The process of compiling an anthology of devotional classics was for me a continuous process of tracking down bits and pieces that were part of my literary and religious life that I had never pursued in detail. I will feel rewarded if my readers come to love the entries in my anthology as I have come to love them, and I will be doubly rewarded if my readers catch a vision for finding devotional riches in overlooked corners of their own reading lives.

The Devoted Heart
The following reflections on the devoted heart are occasioned by the recent release of my anthology of devotional classics, a book in which each devotional text is accompanied by a 500-word explication by me. I called the texts classics to denote that they possess qualities that raise them above the conventional entries in a daily devotional guide. The problems with the conventional devotional guide are multiple, as Charles Spurgeon discovered when he made a survey of existing devotional books. What Spurgeon found was predictability, monotony, a tendency toward abstraction, and lack of fresh insight and expression.
In compiling my anthology, I worked hard to find devotional riches in unexpected places. Many of the authors would doubtless be surprised by what I chose for devotional purposes. Although I did not primarily go in quest of superior expression, I found that freshness of insight and expression just naturally appeared, often because of the real-life situations from which the devotionals arose.

I will adduce four examples to illustrate what I am describing, and then I will explore the common ingredients that the selections in my book share, in effect offering a definition of the genre of a devotional classic.

Devotional Riches in Unexpected Places
The burial service in The Book of Common Prayer was not composed as a devotional. It was instead intended to be part of a funeral service. Yet it is a moving meditation on human mortality and immortality. Here is a brief excerpt:
In the midst of life we are in death; of whom may we seek for help, but of thee, O Lord, who for our sins art justly displeased? . . . O holy and most merciful Savior, deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death . . . [and] suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from thee.
When Victorian poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson was walking with a visitor in a garden, the visitor asked the poet what he thought of Christ. Tennyson’s response was not offered as a devotional, but it nonetheless rises to that status: “What the sun is to that flower, Jesus Christ is to my soul. He is the sun of my soul.”
William Shakespeare finalized and signed his will a month before his death in 1616. In doing so, he did not envision himself as writing something devotional, yet part of the preamble reads as follows: “I commend my soul into the hands of God my Creator, hoping and assuredly believing through the only merits of Jesus Christ my Savior to be made partaker of life everlasting. And my body to the earth whereof it is made.”
Painter Lilias Trotter made a practice of drawing plants in Algeria, where she served as a missionary in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Trotter pondered the plants that she came to know intimately, the idea occurred to her that they were parables of spiritual truths. One of these parables was built around the idea that just as plants die and then revive to new life, for people, too, death is in multiple ways the gate of life. Here is a brief excerpt: “A gateway is never a dwelling-place; the death-stage is never meant for our souls to stay and brood over, but to pass through with a will into the light beyond . . . for above all and through all is the inflowing, overflowing life of Jesus.”
A Devoted Life is the Seedbed of a Devoted Heart
Before I turn to an analysis of the common ingredients of the genre of a classical devotional, I will pause to draw a conclusion from the examples I have just quoted.
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That’s a pretty horrible picture, innit? It’s a 40-year-old German monkeypox patient whose nose began to rot off after he caught the disease. Turns out that he was HIV-positive and didn’t know, plus was infected with advanced syphilis — also a surprise to him. He told doctors he had never been tested for a sexually transmitted infection. There he was, celebrating diversity like a champ, and now his nose is partially rotted off. Heaven knows who he passed along HIV, syphilis, and monkeypox to along the way.
Meanwhile, New Orleans is so far going ahead with its big Labor Day weekend Southern Decadence festival, an LGBT event that draws 275,000 to the French Quarter for six days of sex, dancing, and debauchery. Decadence was cancelled the past two years because of Covid, but not over monkeypox, though it is certain to be a superspreader event.

I will never be able to understand the death wish of a culture in which a man like the anonymous German exists. Take a look at this collection of articles from medical journals, compiled by Joseph Sciambra (once a promiscuous gay man, now a chaste Christian), testifying to the shocking health realities of gay male culture. For example, according to the CDC in 2017, 60 percent of syphilis cases were found in only two percent of the population: gay men.

