A Letter To a Young Person Drifting Away From the Church: Whitterings, June 2009

A Letter To a Young Person Drifting Away From the Church

I have known you since you were a child and have watched you to grow up. I have seen you grow from a baby comfortable and safe within our church community; to a toddler taking their first steps down the centre aisle; to an enthusiastic member of the Sunday School, First Communion Class, Youth Group and Confirmation Class; to a young person ready to set out and begin their own life on their own.

I know that you are beginning to leave us. I have seen how you have explored new ideas and new ways of living. I know you no longer find the services or sermons vibrant or especially relevant. I also know that you have grown tired of being surrounded by surrogate grandmothers and grandfathers whose lives seem to you more and more old fashioned. You have begun to explore another world inhabited by your peers which is much more interesting to you than ours and which makes you feel alive and free. These worlds seem to you disconnected and it is clear which one is more attractive. I know this is natural and I am not surprised.

Sometimes at your age the love of adults can seem burdensome and unwelcome. You want to connect with your peers and be respected and loved by them. Of what use to you is the love of a community like ours? Yet we do love you. We have known you since before you were even born and have helped care for you these many years. We feel you are part of us and that we know you. So, yes, we do discuss what you are doing, how you are doing at college, and whether you are ok at coffee hour on Sundays. You would be surprised how much we wish the best for you and pray for you. You would also be surprised at how much we miss your presence. We always feel the loss when someone leaves us. Yet it is more poignant when we lose a young person whom we have known their whole lives.

You know all that I have to teach you. I have prepared you for First Communion and Confirmation and trained you as a server. You were with me week by week for years during Youth Group. Much of what I have taught you takes years to integrate and your generation is most attracted by what is most immediately accessible. I know this. We have been through all of the arguments and discussions about the Gospel and the Christian Faith and I do not repeat them again here. We have spoken at length these many years about the modern world and what we believe are its dangers. I know you no longer find these views as compelling as you once did.

Remember what I shared with you from Father Zosima about the modern state of man.
“Look at the worldly and all who set themselves up above the people of God; has not God's image and His truth been distorted in them? They have science; but in science there is nothing but what is the object of sense. The spiritual world, the higher part of man's being is rejected altogether, dismissed with a sort of triumph, even with hatred. The world has proclaimed the reign of freedom, especially of late, but what do we see in this freedom of theirs? Nothing but slavery and self-destruction! For the world says: ‘You have desires and so satisfy them, for you have the same rights as the most rich and powerful. Don't be afraid of satisfying them and even multiply your desires.’ That is the modern doctrine of the world. In that they see freedom. And what follows from this right of multiplication of desires? In the rich, isolation and spiritual suicide; in the poor, envy and murder; for they have been given rights, but have not been shown the means of satisfying their wants.

How can such a one fight? What is he fit for? He is capable perhaps of some action quickly over, but he cannot hold out long. And it's no wonder that instead of gaining freedom they have sunk into slavery, and instead of serving, the cause of brotherly love and the union of humanity have fallen, on the contrary, into dissension and isolation, as my mysterious visitor and teacher said to me in my youth. And therefore the idea of the service of humanity, of brotherly love and the solidarity of mankind, is more and more dying out in the world, and indeed this idea is sometimes treated with derision. For how can a man shake off his habits? What can become of him if he is in such bondage to the habit of satisfying the innumerable desires he has created for himself? He is isolated, and what concern has he with the rest of humanity? They have succeeded in accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the world has grown less.

The monastic way is very different. Obedience, fasting, and prayer are laughed at, yet only through them lies the way to real, true freedom. I cut off my superfluous and unnecessary desires, I subdue my proud and wanton will and chastise it with obedience, and with God's help I attain freedom of spirit and with it spiritual joy. Which is most capable of conceiving a great idea and serving it -- the rich in his isolation or the man who has freed himself from the tyranny of material things and habits? The monk is reproached for his solitude, "You have secluded yourself within the walls of the monastery for your own salvation, and have forgotten the brotherly service of humanity!" But we shall see which will be most zealous in the cause of brotherly love. For it is not we, but they, who are in isolation, though they don't see that.”

The Brothers Karamazov. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Part Two: Book VI, Chapter Three.

I also ask that you remember what I taught you about Socrates and the core message of the Gospel:

“The unexamined life is not worth leading.”
“Any man who would save his life with lose it but any man who would lose his life for my sake shall gain it.”

The adventure to discover who we are underneath our individuality is the great adventure. As Christians we believe that this is only revealed when we move out of ourselves towards others and the world, which we call love. It is through love that truth is revealed. The path to becoming open to reality is first taken through discipline. We set a goal and then begin the journey through duty, trust in those who we believe to be good, and most of all with hope that the path will eventually take us to our goal. Along the path we are transformed and what we once set out to do by an act of will becomes natural as our hearts open more and more to others and the world. Saints have no need for morality for all their actions are acts of love. In the end the goal we thought we were heading for mysteriously changes and we find that the goal was with us the whole time. We, as T.S. Eliot says, “Return home and know it for the first time.”

“What you thought mattered-what you thought was truest to the real you-often turns out to be empty and dishonest. You have to keep asking and keep looking; no wonder we hate it and find every excuse for not getting on with it. There is a faint echo of T.S. Eliot’s ‘What you thought you came for / is only a shell, a husk of meaning’ or Rilke’s ‘archaic statue’ in his poem of that name, telling you that there are no places to hide and instead ‘you must change your life’. Your surface ideas have to go, and so does the notion that you can produce something by an act of the will. In fact, as a famous sculptor once said to his students, will has no part in the creative process. The use of the will is simply to keep you at it-but it doesn’t deliver the product, because you don’t yet know what you moist truthfully want.”

