Rowan Williams on Fleeing and Staying

 

The 2019 Paddock Lectures at General Theological Seminary ~ Rowan Williams

I had the pleasure to hear Dr. Rowan Williams give the Paddock Lectures in February of 2019.  General Theological Seminary has posted the videos of them on YouTube, which is quite wonderful. Well-worth some of your "screen-time" this Advent.

pmc+

Rowan Williams ~ "45 Years of Being Christian"

This is what the love of God is like

“This is what the love of God is like:
it is free and therefore it is both all-powerful and completely vulnerable.
All-powerful because it is always free to overcome,
but vulnerable because it has no way of guaranteeing worldly success.
The love of God belongs to a different order, not the order of power,
manipulation and getting on top, which is the kind of power that pre-occupies us.”  

― Rowan Williams, 
Theologian and former Archbishop of Canterbury.

Thomas Merton and Karl Barth - December 10, 1968 - An Archbishop reflects on two giants

Below is a great piece that Rowan Williams wrote in 2008, when he was Archbishop of Canterbury

Not Being Serious: Thomas Merton and Karl Barth

Wednesday 10th December 2008

A lecture given to the Thomas Merton Society of Great Britain and Ireland (at St Cyprian's, Clarence Gate, London) on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of Merton's death in 1968. Karl Barth, the great Swiss reformed theologian, died on the same day.

Alongside Merton's obituaries in 1968, in many publications, appeared obituaries of a very different figure indeed – possibly the greatest Protestant thinker of the twentieth century: Karl Barth. I was at that time a first-year student of theology in Cambridge and during my first term I picked up the newly published British edition of Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. And what are the first words of Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander? 'Karl Barth had a dream about Mozart.' I found myself speculating, in December 1968, about conversations that might be going in on in some heavenly waiting room between Merton and Barth. Apparently such very diverse figures: the greatest Protestant thinker of the twentieth century, and one of the most widely publicized and widely-read Catholic writers of the age. What would they have to say to each other? Well of course Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander begins to give you the answer to that. The conversation did not begin in the anteroom of heaven (or some department of purgatory) in 1968: it had begun several years earlier. 16 September 1960 is the first reference in Merton's journals to his reading of Karl Barth, and during the early '60s Barth was so much of a conversation partner for Merton in his private journal writing, thatConjectures itself is, for a long time, referred to in the journals under the provisional title Barth's Dream (which is still the title of the first part of the published journal, Conjectures).

'Karl Barth had a dream about Mozart', and Merton was very struck by what Barth had to say about Mozart. Mozart, according to Barth, posed a major theological problem: Barth's dream was about trying to get Mozart to explain to him why he was an unreconstructed and not terribly devout Catholic. Barth took these things seriously and really wanted to know; but, Mozart had no answer to give him. Mozart had said all he wanted to say: and he hadn't said it in theological words. Mozart, said Barth, is the 'divine child' in all of us. And Merton seizes on this image, and says that even for a committed Protestant theologian like Barth, it's the divine child, the Mozart who saves us.

Barth says ... 'It is a child, even a 'divine' child, who speaks in Mozart's music to us.' Some ... considered Mozart always a child in practical affairs. ... At the same time Mozart, the child prodigy, 'was never allowed to be a child in the literal meaning of that word'. He gave his first concert at the age of six. Yet he was always a child "in the higher meaning of that word.

Fear not, Karl Barth [Merton continues]. Trust in the divine mercy. Though you have grown up to become a theologian, Christ remains a child in you. Your books (and mine) matter less than we might think: there is in us a Mozart who will be our salvation. (Conjectures, pp.3—4)

But Merton connects this in his journals with a much deeper groundswell of interest at that time in what he refers to as 'the sophianic': that is, that level of the world where divine wisdom in its receptive femininity is at work. That depth of silent receptivity, represented in scripture and tradition by the language of holy wisdom (particularly represented in the eastern Orthodox tradition by the icons of holy wisdom), is, for Merton, what Barth is feeling for – and not quite articulating. The 'divine child' belongs with this apprehension of divine Sophia, the wisdom of the heart of things. And Merton tends to read Barth at this point as if Barth the theologian stands simply for the principle of active – almost aggressive – divine love over against any attempt at human self-justification or human action. He fits Barth very effectively into the polarity between agape and eros: agape the divine love coming down actively, and eros the hopeless, human attempt by desire and longing to rise to God, always frustrated. Barth the theologian is on the side of agape and yet, (says Merton) scratch Barth a little and you'll find Mozart, you'll find eros, you'll find the divine yearning mediated through the human.

