Contemplation and Mission

The story of Christmas is in part the story of Mary, who treasured and pondered things in her heart.

These words from the Archbishop of Canterbury are perhaps relevant:

Evangelization, old or new, must be rooted in a profound confidence that we have a distinctive human destiny to show and share with the world. There are many ways of spelling this out, but in these brief remarks I want to concentrate on one aspect in particular.

To be fully human is to be recreated in the image of Christ’s humanity;  and that humanity is the perfect human ‘translation’ of the relationship of the eternal Son to the eternal Father, a relationship of loving and adoring self-giving, a pouring out of life towards the Other.  Thus the humanity we are growing into in the Spirit, the humanity that we seek to share with the world as the fruit of Christ’s redeeming work, is a contemplative humanity...

To be contemplative as Christ is contemplative is to be open to all the fullness that the Father wishes to pour into our hearts.  With our minds made still and ready to receive, with our self-generated fantasies about God and ourselves reduced to silence, we are at last at the point where we may begin to grow...

And we seek this not because we are in search of some private ‘religious experience’ that will make us feel secure or holy.  We seek it because in this self-forgetting gazing towards the light of God in Christ we learn how to look at one another and at the whole of God’s creation...

[C]]ontemplation is very far from being just one kind of thing that Christians do: it is the key to prayer, liturgy, art and ethics, the key to the essence of a renewed humanity that is capable of seeing the world and other subjects in the world with freedom – freedom from self-oriented, acquisitive habits and the distorted understanding that comes from them...

Jacob Needleman, in a controversial and challenging book called Lost Christianity: the words of the Gospel, he says, are addressed to human beings who ‘do not yet exist’.  That is to say, responding in a life-giving way to what the Gospel requires of us means a transforming of our whole self, our feelings and thoughts and imaginings.  To be converted to the faith does not mean simply acquiring a new set of beliefs, but becoming a new person, a person in communion with God and others through Jesus Christ...

Invoking the Holy Spirit is a matter of asking the third person of the Trinity to enter my spirit and bring the clarity I need to see where I am in slavery to cravings and fantasies and to give me patience and stillness as God’s light and love penetrate my inner life...

In a very important sense, a true enterprise of evangelisation will always be a re-evangelisation of ourselves as Christians also, a rediscovery of why our faith is different, transfiguring – a recovery of our own new humanity.

And of course it happens most effectively when we are not planning or struggling for it.  To turn to de Lubac once again, ‘He who will best answer the needs of his time will be someone who will not have first sought to answer them’ (op. cit. pp.111-2); and ‘The man who seeks sincerity, instead of seeking truth in self-forgetfulness, is like the man who seeks to be detached instead of laying himself open in love’ (p.114).  The enemy of all proclamation of the Gospel is self-consciousness, and, by definition, we cannot overcome this by being more self-conscious.  We have to return to St Paul and ask, ‘Where are we looking?’  Do we look anxiously to the problems of our day, the varieties of unfaithfulness or of threat to faith and morals, the weakness of the institution?  Or are we seeking to look to Jesus, to the unveiled face of God’s image in the light of which we see the image further reflected in ourselves and our neighbours?

That simply reminds us that evangelisation is always an overflow of something else – the disciple’s journey to maturity in Christ, a journey not organised by the ambitious ego but the result of the prompting and drawing of the Spirit in us.  In our considerations of how we are once again to make the Gospel of Christ compellingly attractive to men and women of our age, I hope we never lose sight of what makes it compelling to ourselves, to each one of us in our diverse ministries.

Rowan William, Archbishop of Canterbury, to the Synod of Bishops in Rome, 10 October 2012

Full address here

Question Time

The Archbishop's words are well worth pondering...

Archbishop speaks in House of Lords

... not only for what he says but for the manner of his speaking.

Someone blogged elsewhere a helpful reference to David Ford's excellent book 'Christian Wisdom'. One of the things that Ford there points out is that Job's comforters represent God as being judgemental (p 103). But in fact for much of the book God is "powerfully interrogative. In the Prologue his first to statements are questions, and his whirlwind speeches are pervasively interrogative without much hint of answers or directions.. Both history and creation generate more questions than answers. But they also generate cries and despairs."

Much of Ford's book is a reflection on the cries and despairs of scripture, not least in the experience and life of Christ. In the context of Job he points out how God's response in the whirlwind to Job's desire for annihilation is to evoke and revel in the limitless possibilities of all creation (p109). This is not a cheap comfort. Ford writes: It is as if an almost unthinkable hope can only be suggested by a delicate opening up if the imagination through reworking the very images that had earlier powerfully expressed despair."

A brief summary can do nothing like justice to Ford's wonderful book; the danger is that these brief quotes will misrepresent his subtle and nuanced writing. The best think is to read it as a whole.

And I can't help but think that our Archbishop has read it and has sought to apply it's thinking in his response in the Lord's.

Tomorrow I am speaking on Matthew 15:21-28 (the Canaanite Woman's Faith). I think that at the heart here is Jesus raising a question (for the benefit of his disciples). A move is made from 'stigmatising' the woman as being an outsider to someone who is welcomed. The danger at the moment (eg BBC Question Time) is to come up with quick solutions that stigmatise and judge. This all too easily fails to listen to the cries of despair and offers easy answers.

When I have faced bereavement, 'comfort' comes as the grief does its work. I rarely find solution in intellectual answers but rather in a deep-wrought change which means that old answers and problems are seen in a new light. We too need to let grief do its work. Thank you Rowan for your lead.

Publish Post

Between: New Statesman and Big Society

Between: New Statesman and Big Society: "This latest edition of the New Statesman has been guest-edited by Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams , and has managed to put the..."

Having read something of what Archbishop Rowan actually said, as against what he is said to have said, a breath of fresh air from Phil Ritchie here:
http://philipstreehouse.blogspot.com/2011/06/rowan-round-up.html

The New Statesman article majors on a very real concern for the gospel - fear. References to policies for which we didn't vote etc., and to cynicism about the Big Society are not criticisms but factual observations. He points out the lack of public debate about key issues at the last election. There is discussion as to what priorities there should be. It strikes me as a thoughtful well-timed intervention.
Eliot's The Wasteland contrasts (I think!) the fragmentary culture of his day with the prophetic questioning of the Old Testament prophets. Here we have some genuine questioning.