Rowan Williams, Where God Happens, p. 45-46

Most of us are still on the path to transformation and as such need the goal, the discipline and the hope. What I do know is that without the goal we often head in the wrong direction and who knows where we will end up. If we do not have a goal we will not cross rivers and mountains to get to it but will rather follow the contours of the landscape taking the path of least resistance. We may be lucky to escape the shadows but many do not. At the end it does not really matter what sort of career we choose as the Saints have come from all walks of life. What they have in common was the goal, the commitment. It is not so much about ‘What You Do” but about ‘Why You Do It”. You already know all of this and you once, and I believe, still believe it deep down. I remind you that this goal is not just grounded upon the Gospel of Christ but also upon modern psychology. In this religion and science agree. Thus I think it would be hard to find a better starting point.

Most importantly take your time. Do not rush things. This letter is NOT meant to be pressuring you to hurry up and make decisions or figure everything out or make you return to the church. We have already been through all of that. Simply to point you in the way I believe is the right direction to start walking if you have not already started to do so.

“It is alright to take time. Only in taking time can you realise how much more you are than the individual. By taking time you are built by the character of the world you are in and the people around you...God alone will tell me who I ‘really’ am, and he will do so only in the lifelong process of bringing my thoughts and longings into his presence without fear and deception.”

Rowan Williams, Where God Happens, p. 53 & 50

The Archbishop of Canterbury’s has a short guide to making decisions found on page 61-62 of Where God Happens. He is wiser and holier than I will ever be. I trust him and so I offer you his words as you continue to make important life decisions.
“...God leaves the question about his will to a process of discernment of our free will. The discernment goes like this: We have to choose between a number of courses of action. What course of action more fully resonates with the kind of life Christ lived and lives? What sort of action opens up more possibilities for God to work? Now, these are not questions that immediately yield an answer. But they are the stuff, the raw material of reflection. What course of action might be (even a little) more in tune with the life of Christ? And what opens, rather than closes, doors for God’s healing, reconciling, forgiving, and creating work to go on? It may well be that in any given situation there simply is not a clear answer to those questions. But if they are the questions we are asking, then the very process of reflecting and discerning makes space in ourselves for the life of Christ and the creative movement of God. To the extent to which we truthfully and sincerely make that space, we are already in tune with the will of God. Even if we go on to make a mistake, we have not done it by shutting the door on God. We have done our best to leave room for God in the decisions we made. To the degree we manage that, we really do (in some measure) God’s will. We must simply leave God room and freedom to salvage our life from whatever mess our decision may bring with it.”

I trust that you are capable of being an open and loving person. I trust you already have all of the tools you need to make decisions for yourself. I believe, if you give yourself the time for reflection and discernment, you will make the right ones. I also do not believe there is anything ‘wrong’ with you except for the fact that you are a human being and alive and that in itself (obviously) is the reason we always have problems with ourselves and with the world. We are all lost in a way and are also all found in a way. Life is complicated and you are in the same boat as the rest of us. The fact that you have particular weaknesses and desires and fears does not make you a bad person. It just makes you human. Do not fall into the illusion that everyone else is alright and except you. “Go and pray for me a sinner also”.

I am aware that you do not see a future for yourself as a regular churchgoer. I will ask you to not give up entirely. Keep the door open. Remember your childhood and youth with us and return to us when you can even if only to see us and not for the religious side of things. As you get older keep an open mind to what we have taught you about goodness, forgiveness, meaning, and love. Please do not forget us. If you are ever ready to come back please know that we will be waiting and will rejoice to have you with us again. They say that ‘home’ is where they have to take you in. We consider ourselves your home and you have the right to be here. Even if we are long dead, we will still be a part of the church and we will still rejoice. If you ever find yourself afraid or confused, sad or lonely, or in danger or need please come to us. We will do everything we can for you. You may come to feel that you are no longer part of us but we will always consider you one of us no matter how much you change. We care what happens to you and we will love and pray for you all of our days and beyond.

I write this to you as an act of love not as an act of manipulation or guilt or judgement. Thus it is here for you to reread, read again, or in a month or in many years - whenever you are ready. I want you to be happy, healthy, and free. I want you to have an adventurous life free from fear and anxiety with someone you love and with a life you will find real. I want you to be able to love yourself, trust yourself and respect yourself. I offer you my reflections, the fruit of much prayer and thought, with this in mind.

"Furthermore, we have not only to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And where we had thought to find an abomination; we shall find a god; and where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the centre of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world."

Joseph Campbell

This Letter is not to a Real Person but an imaginary one who is a combination of the many young people I have ministered to and have subsequently left the Church.

Become All Flame: Whitterings, May 2009

Rowan William’s book ‘Where God Happens’ is an exploration of Christian community using the wisdom of the Desert Fathers. The Deseret Fathers were the first generation of Christian Monks who fled from civilisation into the Egyptian desert to pursue what they considered the ideal Christian life. These communities of hermits thrived for over a hundred years beginning in the second half of the second century. The most famous Desert Father was St Anthony the Great who died in the year 356.

The stories of the Desert Fathers are rather Zen-like in character in that they teach by example rather than by preaching. These communities emphasised lives of humility, silence, mutual love and simplicity. In time these ideals would form the basis of the Rule of St Benedict and as such the foundation of Western Monasticism. These men and, to a lesser extent, women felt that the church in their day was becoming secularised and losing the focus of the Gospel and they wanted to experiment to find out what the church could really be like.