And that goes with Merton's reading of Barth at this point as someone advocating an extreme hostility to, or suspicion of, human culture and also as someone privileging the cerebral over the emotional or imaginative. That is of course how Barth has often been read. But I want to suggest this evening, that Merton's reading of Barth moved on very interestingly from that point, and moved on in such a way as to be as one piece with his apprehension of and his use of the very different religious world of Buddhism in his Christian journey. So that the bold suggestion I'm making is that Barth helped Merton to read Buddhists. (Barth, I feel, would not have thanked me for this!)

But even the very first quotation that Merton makes from Barth ought to flash a few warning signs: because that first quotation is from a Christmas sermon of Barth's in which Barth attacks the whole idea of religious system and religious proof. In other words Barth is undercutting his own intellectualism and cerebral temptation. Thus the Barth that Merton is reading is already rather more complex than simply the prophet of divine, aggressive, active agape mediated through the theologian's intellect, and yet secretly subverted by the divine child. And it's fascinating to trace in the journals of the early 1960s just how Merton's reading gradually opens out onto some deeper dimensions of Karl Barth.

In Conjectures later on, he's still reading Barth as someone wary of or hostile towards human culture, and compares him unfavourably both with Christopher Dawson (a great Catholic social thinker) and with Dietrich Bonhoeffer; saying that Bonhoeffer stands much closer to Catholicism than Barth does. But that first layer of the Barth/Merton conversation is already beginning to give way in the journals of this period.

Merton read Barth more and more deeply and by 1963 he had begun to hear another music as in Barth. Before '63 he'd read mostly one or two sermons and some slightly more journalistic pieces by Barth. But in '63 he was reading Barth's little book Dogmatics in Outline: the lectures that Barth gave after the war in the ruins of Bonn University, which are certainly still the best short guide to Barth's thinking. If we turn to the journals of 1963—5 we see something new opening up. Merton has begun to understand that Barth's concept of God, Christ and of faith is a concept far more in tune with some of his own deepest intuitions than he had ever spotted before. Here is some of what he wrote in the journal:

30 September 1963

'A magnificent line from Karl Barth: 'Everyone who has to contend with unbelief should be advised that he ought not to take his own unbelief too seriously. Only faith is to be taken seriously. And if we have faith as a grain of mustard seed, that suffices for the devil to have lost his gain.' What stupendous implications in that!'

Barth, in Dogmatics in Outline, is not simply mounting a conventional attack of agape against eros, faith against culture: he is rather saying that the self before God is not serious, it is groundless. It is not something that exists in its own density and solidity: the self before God is poised on the divine word, the divine communication over an unfathomable abyss. It is both deadly serious in one sense, and totally unserious in another sense. It's not surprising that Merton returns several times in his journal entries to Barth's humour in Dogmatics in Outline. (It has to be said, against popular myth, that Barth can be a very funny writer indeed, and often is, in these lectures.)

Now there are elements of the old typology still at work in Merton's reception of Barth at this time – a contrast that he draws between Barth and Frithjof Schuon (1907—98) at one point, as representing revelation over against a perennial philosophy of 'the religions'. Yet, more and more, Merton is drawn into what seems to be the heart of Barth's theological vision, and finds there both a deep resonance and a profound challenge. The key passage comes in 24 October 1963. I'll read it in its original form from the journal, though a version of it is reproduced in Conjectures, crucially placed almost at the end of the book – as if it's a point towards which Merton is working. Merton opens with a quote from Barth:

24 October 1963

To be a man, means to be situated in God's presence: as Jesus is. That is, to be a bearer of the wrath of God.' We need the shock of this sentence, which is of course immediately qualified by Barth himself. And the qualification is implicit, for Jesus bears that wrath and lives. But wrath is on us. And the Calvinist catechism "What understandest thou by the little word suffered?" "That he all the time of his life, but especially the end thereof, hath borne in body and soul the wrath of God against the whole human race.' How powerful, and how serious.

