It's taken me months, but I'm wending my way through Eugene Peterson's Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places. I think it's a wonderful and quite unique book. Infused with the passion of a lifetime, it seems to be poured out rather than written.
Although it would be difficult to summarize this book, one thing that can be said without doubt is that it is Christocentric. Here's a "snip" concerning the taking of communion:
The Eucharist is the definitive action practiced in the Christian community that keeps Jesus Christ before us as the Savior of the world and our Savior, and ourselves as sinners in need of being saved.... Without the Eucharist as focal practice, it is very easy to drift off into imagining Jeus as our Great Example whom we will imitate, as our Great Teacher from whom we will learn, or our Great Hero by whom we will be inspired. And without the Eucharist it is very easy to drift into a spirituality that is dominated by ideas abut Jesus instead of receiving life from Jesus. The Eucharist says a plain "no" to all that. The Eucharist puts Jesus in his place: dying on the cross and giving us that sacrificial life. And it puts us in our place: opening our hands and receiving the remission of our sins, which is our salvation.
The Christian community is never going to give up teaching moral behavior, giving instruction and the commandments of Moses and the imperatives of Jesus and the exhortations of Paul, dealing with the idea and truths given in the Scriptures, and training Christians to follow and obey Jesus in the many and varied conditions of history in which we find ourselves. But however important all these things are, they cannot serve as the center. We cultivate our participation in the play of Christ in history by following him to the cross and receiving his life as he gives it to us under the forms of the Eucharist.
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