Archbishop Williams explores the themes of fleeing and staying in the last two chapters of the book. Fleeing is often a misunderstood idea. The Fathers were not fleeing from creation but from ‘the world’
“For this battle the Apostle arms us, saying, "We are not contending against flesh and blood," that is, not against human beings whom we see, "but against the principalities, against the powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world." So that you may not think that demons are the rulers of heaven and earth, he says, "of the darkness of this world." He says, "of the world," meaning the lovers of the world— of the "world," meaning the ungodly and wicked— the "world" of which the Gospel says. "And the world knew him not."
A Reading from the Treatise of Saint Augustine on the Psalms. [Vulgate Psalm 54. Prayer Book Psalm 55]

They were trying to flee from false images of themselves and others. They believed the individual was different from the person. The person was the unique created child of God that exists behind all self definitions whilst the individual is just those definitions of self with which we perceive and define ourselves . I am ‘this’ and am not ‘that’. Thus through deep introspection and silence and humility they identified with humanity as a whole and not just their own experience of it.

A brother sinned and the presbyter ordered him to go out of church. But Abba Bessarion got up and went out with him, saying “I too am a sinner”.

They fled from anything that might possibly emphasise their individuality at the cost of the nurturing of their person and its relationship with its creator.
“And the call to flee from privilege, safety, speech, (and Bishops), is a call to put some distance between yourself and the less than personal pressures of the soul, temptations that stunt your growth, which the Greek Christian tradition calls pathe, “passions” – or pressures on the soul to pull it out of its centeredness in God.” Rowan Williams, Where God Happens, pg. 91
I believe that it is in this light that we can start to understand that strange saying of Soren Kierkegaard about the self satisfied clergy of his day:
“The punishment I should like the clergy to have is a tenfold increase in salary. I am afraid that neither the world not the clergy would understand this punishment.”

The other side of the coin of fleeing is the importance of staying. Staying is the hardest of the spiritual disciplines. Benedictines take a vow of stability and poverty and celibacy do not even come close to vying with the first vow in difficulty. Staying is a radical commitment to look beyond self dramatisation and fantasy. Without the distractions of the world to keep us occupied the discipline of staying in the moment is soon met with the harshest of the spiritual attacks – boredom. The Greeks called this akedia. St John Cassian identified it as one of the eight great temptations on the soul. Akedia
“has to do with frustration, helplessness, lack of motivation, the displacement of stresses and difficulties from the inner to the outer world." Rowan Williams, Where God Happens, pg. 96
It is the temptation that comes when the ego is cut off from its nourishment and it begins to whine and complain and panic. With akedia we believe that “we can’t start from here!” that we could do better somewhere else with different people.
“We are easily persuaded that the problems of growing up in the life of the spirit can be located outside of ourselves. Somewhere else I could be nicer, holier, more balanced, more detached about criticism, more disciplined, able to sing in tune, and probably thinner as well. Somewhere there is a saintly person who really understands me (and so won’t make life difficult for me).” Rowan Williams, Where God Happens, pg. 99

Staying takes it as faith that God can be found anywhere and that if one is patient and perseveres then in time one’s whole personal life will become pervaded with an awareness of God’s presence. Holiness is simply maturity in the life of staying committed.

Another important element is the discipline of staying is that one must always “start from where you are”. Do not look ahead to the future too much or you will get discouraged.
“If I did not suffer minute by minute, it would be impossible for me to be patient, but I see only the present moment, I forget the past and take good care not to anticipate the future. If we grow disheartened, if we sometimes despair, it is because we have been dwelling on the past or the future.” St Teresa of Lisieux

The final defeat of akedia is found not in how to not be bored but about how to face the fear of boredom without fleeing and to continue with perseverance and not stop the journey.
“A brother fell when he was tempted, and in his distress he stopped practicing his monastic rule. He really longed to take it up again, but his own misery prevented him. He would say to himself, “When shall I be able to be holy in the way I used to be before?” He went to see one of the old men and told him all about himself. And when the old man learned of his distress, he said: :There was a man who had a plot of land, but it got neglected and turned into waste ground, full of weeds and brambles. So he said to his son, ‘Go and weed the ground.’ The son went off to weed it, saw all the brambles, and despaired. He said to himself, ‘How long will it take before I have uprooted and reclaimed all of that?’ So he lay down and went to sleep for several days. His father came to see how he was getting on and found he had done nothing at all. ‘Why have you done nothing?’ he said. The son replied, ‘Father, when I started to look at this and saw how many weeds and brambles there were, I was so depressed that I could do nothing but lie down on the ground.’ His father said, ‘Child, just go over the surface of the plot every day and you will make some progress.’ So he did, and before long the whole plot was weeded. The same is true for you brother: work just a little bit without getting discouraged, and God by his grace will re-establish you."

The church already recognises the importance of this fidelity in the way it celebrates the lifelong commitment found in marriage, ordination, and the taking of religious vows. Many people relate strongly to the presence of Christ in the Sacrament reserved in many churches as a pledge of His promise to be with us “Even to the end of the Age.” She enshrines the strategy against akedia trough the discipline of regular meditation and the daily recitation of the offices and the weekly gathering of the Christian community around the Altar. These habits are our lifeblood.
“The desert community tells the church, then and now, that its job is to be a fearless community, and it shows us some of the habits we need to develop in order to become fearless, habits of self-awareness and attention to each other, grounded in the pervasive awareness of God that comes from constant exposure to God in Bible reading and prayer." Rowan Williams, Where God Happens, pg 28

Once she also celebrated this spiritual practice through the tradition of long incumbencies for parish priests. The work of the Alban Institute has once again emphasised this approach by showing through its research that it takes many years to integrate into a community and that the incarnational presence of the priest only filters through after living in the community for a long period. They suggest that incumbencies of shorter durations are seriously hampered in their effectiveness.

