the most delightful paragraphs I'll read all year, I expect:
When it comes time for the Eucharist—communion—I find myself compelled to take it. There seems to be no choice in the matter. I watch my body walk me up to the priest without delay. I’ve been waiting fifty years, I can’t wait any longer. It was a little hasty, and rather against protocol, but it just sort of happened.
I have plans for the rest of the afternoon but have to cancel them. I drive through a red light on the way home, shouting to hooting drivers that I’ve been to church and have no idea what is happening! I lie in my darkened bedroom and let all I’ve described to you move through me. I feel different, and the feeling doesn’t pass. It was like wildness and discipline dancing with each other.
Lest I be misunderstood: No, I don't think you should be taking the Eucharist if you are not a baptized member in good standing of a local church. Shaw is quite right about the protocol.
Even so: I love the sheer joy he evokes, as well as the sort of surprised and delighted bewilderment of the sentence "I've been to church and have no idea what is happening!"
The church in question in this case is an Eastern Orthodox parish Shaw attended not long after his conversion. And it has become his home. The parish and, really, the Orthodox liturgy, is an anchor to Shaw's entire book, as it happens. I will likely return to the book in fuller form later, so I don't want to say too much more about the book as a whole yet.
Rather, I want to make an observation about how Shaw's Orthodoxy anchors the book. Specifically, I do not think an evangelical could write Liturgies of the Wild. This is why: It's that line in Shaw about wildness and discipline dancing with each other. The discipline seems to come largely from the set forms of Orthodox worship. Evangelicalism, by contrast, has virtually no set forms at all. Rather, as John Ahern argued here yesterday, evangelical churches tend to be characterized by a kind of lowest common denominator Christian theology that is decidedly not Catholic or Orthodox, but also isn't really Protestant in any kind of deep and rooted way.
To take an example from my college days at Nebraska, I was a theologically curious student who liked books and arguments and ideas. (I was an English and History double major, so no surprise there.) I had many questions. For example, I didn't know what to think of baptism. But if I asked someone from any of the dozen non-denominational campus ministries about baptism, the answer I'd get would be some variant of "Christians disagree about this, we try not to divide over it," followed by a very lame and generic account of credobaptism that would likely manage to say virtually nothing about the local church. When I asked my RUF campus minister the same question, the conversation was quite different: "Well, I'm an ordained pastor in the Presbyterian Church in America. So the simplest way I could answer that is to talk you through what our confession says. But I believe the confession because I believe it's a faithful account of Scripture. So if you want to work through the relevant biblical texts, I'd be happy to do that too." The specifically Protestant theology of RUF, and the theology of the Westminster standards in particular, anchored the conversation in much the same way that Shaw's Orthodoxy anchors his argument about stories, initiation, maturity, and so on.
Mostly evangelicals do not relate to tradition in this way, I think. But we could. As I read Shaw my mind reached back to an old piece by David Henreckson at Comment. Here he is modeling one way this could be done:
At its best, Protestantism offers a simple regimen of grace. Perhaps we could benefit from adding a feast day or three to our liturgical calendars, but the singular focus on what matters most may be the tradition’s greatest virtue. Strip everything away, and one can see the grace at the heart of things. External aids are useful pedagogies. Sunlit stained-glass windows beam down colourful shadows of saints—sacred and secular. They can become their own visual piece of the liturgy.
But as John’s Gospel reminds us so often, these signs and wonders should point us to Jesus. Jesus in an ornate golden basilica. Jesus in a pristine Gothic chapel. Jesus in a dilapidated Covenanter church. Jesus in the shadow of Mary. Jesus in the tone deaf. Jesus in the trespassing drunk. We simply need the eyes to see through the excess to the ordinary grace within.
There is a superficial way of telling the story of American Protestantism in which the Mainline is progressive and indifferent to orthodox (all too often true and accurate, to be clear) and evangelicalism is conservative and reliably orthodox. It is that second part of the equation I stumble over most.
In reality, it seems likelier to me that both the Mainline and Evangelicalism have ended up adopting an indifferent and apathetic attitude toward their theological forebears, such that both have ended up with a kind of lowest common denominator Christianity whose chief purpose is facilitating identity expression for its adherents. These days, that identity expression is closely tied to politics, of course, since politics is one of the primary meaning making spaces for many Americans today. My point here is simply that the particularities of ecclesial traditions is lost in the search for a theology conducive to maximizing individual expression. That is severe and perhaps overstated, but I do not think it is wrong in the broad strokes.
The problem with this is perhaps answered most neatly by Shaw: If you want people to be bewildered by church, then church needs to be weird in some way. It does not need to be weird in the way Shaw's Orthodox parish is. But if church seems to consist largely in confirming people in their priors—either by an explicit endorsing of their political vision, as if Jesus shared their exact politics or through a consumeristic liturgy that is nearly indistinguishable from a fusion of concert and TED talk—then I suspect that even when a sincere seeker stumbles into our church, as Shaw did in his book, that seeker will not find anything that helps them to actually encounter Christ and grow into Christian maturity. The life of the church impedes the life of indulgent self-expression. And as Wendell Berry said long ago, it is the impeded stream that sings.