March Madness and Living the Christian Life

     Tonight Kentucky plays Kansas for the NCAA championship. We lived in Kansas City only about long enough to get our daughter’s high school diploma, an adorable teeny tractor Christmas tree ornament, and go to the weirdest sporting event I’ve ever attended. I didn’t know if KU’s fans were watching a basketball game or The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Strange chants, newspapers up, confetti all over, and they hardly ever sat down. Something also happened and their arms all turned into a supposed wheat field, I think—they were well trained at the slightest event to act in a certain way. Though not a March mad fan myself, it is interesting to compare this to living the Christian life.

     Charlotte Mason said this in the Parents and Children volume of the Home Education series (p. 124): “Sow an act, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny.” This thought also supports an Anglican view of how to live an ethical life. Our ecclesial liturgies help us to understand and live our lives as entering into Christ’s actions.

     The way habits operate can be explained with using acting as an example. Actors learn their roles through one of two main ways I’m told. Method acting is more internal. The actors learn their character’s life by living with them and watching them. This contrasts with classical acting instruction in which the actor imitates the exact actions of others helping the actor to internalize them, which is how liturgy operates. Or a Rock Chalk Jayhawks game.

     So in the context of relationships we can ask ourselves what habits we can have in our lives that can assist us in living Christ’s life with others. For example, as in the Church’s practice of the Lord’s table, Samuel Wells also sees food as one of the central practices of friendship and especially marriage:

By learning to eat the same food at the same time they learn the gift of bodily presence with one another. By learning to share the attendant pattern of planning, purchasing, preparing, clearing, washing, and putting away they learn the disciplines of partnership. And by making the family table where manners are articulated and rehearsed, they learn what it means to become a new community with particular vocation. (God’s Companions: Reimagining Christian Ethics, 95-6).

Christ’s sharing of Himself in the Eucharistic meal with us serves as a guide to habits that likewise lead us towards intentional acts to eat with our friends and family.

     Our friends scheme and rope us into places where we find ourselves swimming through some pretty crazy activities that get rather out of control at times. Hopefully on par, though, our general habits align with those that will produce a follower of Christ.