I might also suggest that the spirit of akedia may be one of the chief diseases of the modern clergy (as it has been many, many times in our history) as well as one of the main reasons for the dramatic and disastrous drop in vocations to the religious life. The Anglican Church of Canada is even more seriously effected in this regard. In the Directory of Anglican Religious Communities (Anglican Religious Life 2008-2009) it lists only 45 people in religious vows in Canada: 2 Holy Cross Fathers , 31 Sisters of St John the Divine, 7 Sisters of the Church and 5 Oratorians.

Archbishop William’s reflections on fleeing and staying are only briefly outlined here and I would strongly recommend this small book to you for deeper reflection. In the end he reminds us that the end of all of our journeying in the life of religious discipline is to discover who we have really been all along: beloved, transfigured and holy children of God
“Lot went to Abba Joseph and said, “Abba, as far as I can, I keep a moderate rule, with a little fasting, and prayer and meditation, and quiet, and as far as I can, I try to cleanse my heart of evil thoughts. What else should I do?” Then the hermit stood up and spread out his hands to heaven, and his fingers shone like ten flames of fire, and he said, “If you will, you can become all flame.”

Advent or Dislodging a Green Nut: Whitterings, January 2006

“Dislodging a green nut from a shell is almost impossible, but let it dry and the lightest tap will do it.”

By the time you read this it will be the Season of Epiphany, the season of the ever brightening revelation of Christ’s truth as the sun sheds ever increasing light upon our northern land as each day goes by. However, I write this in Advent as the days get shorter, and linger and die as the surrounding gloom gathers. We move down into the darkness towards the Nativity, the longest night of the year (I know it is not technically the longest night any more because of the change in the calendar but that rather spoils the symbolic effect so I simply ignore it!).

I understand Advent instinctively. Waiting and hoping is second nature to me. Often it seems as if my entire life and ministry is nothing more than waiting and hoping. I wait and hope for: the people of the world to seek the good of humanity over their own selfish desires; people to seek to love and serve one another; the poor and needy of the world to receive comfort and hope; the despots and dictators to be overthrown by the people and for justice to prevail; the nations of the world to seek truth and beauty above power and money; people to seek to understand the Truth and live their lives in harmony with it; people to be kind to one another.

Personally I often wait and hope; that I will read just the right book and my accumulated education will spill over the top of the cup of my knowledge into true understanding of life and God’s universe; that one day in my prayers or meditation I will hear the Voice of God or feel His Presence; that my mind and heart will merge back into being with my Creator; that I will find people with whom I can share parts of my life or at the least travel with; that one day I will not long to escape so much; that I will suddenly just relax into my life and stop worrying all the time; that the overwhelming desire for a cigarette will not keep giving me panic attacks and keep me up at night; that one day I will be in the right place at the right time and will be able to witness to Christ Crucified and Risen and know I have fulfilled the purpose of my life; that I may have some sort of a family and not be alone; that it will all become easier; that life will become clearer and less hectic and more peaceful; that what has been lost will be returned, including love, vulnerability and innocence; that I may one day wake to find the door of my cage open and myself free; that God will reveal Himself and come again. The Prophet Isaiah, whom we read all throughout Advent, speaks what is already in my heart. Advent gives permission to let my imagination run away with me. I can imagine as the U2 song says “the Kingdom Come when all the colours shall bleed into one”. Through the imagination combined with hope, as Saint Ignatius of Loyola taught us, the heart and mind and soul can reach towards God.

I have begun to understand that the waiting on the Lord implicit in the season of Advent is its own goal. It is not what we are waiting for that strengthens and purifies us, it is the waiting and the hoping itself. It keeps the heart open and the mind seeking. The waiting and hoping brings a certain kind of peace and contentment in and of itself. The imagination allows the heart to dream and search and wait with expectation. With hope I believe that one day this waiting will be over. The end shall come. The possibility of Salvation is real. At the end He will draw us back to Himself and the desire of St Augustine will be made real as our restless hearts will rest in Him once again. The Scottish Prayer Book includes Henry Cardinal Newman’s lovely prayer of longing for rest in the service of Compline.

“O Lord, support us all the day long of this troublous life, until the shades lengthen, and the evening cometh, and the busy world is hushed, the fever of life is over, and our work done. Then, Lord, in thy mercy, grant us safe lodging, a holy rest, and peace at the last; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”

My cynical mind believes that most of the things I long for either do not exist or are improbable to happen to me or come to me. Not only that, but the things that one waits for and receives, in my limited experience, seldom live up to their promise. Perhaps what I mean is that I have always found that the thing I thought I was hoping for or waiting for wasn’t really what I desired. Or to put it in yet another way, I do not believe I am truly ready for Christmas because I do not yet have the eyes to see Him. I still wait in Advent because I am still discerning the Incarnation around me. The waiting and the hoping are what I faith will clear my vision and reveal the God with us, Emmanuel. Just as there can be no Easter without Good Friday, no Resurrection without Crucifixion, so also there can be no true Nativity without true Advent. Advent exists whenever the heart longs and hopes and prepares for God. Christmas exists whenever we perceive God Incarnate in his world and in his creatures. So we wait, not just in Advent, but constantly so that we may with patience and perseverance respond to the words of the Baptist and ‘prepare the way of the Lord’ in our hearts so that God may be revealed in the world and people around us.