Catholic piety sees Christ suffering all his life, but in a different perspective. He is the bearer of all kinds of pains, but they are—so to speak—the pains of a person who has not been 'struck', who is not under the wrath; they are quantitative, detailed, exquisite, etc. But the full enormity of sin is perhaps not seen as well as here, for God seems to be pleased with this pain. No! it is his wrath! And Barth's terrific chapter on Pilate. I think I'll have to become a Christian.

Merton deals here with one of the most difficult, challenging, unattractive and indispensable bits of Barth – humanity under the wrath of God: Jesus under the wrath of God: what Merton calls later an ontological sense of wrath: that is, the wrath of God as something written into being itself. Merton reads this as saying that God is not 'pleased' with who and what we have made ourselves. But thus, he's not pleased with suffering, either Christ's or ours, suffering as quantitively piled up in order to placate God. Understanding suffering as something we can 'store up' in order to make God be 'soft' on us is to misunderstand completely the nature of the wrath of God and the pain of Christ.

'I think I will have to become a Christian', says Merton, meaning, if I read him correctly, 'I think I will have to understand that a proper theology of the death of Christ tells me I'm not serious: God is serious; my condition is serious; sin is serious; the Cross is serious. But somehow, out of all this comes the miracle, the 'unbearable lightness of being' as you might say: the recognition that my reality rests 'like a feather on the breath of God'. It is because God speaks, because God loves and it is for no other reason. And if we want to know what it is to say that I am, the only answer is 'I am because of the love of God'. And when I seek to justify, defend or systematize what I am, I become 'serious'. I cease to be a feather on the breath of God and gravity draws me down into darkness.

The point is that, at this particular stage, what Merton is picking up on is Barth's sense of God's freedom. God freely causes us to be involved in the life of the Spirit by freely choosing the means of salvation, not being coerced, he says, by some eternal and impersonal decree. God freely chooses to bring about salvation through poverty and death: through a renunciation which makes room for the freedom of God. Here is later on in Dancing in the Water of Life: 'In sacrificing the desire to be absent, man reveals the world to itself as the place of man's meeting with the glory of God in freedom.' Although a summary of Merton's own reflections a that point, that might equally well be a summary of the first chapter of Barth's Dogmatics in Outline, which speaks very powerfully of the world—and the human world—as the theatre of God's glory and liberty.

Merton has absorbed in all this some of the most difficult and apparently unattractive elements of Barth, the interpreter of Calvin. He's understood that when Barth writes about the wrath of God, he's not writing about some emotional feeling that God has towards us which we have to calm down. He's talking rather about that wholly destructive order of being which we set up when we attempt to fill the space that should be filled by the freedom of the love of God. And you'll see how this is developed still further in more depth in some of the later journal entries. It's a very paradoxical kind of 'natural theology', and much later on in Dancing(the entry for 12 August 1965), Merton explains what he means – implicitly contrasting Barth here with 'the Barthians', Barth's rather less gifted interpreters.

12 August 1965

Our very creation itself is a beginning of revelation. Making us in His image, God reveals Himself to us, we are already his words to ourselves! Our very creation itself is a vocation to union with Him and our life, and in the world around us, if we persist in honesty and simplicity, cannot help speaking of him and of our calling. The trouble is that there are no 'pure' natural traditions and everything gets overlaid with error. Still, there is truth there for those who are still able to seek it, even if they are few. Ought it to be called 'theology'? That is a technical question.

Our very creation is a vocation. Once again the centrality in Barth's theology of the calling of God as the essence of the creative act is used by Merton to establish what he thinks is a kind of natural theology that avoids the reproach of simply trying to climb from the world to God by a ladder of analogy. Existence itself is a word, my being is God's word to me. And in that entry, Merton sees this as something quite in tune, not only with Barth, but with Anselm.

It's not that there is, from this perspective, something in us, some element of human longing, human eros, which links us to God and leads us to God: not that there's some bit of us which if we spot it correctly gives us the right clues to work out the existence of God. It's the bare fact of our being, resting on God's gift: that is, 'word', calling, summons, the beginning of union. And that's why I used earlier on the admittedly quite controversial word, 'groundlessness'. I used that because it's one of the concepts that bridges something of the world of Barth and the world that Merton at the very same time was immersing himself in, more and more deeply: the world of Buddhist meditation and speculation. Groundlessness: there is no solid self independent of the relations, the chains of interaction, that compose the world: there is no solid self which exists over against God: there is only the call of God and the echo set up in creation: the possibility of union.