I remember being told by the media that gay men were vastly more promiscuous than straight men because society compelled them to be. Normalize homosexuality and grant same-sex marriage, and that would change. I never believed it because I knew perfectly well that gay men were insanely promiscuous not because they were gay, but because they were men. An ordinary male unrestrained by religious or moral scruple, and faced with a wide variety of willing partners who demand no emotional commitment, or even to know one’s name, before having sex — that man will likely behave exactly as most gay men do. Until now, at least, heterosexual men have had to cope with a culture of restraint imposed by women. Randy Shilts, the gay journalist who wrote And The Band Played On (and who later died of AIDS), made this very same point in his book. He said that straight men he’d spoken to expressed envy that gay men could have such a bounty of sexual experiences, because they didn’t live with the restraining factor of women. There was always, always somebody — and usually many somebodys — willing to say “yes” to anything you wanted, any time you wanted.

In the United States, we have had legal same-sex marriage from coast to coast for seven years now. Of course the culture of debauchery has not changed. It never was going to change. And look, if the horrors of AIDS didn’t change it, why should monkeypox?
If all this is normative behavior in the gay male community (note well: I’m not talking about lesbians), then what chance does a young gay male have of not being caught up in it? We live in a culture where, for better or for worse, homosexuality has been largely destigmatized. It seems plausible that if a young gay man wanted to have a normal, “vanilla” lifestyle of dating, courting, and gay marriage, it would be possible. I wonder, though, how likely it is when the cultural norms within the gay male community are so debauched. Seriously, gay male readers, what advice would you give an adolescent gay male if he wanted to avoid falling into that gutter? If you don’t have the ability to use the comments section, email me at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com, and put COMMENT in the subject line.
In the late 1980s, during the height of the AIDS crisis, a New Orleans friend who is very liberal and pro-gay, though a heterosexual woman, told me a story about being out on the streets on Mardi Gras day. She said that she and her boyfriend were crossing lower Bourbon Street, the heart of the city’s gay community, when they saw a teenage boy, couldn’t have been a day over 17, staggering drunk (or drugged) and naked through the crowd of men. He had blood and feces running down his leg from his rectum. He had likely been raped. Nobody in the crowd was trying to help him. He was lost and wandering. He disappeared into the crowd of nearly-naked gay men partying in the street. My friend said the sight of that poor kid, who may well have been infected with HIV that day, upset her so much that she asked her boyfriend to take her home, that her day was done.

We never talk about stuff like that. It violates the Narrative. But it happens. It’s not the whole story about gay male culture here, but it’s a part of the story.

UPDATE: Along these lines, here’s a strong essay by Bridget Phetasy about her regret over being a “slut”. Excerpt:
But if I’m honest with myself, of the dozens of men I’ve been with (at least the ones I remember), I can only think of a handful I don’t regret. The rest I would put in the category of “casual,” which I would define as sex that is either meaningless or mediocre (or both). If I get really honest with myself, I’d say most of these usually drunken encounters left me feeling empty and demoralized. And worthless.
I wouldn’t have said that at the time, though. At the time, I would have told you I was “liberated” even while I tried to drink away the sick feeling of rejection when my most recent hook-up didn’t call me back. At the time, I would have said one-night stands made me feel “emboldened.” But in reality, I was using sex like a drug; trying unsuccessfully to fill a hole inside me with men. (Pun intended.)
I know regretting most of my sexual encounters is not something a sex-positive feminist who used to write a column for Playboy is supposed to admit. And for years, I didn’t. Let me be clear, being a “slut” and sleeping with a lot of men is not the only behavior I regret. Even more damaging was what I told myself in order to justify the fact that I was disposable to these men: I told myself I didn’t care.
I didn’t care when a man ghosted me. I didn’t care when he left in the middle of the night or hinted that he wanted me to leave. The walks of shame. The blackouts. The anxiety.
The lie I told myself for decades was: I’m not in pain—I’m empowered.
Looking back, it isn’t a surprise that I lied to myself. Because from a young age, sex was something I was lied to about.
Yeah, me too. I was never any kind of “slut,” if that word can be applied to men. But it took me a while to work out that what the world (meaning popular culture) told me about sex was a lie. I was not especially sexually active in my pre-Christian years, but that wasn’t for lack of trying. What slowed me down was the misery I felt after doing the deed. Everything was clear after that: the lies I told the women, and myself, about what we were doing. I loved sex, but more than that, I really did want it to be about love, real love. I kept trying to tell myself that it was fine for it to be meaningless, because that’s what I was supposed to think. It was a lie. It was only after my conversion, and learning the value of chastity, that I was able to see the true meaning of sex. It kept me away from surrendering my life to Christ for years, because I thought — I had been told — that it was my birthright to enjoy commitment-free sexual pleasure. Hadn’t we put away the hypocrisy of our parents’ generation? Weren’t we, you know, liberated? I believed that with my mind, but my heart, and my body, said otherwise.
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After more than forty years of ministry at Huguenot that included many challenges including times when the congregation could not pay him, he spent his last few years of life as pastor emeritus. One factor contributing to his retirement was total blindness. His final sermon was delivered February 22, 1914. During his life he served outside the church as well as within. Among his other works were serving as a commissioner for the Charleston Public Schools, president of the Charleston Bible Society, president of the City Board of Missions, president of the Training School for Nurses, and the eighth president of the New England Society for 34 years. 

