Book Review: The Soul’s Pilgrimage – Volume 1: From Advent to Pentecost by Robert D. Crouse
Robert D. Crouse, The Soul’s Pilgrimage – Volume 1: From Advent to Pentecost (The Theology of the Christian Year: The Sermons of Robert Crouse). London, UK: Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd, 2023. ISBN: 978-1-915412-42-3, 253 pp., $33; also Kindle.
“History is a pattern / Of timeless moments.”[1] T.S. Eliot’s well-known lines from The Four Quartets describe time as meaningful. It is not as hopeless repetition nor chaotic randomness. The Church fleshes out this meaningful pattern of time church by the liturgical calendar—a yearly cycle that contains “the whole of the Christian faith and practice in a coherent form” and reveals “the pattern of our spiritual life in all its wholeness.”[2]
Father Robert Crouse (1930-2011), a twentieth-century Anglican priest and theologian, firmly believed in the transcendent character of this ecclesial pattern and strove to disclose its meaning throughout his homilies. A group of Father Crouse’s former students recently collected and published these homilies, with the first volume containing homilies from Advent to Pentecost.
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The Liturgical Calendar
A liturgical calendar may seem strange to a modern outsider: the naming of each Sunday, days of feasting, and periods of fasting seem primitive and superstitious. It appears this way in the modern world precisely because it makes T.S. Eliot’s claim about time being a transcendent pattern.
However, this pattern of time is not fantastically abstract, for we encounter it every time we step out the front door. Cycles of death to life, darkness to light, and scarcity to bounty surround us in creation. For nature is “no idle demonstration: here and all about you is nature’s parable of Jesus’s resurrection, and…our own new and risen life.”[3] Father Crouse repeatedly states that the church calendar, no less than the visible seasons, proclaims the life and glory of Christ.
Easter, both liturgically and in nature, is the time of new life when things sown and died “bring forth much fruit” (John 12:24 KJV). Advent, when the earth is the furthest from the sun’s light, is the dawning of the “light of the world” (John 8:12 KJV). These two cycles, the natural and liturgical, in harmony, reveal one truth—the incarnate logos of God.
Father Crouse, with a gentle pastoral spirit, draws the listener into the weekly texts, rites, and traditions of the Christian year. By unveiling the transcendent significance of these seemingly small details, the world of symbolic meaning opens to the believer. From vestments to rites of Holy Week, no color is arbitrary, and no liturgical movement is pedantic. All is imbued with meaning; all is in beautiful harmony with natural truths, and the truth of Christ manifests in his church.
The Threat of the “Cares of the World”
This meaningful pattern, however, is threatened by what Father Crouse decries as the “clamoring and insatiable appetites of the senses.”[4]
Our commercialized culture attempts to cheapen each holy day and exchange the cycle of fasting and feasting for one of constant indulgence. Ultimately, we are left without genuine leisure, and each Sunday and holiday is seen as a cessation of work rather than what we work for and towards.[5] Father Crouse reminds us that the Christian, like the Magi celebrated on the Feast of the Epiphany, is on a pilgrimage to behold Christ, and therefore must leave behind the things of the world—and be vigilant against its encroachment.
The Patient Ascent of the Christian
Father Crouse persistently emphasizes the transformed Christian way of life “set before us step by step in the cycle of the Church’s liturgical year.”[6] This pilgrimage to the beatific vision is a gradual ascension, guided by the yearly repetition of the church’s calendar. The methodical journey of the church each year counteracts a prevalent vice of our modern age: the desire for the “instant, obvious, salvation.”[7] For the state of being human is the status viatoris (condition of being on the way); the condition of a sojourner, placing one step in front of the other, day after day.[8]
The Church beckons us each Lord’s Day to attend to Christ and his word—and thereby to attend to our life found in him. A liturgical calendar has structured the communal journey of the church since the early centuries of the church.[9] Yet the meaning of this orderly journey is often shrouded in darkness because of our inattentiveness to the liturgy and fixation on worldly cares. The Christian is always tempted to lose sight of his pilgrimage and to despair or presume upon the mercies of God. Thus, Father Crouse proclaims, “We must be recalled again and again. Again and again we fall back into our daydreams and nightmares.”[10]
Recommendation
Father Crouse’s homilies illuminate the transcendent meaning of each week of the liturgical year and are a wonderful resource for deepening the ecclesial worship of any orthodox Christian believer. They will undoubtedly help one hear the call of Christ more clearly through the beautiful traditions of the church Sunday after Sunday.
[1] T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” in Four Quartets, (NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 1971), lines 233-234.
[2] Robert Crouse, The Soul’s Pilgrimage: Volume 1: From Advent to Pentecost, (London: Darton, Longman, Todd, 2023), 112.
[3] Crouse, The Soul’s Pilgrimage, 176.
[4] Crouse, The Soul’s Pilgrimage, 45.
[5] See Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1952).
[6] Crouse, The Soul’s Pilgrimage, 47.
[7] Ibid.
[8] For an introduction to this concept see Josef Pieper, Hope, in Faith, Hope, and Love, (San Fransico: Ignatius Press, 1997).
[9] Gary Thorne, introduction to The Soul’s Pilgrimage: Volume 1: From Advent to Pentecost, by Robert Crouse (London: Darton, Longman, Todd, 2023), 25.
[10] Crouse, The Soul’s Pilgrimage, 47.
Image: The Sower by Vincent van Gogh (1888). Courtesy of WikiArt.
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