Advent Calendar

He will come like last leaf’s fall.
One night when the November wind
Has flayed the trees to bone, and earth
Wakes chocking on the mould,
The soft shroud’s folding.

He will come like frost.
One morning when the shrinking earth
Opens on mist, to find itself
Arrested in the net
Of alien, sword-set beauty.

He will come like dark.
One evening when the bursting red
December sun draws up the sheet
And penny-masks its eye to yield
The star-snowed fields of sky.

He will come, will come,
Will come like crying in the night,
Like blood, like breathing,
As the earth writhes to toss him free.
He will come like child.

Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury
From: ‘The Poems of Rowan Williams’, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company,

Cambridge UK, 2002

The Holy Longing or The Ox Rider Riding the Ox in Search of the Ox: Whitterings, April 2005

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. John 12. 24-25

As an Anglo-Catholic I was taught that the preeminent example of the spiritual life was to found in the Annunciation to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Mary completely surrendered her will to that of the Divine Will by allowing her ego to be subsumed by God’s. Thus she was able to be the Theotokos (the title given to her by the Early Church Councils, meaning God Bearer) and to become the vehicle for the incarnation. We too are to allow our egos to be sublimated to the Will of God so that we too can allow Christ to live in us as St Paul tells us. Mary therefore becomes an icon of our own spiritual life, we are to die to self so that we can give birth to Christ in ourselves so that Christ may enter again into his creation through our lives. This way of looking at Christian spirituality is profoundly feminine as it conceives of the human soul as female and as mother. I find that this is way too often a neglected aspect within our predominantly patriarchical, phallocentric western spirituality.

Interestingly enough the Buddhist religion also conceives of the spiritual life as allowing each persons individual Buddha Nature to shine forth by removing the outer encrustations of egotism (the self refereeing or self centered aspect of the mind and heart as opposed to the God centered aspect of our nature). The idea of the Christ that waits inside each of us to be given birth and the Buddha nature inside each of us waiting to be revealed seem to be extraordinarily close. Actually the two religion’s spirituality are also very close up until they part ways fundamentally at the end. Buddhist seek to leave the world of suffering by detachment and Christians, following the incarnate and Crucified Christ, seek to enter into the world and find redemption through suffering.

In Archbishop Rowan Williams’s book Lost Icons he points to a fundamental flaw in the post modern conception of the soul and its liberation. The soul is the Christ nature within us. His argument runs a couple of hundred pages and it would be impossible to relate the subtleties of his argument in just a few sentences. I highly suggest the book to anyone with the perseverance to struggle with it. Basically he suggests that modern Western people conceive of the soul as being an isolated entity that exists as a complete and separate part of our composition. Most people think that the soul is something that is already formed and that needs to be found or connected with. Archbishop Williams says that the soul is almost the opposite of this conception. He believes the soul is not that which we are searching for but instead it is the searcher who searches. As the Zen saying goes we are in the spiritual life:

An ox rider
Riding the ox
In search of the ox.

The soul is that which is constantly changing and growing as we are open to God in all of our life’s experiences and relationships. God’s nature, as we understand through the doctrine of the Trinity, is in constant movement, God’s creation is also in constant movement as the creation is still in process, and so the soul which reflects God’s nature and His creation is also in movement. The soul does not exist separately from our culture, our community, our past and our interactions with others and their interaction with us.

He suggests that the way the soul is nourished to grow and the egotistical self is decreased is in the open vulnerable experience of true love and in the practice of discipline. In our society we are used to instantaneous gratification. We desire objects and people and when we are unable to obtain them we get frustrated, scared or we panic. It is in this place where we experience this questioning of identity that the real spiritual work is done and not in trying to solve the problem that will allow us to obtain our goal. In our tradition fasting, simplicity, discipline, meditation, prayer and celibacy have all be uses to maximize the experience of questioning that comes when we hit obstacles and are thrown back upon ourselves.

“Authentic religious (in this case Christian) practice begins in the attempt to attend to the movement of self-questioning – to refuse to cover over, evade or explain the pain or shock of whatever brings the self into question, to hold onto the difficulty before the almost inevitable descent into pathos and personal drama begins. ‘The soul’ is what happens in the process of such attention: it is the movement that begins whenever man [sic] experiences the psychological pain of contradiction.” Lost Icons, page151

Goethe in his poem the Holy Longing, written in 1814, looks at the transformation of the soul into dominance in the human self using the other example of intimate love. Here he shows that love, at its best, pushes the self beyond the borders of itself and into the vulnerable apprehension of the beloved. This in turn can push the soul into utter transformation by pushing the loving apprehension of the beloved into a loving apprehension of God (which is really what we love in the other). This Holy Longing and Holy Love cost everything. The ego must become totally consumed into that of the Divine. It is nothing less than the death of the self. What then happens it nothing short of rebirth, Resurrection. You can not hold onto your life and have freedom you must die to have freedom. “If any man would save his life he shall lose it and if any man would lose his self for my sake he shall gain it.” This is when we become like the Blessed Virgin and give birth to Christ within us.

The Holy Longing

Tell a wise person, or else keep silent,
Because the massman will mock it right away.
I praise what is truly alive,
What longs to be burned to death.