It's not to say everything is contained within God (this is not pantheism): it's to say rather that what is, is because God addresses it, because God relates to it. Although Merton doesn't seem to make the connection explicitly, this has all kinds of resonances with the Eastern Christian idea that it is the logoi, the words of God, which are the foundation of everything. Every reality is a communication of God, and everything exists therefore in virtue of God's communicating act.

Elements of Barth are feeding in here to the way in which Merton in this period is appropriating Taoism and Zen particularly. They become part of his own revolt against the seriousness of images of the self.

18 June 1965

'Solitude' becomes for me less and less of a specialty, and simply 'life' itself. I do not seek to 'be a solitary' or anything else, for 'being anything' is a distraction. It is enough to be, in an ordinary human mode, with only hunger and sleep, one's cold and warmth; rising and going to bed. Putting on blankets and taking them off (two last night – it is cold for June!) Making coffee and then drinking it. Defrosting the refrigerator, reading, meditating, working (ought to get on to the article on symbolism today), praying. I live as my fathers have lived on this earth until eventually I die. Amen. There is no need to make an assertion of my life, especially to assert it as MINE, though it is doubtless not somebody else's.

28 August 1965

I realized then that I have been running the risk these past few days of tying myself down with a mental delusion—taking the hermitage too seriously and myself with it—identifying myself with this stupid little cottage as if my whole life was bound up with it. What total absurdity! Looking at the hills and recovering the freedom of true prayer (of which, incidentally I have had so much at the hermitage too), I realized, that what is important is not the house, not the hermit image, but my own self and my sonship as a child of God.

Merton's revolt against the seriousness of the self-image, and therefore with an extraordinary prescience and depth, an acceptance of what he calls an 'unavoidable wrongness' in us.

5 July 1965

Certainly enough is evident merely in this Journal to destroy me for ever, after I am dead. But that's the point: not to live as one who can be so 'destroyed'. This means not ingeniously discovering infallible ways of being 'true' in the eyes of others and of posterity (if any!) but accepting my untruth in the untransferable anguish which is characteristic of death, and leaving all 'justification' to God. Everything else is only wrath, flame, torment, judgement.

I think you can see in that extract what Merton has done with Barth's notion of the wrath of God. It is what happens when we take ourselves seriously, when the self-image takes over from reality. And that passage is to me a very poignant 'opening out' onto the agonies of introspection in Learning to Love (the sixth volume of the journals), the volume which covers those anguished months of Merton's love affair. Here I can only refer to a few typical statements, where all of that thinking and reflecting of a couple of years previously comes into focus in the light of an experience of wrongness; being at odds, being unable to provide a self-justification and unable to settle down with a satisfying image of the self. As Merton says – rather poignantly and wryly – in the journals, he is both a bad monk and a bad lover. There is no way of bringing it all together in a single frame. So he can write—in a way markedly contrasting with some of what he said earlier about Christopher Dawson—about the risks of an escape into a 'beautiful lost world of extinct Christian culture. Will that simply reinforce the deceptions and delusions of my 'monastic' life? I don't say these are answers: but they are real questions.'

5 September 1966

What I see is this: that while I imagined I was functioning fairly successfully, I was living a sort of patched up, crazy existence, a series of rather hopeless improvisations, a life of unreality in many ways. Always underlain by a certain solid silence and presence, a faith, a clinging to the invisible God – and this clinging (perhaps rather His holding on to me) has been in the end the only thing that made sense. The rest has been absurdity. There is 'I' – this patchwork, this bundle of questions and doubts and obsessions, this gravitation to silence and to the woods and to love. This incoherence! There is no longer anything to pride my self in, least of all 'being a monk' or being anything – a writer or anything.

Again, that same month.

Where I am now, nothing unambiguous is possible. In a certain sense I have to be wrong up to a point, and what I'm trying to learn is how to be at least simple and honest about it and not try to say I am right, and not try to whitewash myself in terms of something or someone I cannot be. I am neither a good monk nor a good lover.

