Steinhoff Smith, Roy Herndon. The mutuality of care. St Louis: Chalice Press, 1999

Jacobsen, Cindy

English

Wilfrid Laurier University

ConsensusVolume 26Issue 1 The Baptismal Journey: Adventures on theRiver of LifeArticle 275-1-2000The mutuality of careCindy JacobsenFollow this and additional works at: http://scholars.wlu.ca/consensusThis Book Reviews is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in Consensus by anauthorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.Recommended CitationJacobsen, Cindy (2000) "The mutuality of care," Consensus: Vol. 26 : Iss. 1 , Article 27.Available at: http://scholars.wlu.ca/consensus/vol26/iss1/27148 Consensusa promising section of practical importance, yet remains underdeveloped.Stylistically, the book is well researched, well written and thus, easy to follow.Much of this is due to Resner’s consistent repetition. In every chapter heannounces what he is going to say, he says it, and then he repeats what he hassaid. You cannot miss his arguments. Strangely, the book ends with a quirkyinsult to theological schools for following cultural values rather than the cross’values in training preachers. No proof or further explanation is given. This is aglaring blip in an otherwise well reasoned and well documented book. Thestrength of Preacher and Cross is its ability to debate and provide an answer tothe theoretical issue of the importance of ethos in preaching. Its weakness is thatit travels too long on the theoretical highway and doesn’t take enough off rampsto visit the practical concerns of local church pastors.Mike RatteeEmmanuel Bible CollegeKitchener, OntarioLiturgical SpiritualityPhilip PfatteicherValley Forge, Penn.: Trinity Press International, 1997xii + 292 pages, $33.95The quest for “spirituality” is very much with and among us today. This maywell be the finest book on spirituality from a Lutheran prospective written in ourtime. Pfatteicher, well known from his other writings on liturgy and worship,defines his term liturgical spirituality as “that distinctive interior life of the spiritthat is formed and nurtured by the church’s liturgy” (ix). His topic, then, is “thespiritual life as formed by the liturgy” (ibid). He proposes to tell how the principalsymbols of Christian liturgy are experienced spiritually by a congregation.He begins by defining the spiritual life. It is first of all gift and response, andnot our work. His view of spirituality is then theocentric. He also stresses thecorporate nature of Christian faith: It is God with us, and it is communal. It isembodied, and in this sense not especially “spiritual” as we normally think of theword. It transforms us, to make us more like God. “Spirituality then is prayer pluslove plus devotedness. It is, in the words of Brother Lawrence, ‘the practise of thepresence of God’, the way one does one’s religion. It is interpreting the worldaccording to one’s innermost life and intimate and ultimate concern. It is aneveryday activity, the way one goes about daily life... but that is rooted andfocused in the intersection of time and eternity that we call worship...God’sservice of us and our response in our service of God” (10-11).Book Reviews 149This formation of the Christian spirit in worship occurs through seven means,to each of which he devotes a chapter, and each of which he perceives to hallowa different dimension of life: the daily office, the Easter Vigil, the Christian year,architecture, the Eucharist, hymns, and Holy Baptism. Liturgy is the use andstudy of text, but also ofsymbol: hence his treatment of these seven areas which,rather than limiting us, stretch our spiritual lives.The daily office hallows time and mediates to us the symbols of light anddarkness, night and day, our words and God’s Word, speech and silence. On theuse of silence in the liturgy he remarks that “it is a corporate experience that,perhaps surprisingly, binds those who share it more deeply than their commonrecitation of words can do” (46).He uses the Easter Vigil, which hallows memory, as an anchor for exploringthe spirituality of resurrection and Easter. He relates it to the experience of moon,spring, time as flexible, silence, darkness and light, emptiness. Scripture, andwater.Through the Christian year, the hallowing of the seasons, we resonate withthe world of nature. The Christian year uses this to re-appropriate the life ofChrist, not in a historic sense but rather rhythmically, “dense, and close-packed”(109). This is governed by a few simple symbols and archetypes of pilgrimage.The year is a cycle that is going somewhere. In this chapter, he makes aninteresting and rather convincing case for beginning the Christian year not withAdvent, but with Ash Wednesday.Through architecture, the hallowing of space, he sees also the hallowing oflife. He uses Eliade’s concept of the church building as a temple which becomesthe threshold to another world, drawing also on the literary images of Alice andthe Looking Glass, and the wardrobe as the threshold to C. S. Lewis’ Narnia.There is a wonderful description here of Gothic faith, which produced the great12^^ and IB**" century French cathedrals. He defends the 19^^ century Gothicrevival movement in architecture as authentic, and includes a moving account ofthe destruction of the Pittsburgh neo-gothic church, St. Peter’s, in 1990. Hedevelops a convincing dialectic between church as holy place and as house of thefaithful with their activities.His discussion of the Eucharist is subtitled hallowing sustenance. HolyCommunion, he observes, is tied to the 7-day week, which is a rather artificialconstruct. He stresses the idea ofjourney and movement, taking us through theeight actions of Eucharist: prepare, assemble, hear the Word, intercede, offer selfand gifts, give thanks, eat and drink, depart. These are an essential part of thehuman spiritual need for