In the calm water of the love-nights,
Where you were begotten, where you have begotten,
A strange feeling comes over you
When you see the silent candle burning.

Now you are no longer caught
In the obsession with darkness,
And a desire for higher love-making
Sweeps you upward.

Distance does not make you falter,
Now, arriving in magic, flying,
And, finally, insane for the light,
You are the butterfly and you are gone.

And so long as you haven’t experienced
This: to die and so to grow,
You are only a troubled guest
On the dark earth.

Blessed are the Peacemakers: Whitterings, March 2005

“Blessed are the peace makers, for they will be called children of God”

Our Lord does not say that the peacemakers will be blessed; He says that they are blessed. I put it to you that the peacemakers, in common with all the categories of people mentioned by Christ in the Beatitudes, are already blessed because they are already journeying on the path of righteousness. To be a peacemaker one must be able to step back from the heat of the conflict and see both parties in a conflict with the peaceful and painful eyes of compassion. A couple of weeks ago I watched as two teenage friends, both already upset with other people, began to spar in order to let off steam. It did not take long before one inadvertently touched a sore point in the other. I watched while in the two seconds taken to respond the other swiftly found an even weaker spot in the other and poked back. In the twinkling of an eye they were well into the process of trying to hurt each other with personal information that only close friends are privy to. While watching them I felt a sense of pain mixed with peaceful compassionate detachment.

Perhaps detachment is the wrong word. I mean the feeling that one gets when one seems to be looking down from a great height upon conflict while loving both sides and seeing them in a way that you realize that they can not see one another. I remember when I was a teenager and had a truly poisonous and vitriolic fight with a dear friend of mine in the sacristy after having served Evensong and Benediction. The elderly priest taking the service, the former Dean of Aberdeen Canon Arthur Hotchison, tried to intervene but neither of us paid any attention to him as we were so caught up in our screaming. A few seconds or minutes later I remember finally focusing on Fr Arthur’s face over the shoulder of my friend and saw that he was silently weeping. Canon Hotchison was in his mid eighties when this occurred and was not in excellent health. My friend and I used to go regularly to his house to clean and prepare meals for him and so we were both very close to him. The second I saw his pain the fire of anger in me died. I felt ashamed and guilty. I felt helpless watching this old priest whom I loved crying because of my violent words. I did not remember what he said exactly but it was something about him loving us and that we loved each other and why were we not kinder to one another. I now think I know what he felt: the compassion to see both parties with love mixed with the painful realisation that one is unable to get the other parties to love one another the way you do. This is also true when you love someone who does not love them self and so you must constantly stand back and watch as they punish them self.

Surely part of being a peacemaker is to learn to live in this lonely land of compassion. We do not often think of peacemaking as lonely or painful. In Leonard Cohen’s song Suzanne there is the verse:

“And Jesus was a sailor

when he walked upon the water
and he spent a long time watching

from his lonely wooden tower
and when he knew for certain

only drowning men could see him
he said all men will be sailors then

until the sea shall free them

but he himself was broken

long before the sky would open
forsaken almost human

he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone
and you want to travel with him

you want to travel blind
and you know he will find you
for he’s touched your perfect body

with his mind.”

In 1962 Hector Rondon of the newspaper La Republic in Venezuela covered the violent rebellion in Puerto Cabello when rebel marines clashed with government troops in the streets. As the government troops moved from doorway to doorway to flush out the rebels, peasants flowed into the city from the countryside to side with the loyalists. The rebel marines were pushed into a four block area and a deadly game began. The government troops went building by building to exterminate the revolutionaries. Rondon recalls, “The air was full of lead when I noticed a priest walk into the streets to offer the Church’s last rites to the dying. One badly wounded soldier crawled to the priest, later identified as Father Luis Padilla, and pulled himself to a kneeling position, grasping the priest’s cassock. The sniper fire continued, and bullets chewed up the concrete around the priest as he looked up to face the sniper. Padilla gave the sacrament to the soldier, then moved onto others who had fallen.” The photograph he took at this moment won the Pulitzer Prize in 1963.

When I first came across this photograph I was reduced to tears. For me it represents this lonely love of those who love Christ and who therefore love the world with His love. “Love one another as I have loved you.” In the middle of hell a priest walks into danger to comfort the violent children of this world as they reap the prize of hatred. Indiscriminately he comforts the fallen of both sides while snipers continue to fire at him. In this photograph is revealed the full pathos and the full glory of the Church at Her best.

The beginning of peacemaking is the realisation that ones enemy is as equally loved by God as you are. Your enemy is simply afraid. Fear is the root of all evil. As Yoda reminds us, “Fear leads to violence, violence leads to hatred, and hatred leads to the Dark Side.” In Rowan William’s Lent Book Christ on Trial he quotes from Anita Mason’s The Illusionist, a retelling of Christ’s Passion:

“The trial was taking place somewhere else. From an immeasurable distance, he was aware of the governor’s face staring at him in a passion of fury. Demetrius looked at the face and saw that this man too would one day die. He looked deep into the furious eyes, and far away at the back of them he saw fear.”

To see with the heart is to stand above the fire of passion of this world and see instead with the passionately compassionate, and hurt pained eyes of Christ. Christians are Strangers in a Strange Land, Aliens in Occupied Territory. We stand too much out of the world to take too much comfort from it but too much in it to be protected from it. We stand at the door. It is a lonely place to stand but we are glorious because of it. The Lesson of the Fox in the Little Prince reads,

“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

Trailing Clouds of Glory: Whitterings, January 2005

The beginning of the new year often leads to introspection about the past. So as I reflect on the events of the previous year I find myself in a familiar predicament. I can not remember a good chunk of it.