Charles Stuart was born to Albert A. and Susan (Fulton) Vedder in Schenectady, New York, October 7, 1826. His education was provided by Schenectady Lyceum Academy which prepared him to graduate valedictorian of Union College’s class of 1851. Ready for his life’s work, Vedder was employed in the publishing industry by Harpers’ Magazine and other New York periodicals while he anticipated bigger and better things. However, having set his course, his direction would change. Vedder grew up in a Christian home reading the Bible and had been profoundly affected by The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis (1379-1471). His ancestry was Dutch-German and à Kempis was influenced by the Dutch priest, Geert Groote (1340-1384), whose devotio moderna was a response to what he saw as speculative theology among the Dutch. Groote’s teaching emphasized personal spirituality and taught practical communal religion as applied in the Brethren of the Common Life. But Vedder did not seek the priesthood, rather he became a candidate for the Presbyterian ministry. One thing is certain, he could not have become a priest given his marriage to Helen Amelia (Scovel) of Albany, June 7, 1854.
Where would the former publisher go for seminary? Since he was about twenty years old he had suffered reoccurring bouts of ill health because of compulsive work habits combined with the difficult climate of long, wet, and cold winters in New York. A more agreeable climate might prove prudent for theological education with the bonus of improved health. Other men that were Presbyterian ministers such as George Howe, Aaron W. Leland, and Zelotes Holmes moved South for warmer winters, so Vedder joined the number by attending Columbia Theological Seminary in South Carolina. He graduated Columbia with twenty others in 1861 just as the Civil War was beginning.
Vedder was soon licensed and ordained by the Presbytery of Charleston for work in First Church, Summerville, beginning 1861. The Summerville congregation could trace its ancestry to a small group of settlers from the Congregational Church in Dorchester, Massachusetts, which sailed in 1695 to Carolina (North and South, divided 1712) to establish a settlement about twenty-two miles northwest of Charleston. The next year they built the Old White Meeting House. At the Synod of South Carolina meeting in 1859 the Presbytery of Charleston reported, “They have organized [June 9, 1859] a Church at Summerville, and constituted the pastoral relation between it and the Rev. A. P. Smith” with one ruling elder, “Arthur Fogartie” (10, 96). After but a year, pastor Andrew Pickens Smith left Summerville to serve the Glebe Street Church in Charleston, 1862, and after a series of brief calls ended his days in First Church, Dallas, Texas, 1873-1895. There are several events and transitions on the timeline between the Old White Meeting House era and organization of the Summerville Presbyterian Church, but the Summerville Presbyterians exemplify the close relationship between Congregationalists and Presbyterians in the Low Country. Both presbyterian and congregational polities held to the Calvinism of the Westminster Confession in opposition to the established religion of the Church of England in the colonial era.
When the Civil War ended in 1865, Vedder continued at Summerville another year before changing call to the Huguenot Church in Charleston where he would be pastor the remainder of his lengthy life. Huguenots fled France and emigrated to other nations in anticipation of Louis XIV’s October 18, 1685 revocation of the Edict of Nantes that had given them some freedoms to practice their Calvinism and worship as Protestants. Just as Congregational churches in South Carolina enjoyed good relationships with the Presbyterians because of their common commitment to the Westminster Confession, so also the Huguenots were friends in ministry with Presbyterians due to their common commitment to Calvinism, rule by elders, and the mercy work of deacons.
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