In those pages some of what both Barth and Buddhism have fed into Merton becomes incarnate in the most uncomfortable and challenging way. Because if it's true that I am a 'feather on the breath of God', that I exist because called, summoned into relation by God, that I have no seriousness within myself, but only the joyful 'unbearable lightness' of knowing myself held by God – if all that is true, then there is never going to be a way in which I can map my life, my sense of my identity onto a fore-ordained pattern of rightness and justification. I am bound to be dependent. I am bound to be receiving. I am bound to put on hold whether I can show myself to be 'right'. And it leads Merton to make some very stinging remarks in these journals about 'religion' as a means of self-justification, religion as a drama which seeks to gloss or to soften the challenge of faith: a very Barthian theme indeed. There's another telling little aside where Merton is reflecting on Teilhard de Chardin. He was initially quite enthusiastic about Teilhard, then read a bit and found it much duller than he expected.

10 June 1967

Are the neologisms of Teilhard much better? Good intentions, heart in the right place, wanting the right thing, but did he really have the necessary gifts? If it comes to science I would gladly read later and better scientists. If it comes to poets ... he does not even begin to be one. As for theology, I must admit that I become more and more suspicious of it in its contemporary form. After Barth. ...

as if something about the ambitious, harmonic cosmology of Teilhard comes to be insupportable once you've really digested Barth not only as a theologian, but as someone describing your reality, your unjustifiable reality which depends on the mercy of God. I don't fully endorse that judgement of Teilhard: it's a very typical bit of Merton's wild over-statement. But that little sentence 'After Barth.' is very significant there.

He sums a lot of this up in an entry from the private journal written in the summer of 1966 and designed for the woman he loved.

20 June 1966

The great joke is this: having a self that is to be taken seriously, that is to be proved, free, right, logical, consistent, beautiful, successful and in a word 'not absurd'.

4 February 1967

Let the idol fall on its face in the presence of the hidden child.

Right back to where we started – only the 'divine child' this time is not a sort of innocent, sophianic, indwelling reality, yearning heavenwards towards God; or a sort of buried innocence that you can strip your way down to. The divine child this time is the birth of God's freedom in the emptiness of solitude and the emptiness of realizing that there is no justification. And even having said that, we have to be careful: the full quotation is: 'Let the idol fall on its face in the presence of the hidden child. (Yeah, but beware.)'

We're back full-circle to Barth and Mozart. The experience of real eros in 1966 was not for Merton a revelation of original innocence or of a deeply buried 'image', but a revelation of the groundlessness of the self, a revelation of the inescapability of finding yourself wrong – and neither justifying the wrong nor pretending to be justified in any other way. A revelation of groundlessness (and yes, in that sense, 'Buddhist' up to a point) but still underpinned by an essentially Christ-focused awareness, awareness of the bearing of 'wrath' in Christ. It is Christ. in life and death and resurrection. who shows us how unserious we are, how little we can begin to do to justify ourselves. because everything is gift. And it may sound strange to read incarnation and cross and resurrection in that light, and yet in all those millions of words of Barth's Church Dogmatics, that is where he is driving. Although Merton hadn't worked his way through those millions of words, he had apprehended something central and focal in Barth's vision: We are not 'pleasing' to God: yet God wills to be pleased'. That's to say that we are not condemned to keep God happy, we are not bound to the fiery wheel of entertaining God, placating God or preserving God's good moods. Because God's pleasure is God's being and God's will directed towards us in creation and redemption, and therefore all we can do is say 'yes' to it. And to know this is to be finally free from the idols of the self.

Merton didn't discover all this in Barth; it's already strongly adumbrated in the 1950's in parts of Thoughts in Solitude – one of his most profound and abidingly impressive books. But somehow making the Christological connection seems to be one of those things that, with all the intellectual and spiritual and emotional turbulence of the mid-'60s in Merton's life, anchored him in the classical Christian vision of the Son sent forth from the Father, returning to the Father ('the Son's journey into the far country', as Barth calls it) the whole of our life, our universe, our individual pilgrimage swept up into that movement of outgoing and returning love, a love bestowed, a love which is also our homecoming, a love so profoundly anchored ontologically in the reality of God, eternally, non-negotiably, that the only thing we can do about any attempt ourselves to think that we have a part in this is to laugh. Barth's unseriousness, Merton's unseriousness, and perhaps Mozart's glorious unseriousness all converge here. To say this is not to minimize the depth of human betrayal or the intensity of human suffering. But it is to say – to go back to that phrase of Merton's in the '66/'67 journals 'the great joke is having a self that is to be taken seriously', when what is to be taken seriously—and yet unbearably lightly—is only and eternally God.