Memory is a strange thing. I know people who can remember the details of a dinner party twenty years ago including the conversation topics. I know people that seem to remember everything they ever did or watched or even read. I often envy them.

My memory is esoteric, impractical, and totally unpredictable. I seldom remember the particulars of my own life but can discuss at length some obscure archaic belief system long since dead. I can remember that I have visited a place but can recall nothing about it. I can remember abstract things such as poetry, history, philosophy – in other words abstract thoughts - but not where I have been or what I have done. My friends joke about the fact that they know more about my history than I do. I have come across articles and monographs which I would swear I have never seen before concerning things I swear I know nothing about only to discover that I wrote them. Once when I was doing Doctoral work at Cambridge I received a telephone call from a man enquiring about the controversy over the foundation date of a Lazarite Leper Hospital in the north of England. I thought the man had the wrong number and informed him that I had never heard of the place. There was a long pause on the other end of the telephone before he asked sheepishly if I was the author of the monograph ‘Medieval Foundation of the Order of St Lazarus in England and Wales’. You guessed it, I wrote a book in which I spent two pages discussing the Foundation date of the particular leprosarium in question!

There is some comfort in knowing that the trait seems to be genetic as my mother suffers from the same eccentric memory. After my Grandmother and Aunt both died my mother commented that not only did she lose her family she also had lost her childhood as they could remember her past and help her remember it while she is unable to do it alone. For awhile I kept journals and took photographs constantly. I no longer do so as my journal writings seem to be those of a stranger writing about people I do not recall doing things I cannot remember. As for photographs they often only seem to mock me by reminding me that I should recall the people and the event of which I only have a vague recollection.

I always thought that leading an exciting life was done not only for the adventure but also to store up treasures in the memory chest for later years. I once dated a model mostly so I would be able to take pleasure later knowing that I had done so. I shouldn’t have bothered as I have no memory of it. Overall I have been haunted with a sense of loss and guilt. I also feel cheated by my own mind.

William Wordsworth reflected deeply about this pain of forgetting in his poem Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. In it he traces the birth of man from God and the gradual losing of that memory of Him and the feelings of awe experienced in childhood to be replaced by reflective melancholy and estrangement. He sees forgetting as part of a much greater problem of the human condition: The forgetting of innocence, joy, and God.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

Upon the growing boy.

Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind;

In the primal sympathy

Which having been must ever be;

In the soothing thoughts that spring

Out of human suffering;

In the faith that looks through death,

In years that bring the philosophic mind.

In Wordsworth I find the melancholic but freeing sense that forgetting is not just about a trick of the mind but actually echoes the end of all things, including humanity itself. The Prophet Isaiah reminds us, “All flesh is grass, and its beauty is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the Lord blows upon it; surly the people is grass. The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand for ever.”

Remembering has been a sacred thing to humans. The remembering of our ancestors, the stories of our race’s beginnings, our myths, our lives, our mistakes. Remembrance plays a central part in our faith as well. We recall the life of Our Lord with the yearly round of feast and fast, the lives of His Saints, we recall his words week after week, and we gather around the altar to celebrate the Eucharist in memory of him. Yet within the Eucharist lies the key to the solution to the problem of forgetting. The key is the word remember. The Greek word for remembrance used by Christ is anamnesis. The word does not really mean to remember something that happened before but to reach back and pull it forward again – to make it real again. By doing so the thing remembered is resurrected and given new life.

This is impossible for us. We remember darkly at best and even if we remember we too will die and our memories with us and down through the centuries the remembrance of love, and beauty, loss and pain will all vanish. There are also those who have no one to remember their stories at all. Those who die alone, on battlefields, those who have disappeared, those who have no one to witness their lives. Archbishop Williams reflected upon this in his Easter Sermon last year in speaking about the horrors of the modern world such as the holocaust and Rwanda.

“We may and we should feel the reproach of the risen Christ as we recognise how easily we let ourselves forget; and nearer home, we might think too of those who die alone and unloved in our own society - the aged with no family (or forgotten by their family), the homeless addict, the mentally disturbed isolated from ordinary human contact. But Easter tells us to be glad that they are not forgotten by God, that their dignity is held and affirmed by God and that their lives are in his hand.

When we pray at this Eucharist 'with angels and archangels and the whole company of heaven', we say presente of all those the world (including us) would forget and God remembers. With angels and archangels; with the butchered Rwandans of ten years ago and the butchered or brutalised Ugandan children of last week or yesterday; with the young woman dead on a mattress in King's Cross after an overdose and the childless widower with Alzheimer's; with the thief crucified alongside Jesus and all the thousands of other anonymous thieves crucified in Judaea by an efficient imperial administration; with the whole company of heaven, those whom God receives in his mercy.”

So although remembering in the human sense will not resurrect the past and will not heal the broken lives that have gone before us, God’s remembering will. St Luke tells us that Christ said that not even a sparrow is forgotten before God. God’s remembering is like that of the Eucharist: all will be made alive again, all will be made whole again, and all will be healed. Wordsworth’s man will return to the God from whence he has come and enter back into his lost innocence. Aristotle told us that all wisdom is just a remembering of that which we already know in the secret place of our heart.

