My Canterbury Tale, Part Three
It wasn’t the pep rally that I had come to expect from Evangelical worship services. There were simply the prayers of the saints tending my wounds and the body and blood of Christ nourishing my soul.
Writer | Editor | Artist | Ordinand
It wasn’t the pep rally that I had come to expect from Evangelical worship services. There were simply the prayers of the saints tending my wounds and the body and blood of Christ nourishing my soul.
In many of my conversations, the prayerbook was consistently lauded as a steady, biblically-sound guide. Now, with my mind failing, it became my life-preserver.
How did a low-church Baptist boy from the North Georgia mountains ever end up in a liturgical tradition like Anglicanism?
I can’t believe it has been a year since my friend Kyle and I packed our bags and made the transatlantic journey to Ireland and England. In many ways, it feels like just a few days since I was last walking the streets of the cities I so quickly came to love.
When you take a trip, you hope to bring something back with you — to somehow be changed by your experience… Ultimately, what I took from my visit to Ireland was a bigger, broader view of three things: the world, the Church, and myself.
Transcendence describes something that transports us beyond our physical existence, something whose whole is on another spiritual plane than the sum of its parts.
As any hobbit knows, much of the joy of a good day’s walk comes from the friends who travel by your side.
As I walked along the banks of the River Liffey on the last day of my journey, I think all the energy of the ancient cities I had visited––London, Oxford, and Dublin––began to course their way into me.
When I return to my hometown, I realize I am a fish out of water. I recognize the sights, the sounds, and the flavors, but they are no longer mine. There is an aesthetic, verbal, and all-around cultural disconnect. The experience is bittersweet.
In the story of redemption, the grievance is from one direction and the reconciliation from the other.
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