© Rowan Williams 2008

- See more at: http://rowanwilliams.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/1205/not-being-serious-thomas-merton-and-karl-barth#sthash.qu1tIZGj.dpuf

Rowan Williams on the Jesus Prayer ...

Rowan Williams Promoting the Jesus Prayer as Answer to Modern Angst

In Orthodox Christian Network

Jul 19, 2014 ⋅ 7 Comment(s) ⋅ Tags: Daily Prayer, Jesus Prayer

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Dr. Rowan Williams, who recently retired as Archbishop of Canterbury, was one of a group asked by the New Statesman to respond to the topic, “After God: How do we fill the faith-shaped hole in modern life?” Here is his response.

The physicality of prayer

Rowan Williams

The Christianity I was originally formed in was not very ritual-minded: it was both intellectually alert and emotionally intense – the best of a style of Welsh Nonconformity now almost extinct – but tended to look down on physical expression of belief (other than singing, which I suspect was regarded as not really physical). Only when the family joined the Anglican Church when I was in my early teens, after we’d moved to another town, did I discover a sense of worship as a physical art, involving gesture, movement and colour. I still have a vivid memory of my first experience of a solemn Mass with procession at Easter, when I was, I suppose, about 12 – the awareness of a deliberate strategy of involving the senses at many levels.

The mild High Church atmosphere of those years was, for me, an environment that made strong imaginative and emotional sense, and indeed is still the kind of setting where I feel most instinctively at home, rather than in more simply word-oriented styles, or in the heated atmosphere of “charismatic” worship, repetitive song and unstructured prayer – although I’ve learned to be nourished by that, too, in many circumstances. But the ritual that is most significant for me apart from the routines of public worship and the daily recitation of the fixed words of morning and evening prayer owes more to non-Anglican sources.

Readers of Salinger’s Franny and Zooey will recall the somewhat unexpected appearance there of an account of the traditional Greek and Russian discipline of meditative repetition of the “Jesus Prayer” (“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me, a sinner”). Practically every Eastern Orthodox writer on prayer will describe this, and many in the tradition also describe some of the physical disciplines that may be used to support it – being aware of your breathing, sitting in a certain way, focusing attention on your chest: “bringing the mind into the heart”, as the books characterise it.

The interest in uniting words with posture and breath is, of course, typical of non-Christian practices also; and over the years increasing exposure to and engagement with the Buddhist world in particular has made me aware of practices not unlike the “Jesus Prayer” and introduced me to disciplines that further enforce the stillness and physical focus that the prayer entails. Walking meditation, pacing very slowly and co-ordinating each step with an out-breath, is something I have found increasingly important as a preparation for a longer time of silence.

So: the regular ritual to begin the day when I’m in the house is a matter of an early rise and a brief walking meditation or sometimes a few slow prostrations, before squatting for 30 or 40 minutes (a low stool to support the thighs and reduce the weight on the lower legs) with the “Jesus Prayer”: repeating (usually silently) the words as I breathe out, leaving a moment between repetitions to notice the beating of the heart, which will slow down steadily over the period.

The prayer isn’t any kind of magical invo­cation or auto-suggestion – simply a vehicle to detach you slowly from distracted, wandering images and thoughts. These will happen, but you simply go on repeating the words and gently bringing attention back to them. If it is proceeding as it should, there is something like an indistinct picture or sensation of the inside of the body as a sort of hollow, a cave, in which breath comes and goes, with an underlying pulse. If you want to speak theologically about it, it’s a time when you are aware of your body as simply a place where life happens and where, therefore, God “happens”: a life lived in you.

So the day begins with a physically concrete and specific reminder that your own individual existence is breathed through by a life that isn’t your possession; and at moments of tension or anxiety during the day, deliberately breathing in and out a few times with the words of the prayer in mind connects you with this life that isn’t yours, immersing the anxiety and dispersing the tension – even if it doesn’t simply take away pain or doubt, solve problems or create some kind of spiritual bliss. The point is just to be connected again.