Remembering is essential for not repeating the past mistakes of our collective life as well as for keeping steady on the path of faith. However if you are like me and find that much of life seems to be lost in the unreachable recesses of the mind, take comfort that although we forget, although we die and are forgotten by the world, and that this world will also one day vanish and be forgotten, God remembers. He not just remembers us in the past which is no more, He remembers us always in the eternal present and makes us whole again.

“To me the meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for
tears.” W.W.

Rowan Williams and the Hegalian Dialectic: Whitterings, October 2004

Early this summer The Rev’d Dr Giles Fraser, Rector of Putney and Lecturer in Philosophy at Wadham College Oxford, published a critique of the Hegelianism of the Archbishop of Canterbury. I have been haunted by it ever since.

For those of you who do not know the Hegelian dialectic or who need a refresher let me radically simplify. Hegel, the last of the great idealistic philosophers, proposed his dialectic as a tool for the advancement of human civilisation. The dialectic (thesis + antithesis = synthesis) assumes that human civilisation and thought evolves by the constant compromise (synthesis) between extremes (thesis and antithesis). The use of the dialectic ensures that no party wins but that the condition of both parties changes. The important thing is that both sides stay together afterwards. If one side wins completely the losing side will become aggressive and eventually, with renewed strength, attack the winners. Hegel assumes that without the dialectic man will always be at war. The conflict between the two extremes creates the energy for change, when they compromise society progresses. Human advancement is like a phoenix rising from the ashes of its former body. Those who see the bigger picture see this slow march towards the light while most see only their own small fights in their own limited time.

Fr Fraser argues that Archbishop Williams is an Hegelian. “Reflection requires that the plain opposition of positive and negative be left behind. What is thinkable is so precisely because thinking is not content with the abstraction of mutual exclusivities, but struggles to conceive of a structured wholeness nuanced enough to contain what appeared to be contradictories.” This is a quotation from Archbishop William’s essay “Hegel and the Gods of Postmodernity”. I know that Archbishop Williams has Hegelian Tendencies but I am also aware that his emphasis on the outcast and the destructive nature of institutions, found in such books as Christ on Trial, are much more Kierkegaardian. Soren Kierkegaard is one of Hegel most powerful critics. He once described Hegelian thought as “A grand palace in which no man can dwell.” So I am not entirely convinced by Fr Fraser’s argument but I am still troubled.

The dialectic works. It works on all levels of human conflict. The opponents of women priests may think that a long-term peace has been reached. History will show that they are slowly being phased out of the larger system by a dialectical process. My guess is that most liberals, even if only at the back of their minds, believe this will also happen with the issue of homosexuality.

It may work, but the dialectic is cruel and merciless. Hegel himself admitted that his system took no account of the individual and that it was a “slaughter-bench”. Christ was certainly not Hegelian. I think he was probably more of a Kierkegaardian! The individual is paramount. The ninety-nine are left to seek the one who is lost. Canterbury himself points this out when he says that to find Christ you must look at all of the structures in society and then look for the people left out of these structures. There you will find Christ most fully. You will find Him, not with, but in the outcast. Mother Teresa and Jean Vanier’s spirituality is rooted in this truth.

So the realisation that ecclesiology, the theology of the church, even enlightened ecclesiology is often Hegelian in nature scares me. The individuals that are being disregarded by the dialectical process are not just important but are actually the focus of our Incarnational theology as they are Christ for us. “What you did to least of these my brethren you have done to me.” Bishop Trevor Huddleston and Archbishop Desmond Tutu fought against the Hegelian Dialectic in favour of the individual. Archbishop Tutu, with his Truth and Reconciliation Board, challenged the unspoken belief that the Hegelian dialectic is a necessary evil. He showed that the Christian process of repentance, confession, and forgiveness all done in a state of genuine vulnerability can also positively transform society.

So I am afraid. I am afraid that the paramount importance that unity plays in most people’s ecclesiology these days will lead to the persecution of Christ by His own Church. There are times when one must simply take a stand to stand with the weak and fight for them. To do otherwise is to deny Christ and to subject ourselves to judgement. Once you realise that race, gender, and sexuality is irrelevant to a persons humanity to go back is to deny truth and therefore to deny Christ. Simone Weil once said that if you had to choose between Christ and the truth you must always choose the truth. Then you choose more who Christ really is instead of who you think he is. Many of us can not go back because by doing so we will deny Christ as we experience Him and we will lose our integrity and therefore risk losing our souls. Others can not, at this time, come forward without losing the very same things. Is an individual who feel abandoned by the church on either side of this conflict any less an outcast or any less lost? I am afraid that with an Hegelian synthesis we might all find ourselves facing the same danger. Charles Simeon, leader of the Evangelical Revival in the 19th century (Feast Day November 12th), said, “The truth is not in the middle, and not in one extreme; but in both extremes.” I am not knowledgeable enough to know what a Kierkegaardian solution or process would be. Nor am I graced enough to know what Christ’s way is. I know that there is one. I wish I knew what it was.

In this monthly column I am not seeking answers as much as I am seeking to ask the right questions. The Fourth Note at the Beginning of The Rule of the Oratory of the Good Shepherd, my Religious Order, is The Labour of the Mind. I leave you with it.

“It’s birth in a University and the learned tradition in religious communities give the Oratory a duty of thought and study. Members will endeavour to worship God with their minds as well as with heart and soul. They will be fearless in following truth, and will constantly try to express it, so that Christ may be fully presented as thought and word allow. They will have a private rule of reading. Each brother will seek according to his ability to bring new thought and knowledge under the discipline of Christ, and to interpret them to a better understanding of the loving purposes of God.”