--from As kingfishers catch fire, Gerard Manley Hopkins

We have good ideas, but are we incarnating them, bringing them to flesh and action? This is often a problem for the contemporary church. We have good ideas, ideas that remain in their platonic, abstracted state. We talk a lot, we do little, we change little.

The church doesn’t just have a lot of good ideas, it has the Grand Idea—the idea by which men can be rescued, redeemed and renewed. We get our word “idea” from the Greek word ίδεα, which means form or pattern. In English an idea can mean a thought, conception or notion, or a plan of action or intention.

The Gospel encompasses the greatest notion, the greatest intention the world has known. As the Grand Idea, it gives birth to a myriad other ideas—ideas for serving, loving, and caring for neighbors and nations; ideas for building, improving, educating and protecting. Is it any surprise that historically the Church has sent out so many world-servants of so many different stripes? The Church built hospitals as well as monasteries; it sent forth masons as well as missionaries, architects and archbishops, mathematicians as well as monks (in fact sometimes the mathematician was a monk).

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We might say that the Gospel is like a Grandfather Idea that has left more descendants than we can count. The Gospel fathers-forth a thousand ideas which all bear the family name, and which all show a common family trait, a pattern of love serving God and neighbor in ten thousand faces.

So which idea burns in your breast? What is it that you pine to bring to the world? No doubt Christ plays in your soul, lovely in your limbs and eyes. What can you do today that will give your idea bodily life? It might just be the cause for which you came into the world—and we need you.

For more insight to this question, get the book, Habits of the Mind, by James Sire. Or read the article, “A Train to Somewhere: Ideas Matter,” by Everett Piper.