The mature practitioner (not me) will discover a steady clarity in the vision of self and world, and, in “advanced” states, an awareness of unbroken inner light, with the strong sense of an action going on within that is quite independent of your individual will – the prayer “praying itself”, not just human words but a connection between God transcendent and God present and within. Ritual anchors, ritual aligns, harmonises, relates. And what happens in the “Jesus Prayer” is just the way an individual can make real what is constantly going on in the larger-scale worship of the sacraments. The pity is that a lot of western Christianity these days finds all this increasingly alien. But I don’t think any one of us can begin to discover again what religion might mean unless we are prepared to expose ourselves to new ways of being in our bodies. But that’s a long story.

Read the other responses here.

__________________________________________

Posted by the Orthodox Christian Network.  You can find the Orthodox Christian Network on Google+.

Rowan Williams to step down in 2012

Rowan Williams will step down as Archbishop of Canterbury at the end of 2012 to become head of Magdalene College at Cambridge.

Lambeth Palace has a news release. An extract:

"It has been an immense privilege to serve as Archbishop of Canterbury over the past decade, and moving on has not been an easy decision. During the time remaining there is much to do, and I ask your prayers and support in this period and beyond. I am abidingly grateful to all those friends and colleagues who have so generously supported Jane and myself in these years, and all the many diverse parishes and communities in the Church of England and the wider Anglican Communion that have brought vision, hope and excitement to my own ministry. I look forward, with that same support and inspiration, to continuing to serve the Church’s mission and witness as best I can in the years ahead."
Dr Williams will continue to carry out all the duties and responsibilities of the Archbishop of Canterbury, both for the Church of England and the Anglican Communion, until the end of the year.
The Crown Nominations Commission will consider in due course the selection of a successor.

HERE are some of the posts that I have had about Rowan Williams

Rowan Williams on sanctorum communio

Rowan Williams on sanctorum communio

In its original Latin the Apostles' Creed announces belief in the communio sanctorum; and this could mean one of two things - or maybe both. It could be 'the sharing between holy people' or it could mean 'the sharing of holy things'. Now when the New Testament, especially St Paul, talks about 'holy people', it doesn't mean quite what we might mean by 'saint', it isn't offering a sort of verdict on a lot of spectacularly good lives. Christian people are 'holy' simply because they have been adopted by God into relationship, into that family relationship expressed in saying 'Our Father'. So the 'sharing between holy people' isn't some kind of club for the spiritually gifted; it's simply the relationship that holds together those who recognize and express their adoption by God. And so this sharing becomes tangible and visible when Christians are together just breathing the air of Christ, making real in words and actions who they are in relation to Jesus. The 'communion' that is meant here is what becomes visible when Christians are simply saying who they are.

And what does this involve? The Church is the community of those who have been 'immersed' in Jesus' life, overwhelmed by it. Those who are baptized have disappeared under the surface of Christ's love and reappeared as different people. The waters close over their heads, and then, like the old world rising out of watery chaos in the first chapter of the Bible, out comes a new world. So when the Church baptizes people, it says what it is and what sort of life its people live. Baptism is an event in which the 'sharing between holy people' comes to light and we see what the Church really is, a community in which people are constantly being brought into new life by being given a new relationship with God and each other.

It is also the community of those who are invited to eat with Jesus. Just as, in his earthly life, Jesus expressed his promise to create a new people of God by sharing meals with unlikely people, just as, after the resurrection, he shares food with his disciples as he re-calls them to their task, so it is with the whole Church. We are in the Church because we have been invited, not because we have earned our place. And so when the Church gathers to eat and drink with Jesus in Holy Communion, the Church once again says who and what it is. In baptism and Holy Communion, the nature of the Church is laid bare for us. What is the Church? It is simply those who have been immersed in, soaked in the life of Jesus, and who have been invited to eat with him and pray to the Father with him.

~ Rowan Williams, Tokens of Trust (2007)

hat tip to Creedal Christian

Rowan in the News from "Lesley's Blog"

Rowan in the News

From  Lesley's Blog

General Synod is meeting in York at the moment, debating how we can get growth in numbers and spiritual growth. You can hear Rowan’s presidential address here and read ithere.

The Twitter response was mostly positive, picking up on some of the sound bites:

Christianity is not advice but news – don’t reduce to exhalation or sound moral/spiritual teaching alone but reintroduce resurrection news of vindication, homecoming & transformation alarmingly beyond expectation. God has not abandoned us.

