Channeling Thomas Howard

No. Not really.

The truth is: Thomas Howard is my hero, in more ways than one.

First, as an explainer of Catholic sensibilities to the Evangelical Protestant mindset in which I was raised, he is without peer. Just as to deconstruct non-Catholic misunderstandings on justification, the papacy, the canon of scripture, and practically anything else you can think of, go to Jimmy Akin every time (Jimmy is my hero too), likewise to awaken appreciation in the most trenchant Fundamentalist heart of ritual and ceremony, of worship in liturgy and sacrament, of sacred art and architecture, of the whole sacramental and incarnational worldview, Tom Howard is your man.

As a young Evangelical yearning for something more, I discovered Howard’s Evangelical Is Not Enough at just the right moment in my life. It was like water in the desert to me. Chance or the Dance? also is wonderful, though I got even more out of Hallowed Be This House (which I see is now published under the title Splendor in the Ordinary: Your Home as a Holy Place).

Secondly, Howard is a magnificent writer, a stylist of extraordinary grace, wit, and power. He makes wonderful use of words like "precincts" and "hugger-mugger" and "surfeit," and puts sentences and paragraphs together with such elegance and music that form and function become one, and you start to absorb something of what he is trying to tell you just from the sound of the words. He is almost more a poet than an essayist; he writes with the moving energy and joy of a man who loves deeply what he is writing about, who feels it down to the marrow in his bones.

Robert Bolt said that in A Man for All Seasons that he strove to create "a bold and beautiful verbal architecture." Howard’s writing is like that, and reading it, one feels, rather than thinks: If verbal architecture can be like this, with nothing dry or functional or utilitarian about it, why not church architecture also?

Anyway, recently at Arts & Faith, a discussion board I visit more or less regularly, there was some discussion around the disconnect between, on the one hand, Catholic and Orthodox veneration of relics and icons, and Protestant discomfort with such practices on the other.

This subject triggered my Thomas Howard Response Mechanism, which sets me off and running quoting Evangelical Is Not Enough, Hallowed Be This House and whatever else comes to hand (in a pinch I’ve even been known to reach for Once Upon a Time, God…).

So, I began working on a contribution to the thread, but what with one thing leading to another, as I secretly knew from the beginning it would, I got completely carried away and ended up writing a sprawling essay touching on some of the general themes regarding which Howard had been among my earliest and most influential guides.

And, as is often the case when one tries to do the same sort of thing that one’s hero does, I did what little I could to honor Howard’s style as well as his ideas.

Of course I could never really even approximately "channel" Howard, or hope to match either the talent or the style of his inimitable prose. The man is a true original. (The first few grafs of my piece in particular are too jargony and abstract, though I think it gets better after that, about the time I get to Genesis 1.) But I think anyone familiar with Howard may notice that I am at least trying to walk in Howard’s footsteps, even if I don’t quite have his stride.

Read SDG’s "Reflections on a sacramental/incarnational worldview" at Arts & Faith