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Neil Averitt

Goodreads Author

Born

in Washington, D.C., The United States

Website

http://www.neilaveritt.com

Genre

Christian, Classics

Member Since

August 2016

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My book, The Single Gospel, grows out of my own spiritual travels.

Like many Americans today, I grew up with religion playing very little part in my life. This was a change from family tradition, because my ancestors had always had a strong Christian bent. My own childhood, however, was largely devoid of religious education. I was once asked whether I understood the meaning of Easter, and I replied that I certainly did. It was the day, I explained, when they nailed George Washington to the cross.

As I moved into adult life, however, it became increasingly clear that our contemporary world was missing something that had been central to successful cultures and to successful individual lives in the past. One alternative began to appear when I fi My book, The Single Gospel, grows out of my own spiritual travels.

Like many Americans today, I grew up with religion playing very little part in my life. This was a change from family tradition, because my ancestors had always had a strong Christian bent. My own childhood, however, was largely devoid of religious education. I was once asked whether I understood the meaning of Easter, and I replied that I certainly did. It was the day, I explained, when they nailed George Washington to the cross.

As I moved into adult life, however, it became increasingly clear that our contemporary world was missing something that had been central to successful cultures and to successful individual lives in the past. One alternative began to appear when I first encountered a true community of faith, and saw what lives lived in Christian understanding might look like. In my case this happened on a visit to a place in Greece called Mount Athos.

Mount Athos is in Greece but not really of it. It is a self-governing, largely autonomous monastic republic in the northern part of the country, literally a piece of the old Byzantine Empire, a part of the doubly unfamiliar world of the Eastern Orthodox churches. It occupies a remote, mountainous peninsula that reaches thirty-five miles out into the Aegean, terminating in the steep-sided peak of Mount Athos itself, which rises seven thousand feet directly out of the ocean. Scattered across this isolated landscape are twenty large monasteries, a few small towns, innumerable farmhouses and hermitages, and about 2000 monks. The monasteries sometimes stand near the sea and sometimes cling to crags a thousand feet above it. The entire community functions as a religious republic – a sort of “Christian Tibet” – under a charter granted by the Byzantine Emperor in the year 972. For the first-time visitor like me, the experience was as strange as being suddenly dropped down on Mars.

Once there, however, I found lives lived by values that I had not seen before. For one thing, the monks did not have, as one might have expected, a dour and burdened attitude toward their austere lives. Instead, the life they had chosen for themselves seemed to have made them calm and cheerful, and at peace with the world. The country lanes around some of the monasteries were so quiet that you could hear the sound of birds’ wings and of bees in the trees, and a sense of age-old peace lay over the land. One of the monks recommended to me a line from the Psalms, “Be still and know that I am God.”

I had come to realize that I wanted to know more about Jesus and his life. And as I came to learn more, I found that my own truths had changed.

I found a different way of looking at all the practical dealings of daily life. It made it suddenly clear that it is possible to live in the world by different values, and to perceive both troubles and opportunities in ways very different from our society’s customary practices. A follower of Jesus might “live in this world but be a citizen of heaven.” The Seventh Century church father, St. Isaac the Syrian, expressed this connection well:

"Be at peace with your own soul; then heaven and earth will be at peace with you. Enter eagerly into the treasure house that is within you, and so you will see the things that are in heaven; for there is but one single entry to them both. The ladder that leads to the kingdom is hidden within your own soul. Flee from sin, dive into yourself, and in your soul you will discover the stairs by which to ascend."

And so, at long last, I had relearned what had once been so well known in my family that it seemed to be in our DNA. And I had come to feel that the gospel story was something that I needed to work through, absorb, put into more understandable form, and make available to a general readership; and thus this book.

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Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Neil Averitt I came to a decision to write the book in stages, rather than at a single moment.

When I was a freshman in college saw that a new translation was neede…moreI came to a decision to write the book in stages, rather than at a single moment.

When I was a freshman in college saw that a new translation was needed. I had set out to read the Bible. The school library had shelves of them, in all sorts of editions and translations. But none of them seemed quite right. The King James had all of its great language, but many other passages were antique and hard to understand. The more modern translations often lacked the kind of dignity that you associate with scripture. They had changed many of the familiar phrases. Instead of the angels saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men,” they might say something like “peace to those on whom his favor rests.” This might be good Greek scholarship, but it undervalues the traditions of the Christian community, in my opinion.

Later on I came to realize that the substance of the gospels needed to be better known as well. The gospels are one of the true foundations of the Western literary canon, the source of innumerable references in art and literature. A person cannot fully appreciate a painting like Descent from the Cross, or a short story like The Gift of the Magi, without knowing their roots in scripture. But I came to see that this common culture was becoming less widespread among the people of my generation, who are less regular churchgoers than their parents or grandparents had been.

The consolidated narrative in The Single Gospel is intended to address this problem by making the story more accessible. It can be read by different people in different ways. Committed churchgoers can find in it a narrative of the life of Jesus, with the rich details and teachings all present in an understandable order. Our Jewish cousins can read it as an account of life in First Century Judea, and a portrait of a particularly influential reform rabbi. Members of the secular middle class can read it as a way of reconnecting with one of the world’s great works of literature and philosophy.

In time I realized that the values of spirituality and faith, which underlie the gospels, also needed to be more widely known. This kind of insight might come to a person anywhere, but for me it came during a visit to the monastic republic of Mount Athos in Greece. That’s a spectacular place, a sort of “Christian Tibet,” part of the unfamiliar world of the Orthodox churches, and a surviving part of the old Byzantine Empire. But I found faith there in forms I had not seen before. The lives that the monks had chosen for themselves seemed to make them calm and cheerful, at peace with the world. The nighttime services were done by candlelight, with the lighting dim and low, and they conveyed a sense of connectedness with something larger. I left convinced that people would be happier if they were more familiar with Christian teachings, and if the gospels made more readable.

Finally, I was motivated to write this book in order to help counteract a drift toward indifference or actual hostility toward Christianity in our culture. We live in an age of the world where religion is becoming more important in many other countries. This book will help to put the traditions and teachings of Christianity back on the table, in an original form that will help us remember where our own faith has come from, and what its virtues are.
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