Knowing the God who has not abandoned us is inseparable from us not abandoning those whom God has called us to serve.

Mission is asking people to walk with us as we walk with Jesus.

Keeping faith is not the same as never changing.

However, there was disappointment that this seemed very focussed on the clergy once again with little acknowledgement of lay leadership.

Then there is a very interesting interview in the Guardian by the playwright David Hare. Some beautiful quotes:

I say that’s all very well, but how then can he be so critical of self-absorption when he himself is a poet? Surely self-study is necessary to create art? “Ah, yes, two very different things. Self-absorption means thinking the most interesting thing in the world is myself. Self-scrutiny, on the other hand, is very deeply part of the Christian experience.” So is hisreligion a relief, a way of escaping self? “Yes. We are able to lay down the heavy burden of self-justification. Put it this way, if I’m not absolutely paralysed by the question, ‘Am I right? Am I safe?’ then there are more things I can ask of myself. I can afford to be wrong. In my middle 20s, I was an angst-ridden young man, with a lot of worries about whether I was doing enough suffering and whether I was compassionate enough. But the late, great Mother Mary Clare said to me, ‘You don’t have to suffer for the sins of the world, darling. It’s been done.’”

The most intriguing bit in the interview is this:

If you could change one thing about the church? “Rethink the General Synod.”

Then Rowan at his best, again reported in the Guardian, during a visit to Grendon prison:

How do you get to be Archbishop of Canterbury? “By being very wicked in a previous life.”

Asked by a prisoner whether he regretted any of the things he had said in public, he replied immediately: “How long have you got?”

Andrew Brown made some very interesting observations:

Of all the various layers of his job, the only two he spoke of with real passion were his responsibilities in east Kent, and his visits to suffering and persecuted churches abroad. Perhaps a room full of repentant murderers has a more wholesome atmosphere than a committee of ecclesiastical politicians all convinced of their own righteousness. In any case, at Grendon he was witty, straightforward, and humble in a way I have never seen him in public before. Even if he has no more power in government than he has over his own church, his visit did what good he could. No wonder he believes in localism.

Rowan Williams on the Royal Wedding

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams reflected on marriage, and on the Royal Wedding in a recent YouTube.  Brilliant!

~The Rev. Peter M. Carey

Archbishop of Canterbury Lent Books

If you were looking for a book to read in Lent, why not go to the Archbishop of Canterbury and see what the occupant of that office has recommended over the last several years?  This year, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury has made "Barefoot Disciple:  Walking the Way of Passionate Humility," by Stephen Cherry his "Lent Book of 2011."  I have thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, and am now working my way through sections of it for a second time.  


One of the central questions of the book is whether we can develop our humility?  There is an implicit problem with the idea of developing one's humility, which is, as soon as we might recognize, "hey I'm building up my humility, I am doing a great job," we actually are probably not embodying humility as much as before.  We can fall into the trap of being proud about our humility...


Stephen Cherry works the reader through this potential pitfall, and also develops his concept of the "Barefoot disciple" who embraces what he calls "passionate humility."  


It is a wonderful book, and I highly recommend it.  Also, below are several of the Archbishop of Canterbury Lent books from the last several years.  I have read several of them, and highly recommend them.


Praying that we may keep a holy Lent,


Peace and Blessings,


~The Rev. Peter M. Carey

Archbishop of Canterbury's Lent Books

1983 The Truce of God by Rowan Williams

1988 Looking Before and After by Helen Oppenheimer

1992 Tested by the Cross - Wesley Carr

1993 Mary's Story, Mary's Song by Elaine Storkey

1997 Pilgrims by Stephen Platten

1998 The Shape of Living by David Ford

1999 Living Well by Robert Warren

2001 Christ on Trial by Rowan Williams

2002 The Meaning in the Miracles by Jeffrey John

2004  I Thirst by Stephen Cottrell

2005 Other Temptations of Jesus by John Henson

2006 Free of Charge by Miroslav Volf

2007 Power and Passion by Sam Wells

2009 Why go to church? by Timothy Radcliffe

2010 Our Sound is Our Wound: Contemplative Listening to a Noisy World by Lucy Winkett