There’s been a shift in recent years toward a more “casual” faith or approach to worship.  But there also seems to be a number who are reverting back and looking to add more reverence and order.  Any thoughts?

I think the tide might be turning a little bit.  When I go to heavily liturgical churches, there are some things about them I don’t like.  They’re not good at spontaneity.  Episcopalians have never been really good at spontaneity.  But Pentecostals and Baptists are.  So we like that feeling of spontaneity, but also the Episcopalians are good at formulaic praying.  There are some beautiful things in their Book of Common Prayer.  What is written there is often out of the Scriptures.  So there’s lots there.  Another thing you pick up from the Celts—and from the Episcopalians—they use the Bible more than evangelicals do.  It’s an interesting thing.  Evangelicals talk about being people of the Book, but you go to church and the pastor may only use two verses and you don’t hear any more.  But if you go to an Episcopal church, you can guarantee you’re going to hear from the Old Testament and from the New Testament, the Gospels, the Epistles.  They have lots of reading from the Bible within a single service, and I think that’s what people really want.

One of the great things that happened in my recent travels to Ireland was that we went to Glen Stall Abbey, and we stayed among the Benedictines who are kind of the evangelicals in the Catholic church.  The Benedictines don’t have statutes all around, don’t have pictures on the walls of popes or saints.  They just don’t.  And what happened to us there was that I had about fifteen masters-level students with me, and we went to church five times a day and listened to the Bible being read.  Nobody built a sermon around it or said, “Let me explain this from my commentary, because there’s a Greek word we need to look at.”  We just read the Bible, and we read it and read it and read it.  And I was amazed at how much power there was.  The word is lectio divina.  It is a simple reading of Scripture with no commentary.  Is there power in it?  I think there is, but we’ve lost that.  We feel like we have to read a verse and then explain it for thirty minutes. 

All my life I’ve been an evangelical.  And we’re known for talking and expounding the Scripture.  But we’re not really known necessarily for letting the Scripture speak to us—just Scripture.  I think that’s what really came through to me when researching for The Path to Celtic Prayer … how little we read the Bible.  

Let’s switch gears and talk about another of your books, The Singer, which was first published in the mid ‘70s.  What inspired you to write this retelling of Christ's story?