sustenance, “food for the journey”.He sees hymnody as the challenge of hallowing song. This is an especiallytough spiritual move for us today, since corporate song is so strange to us. There150 Consensusare two purposes behind hynanody: to give us voice, and to instruct. As mightbe expected of an English teacher, he defends “text-only” printing of hymns, sothat one may see the shape of the poetry, and gives several examples ofsymbolically-shaped hymns. (For example, “O Morning Star, How Fair andBright”, LBW #76, the verses of which, when printed in a centered-fashion areshaped like chalices.) He relates hymn singing to our spiritual control over soundand breath, again a physical spirituality. Hymns are also for him a signpost in thechurch pointing to the unity of past and present faith expressions. Hymns bindus together as nothing else in liturgy does.Pfatteicher is plainly a lover of hymns. He quotes many from our LutheranBook of Worship. But just as many citations are drawn from the hymnbooks ofother churches - and a great many from our earlier Service Book and Hymnal( 1 958), perhaps a comment on the loss of Christian poetry which occurs when achurch changes hymnbooks!Finally Holy Baptism is the way we hallow life and death. This may seem anodd place to deal with baptism, at the end of the book. But Pfatteicher begins hisdiscussion by focussing on the aspect of death in baptism: water as the threat ofdrowning, the sea as the most profound symbol of our transitoriness. For him,the image of bath and washing is simply too weak to carry the theological freightof baptism. So baptism becomes the journey toward death.Pfatteicher celebrates the vast and intricate complexity and richness ofChristian faith and liturgy. This is not a book for the univocal! It is a persuasivebook, gently prodding us toward a liturgical spirituality, and occasionally startlingus. Much of the content grows out of his other writings on liturgy, especially theco-authored and much-used “Manual on the Liturgy”, now over twenty years old.The student of Lutheran liturgy in our time will find many echoes here of this“Manual”.Nor is it a book for those who maintain an attitude of scriptura sola.Pfatteicher is an English teacher, and draws on the poetry, literature, andhymnody of his field. He also crosses over easily into the territory of the historyof religions, quoting Eliade, James Frazer, Joseph Campbell and Rudolf Ottofrequently. He writes poetically and eloquently, as befits a professor of English.But the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Will his theory of spirituality“work”? And can it sit close with our Lutheran perspective on the Christian life?1 think so. His spirituality is not the inward-focussing solipsism of historic Pietismand current evangelical spirituality, but outward, focussing on the ancientarchetypal symbols, in their physical, ritual, and cultural manifestations.Moreover, as many of us believe, even God used these archetypes and symbolswhen he communicated to us in Scripture! He presents a physical, sacramental,embodied, “hands-on” spirituality. It focuses on things, such as the paschalcandle, the word alleluia, the lenten pilgrimage, and so on. Here the Christian lifeBook Reviews 151happens not so much inside as outside, a welcome contrast to so much of theinward-looking spirituality being marketed today. Jesus is not simply a figure ina book, or in the imagination, but one actually present to us in, with, and underritual.Part of the fun of reading Pfatteicher is in the trivia. He makes interestingcomments on the appropriate use of odd numbers of prayers in liturgy (25), andstrikes a blow for integrity in his remarks on the inappropriateness of fake organpipes in the sanctuary! The book contains one oversight, of interest to readers ofthis journal. In his preface, Pfatteicher records his gratitude to “the first nationalLiturgical Conference of the Evangelical LutheraaChurch in Canada, held on thecampus of the University of Manitoba in July 1982" (xi). If memory serves merightly, this was not a conference of the ELCIC, but of that now-defunct but oncecutting-edge society, CLAW, the Canadian Lutheran Association for Worship!Don NevileHighwood Lutheran ChurchCalgary, AlbertaThe Mutuality of CareRoy Herndon SteinhoffSmithSt. Louis: Chalice Press, 1999224 pages, $33.50 SoftcoverSteinhoffSmith pulls, out of experience, the opportunity for us to see andobserve our tendency as care givers to participate in acts of condescension ratherthan mutuality. He rightfully acknowledges how difficult it is for many of us toidentify this esteem-deflating stance. He goes so far as to reveal an analysis of hisown experiences and learnings.SteinhoffSmith begins his book by using his experiences in a mission groupto share his insight. The people he was supposedly “serving” in this group thatfed the poor, were themselves creating a community of mutuality. They did notexperience themselves as receiving from the leaders of the group, but receivingfrom everyone in the group, as well as contributing to everyone in the group.Many of the “poor” themselves brought food to share. He began to learn thatcaring from a stance of power or authority was not really care.He explores further in his book that pastoral care is very often seen as a“professional skill” of the ordained or specially trained church worker, rather thanthe attribute of an entire Christian community. This professionalizing of pastoralcare misses out on the talents and resources of those around us. It also bringspain to those whose contributions are not acknowledged for lack of recognizing

The mutuality of care

Scholars Commons

https://scholars.wlu.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1473&amp;context=consensus

The mutuality of care

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Wilfrid Laurier University

Scholars Commons