Rowan Williams on the bittersweet gifts of the job

So for now a final quote from Rowan Williams in Silence and Honey Cakes. This is his answer to the penultimate question posed to him when he gave the lectures almost 10 years ago in Australia. As I read it I wondered how he would answer it now and thought of the continued pain of being in the role of leader while being drawn to contemplation. I thought also of the easy attacks on him by the press over recent years and how he tries in a very real way to stay true to himself.

Reading what he writes here also surprisingly made me think of my father - a little incoherently but in my head in hangs together - about his role as teacher - the pupils at school called him "Goofy" - and also his role as local politician and leader. Being all over the local paper every week. You make decisions in the spotlight of debate but also you just get on and live your life. He kept on keeping on, he didn't give up in opposition or in power. He often said that chairing the Labour group meetings on the council while being in power was more difficult than the full council meeting. Internal opposition and consensus building is harder than facing the supposed "real" opposition.

Two of the chapters of Williams book on the wisdom of the desert are called "fleeing" and "staying" - so do we stay with our role accepting it will not always be understood by others or do we flee? I also asked myself what did I leave to be in the role I am now and coming to any kind of concise and self-aware answers like Williams does may take me considerably more time than the week's holiday I have left.

What were you leaving when you became a bishop?

"All sorts of things: peace and quiet for instance! On one level, I felt I was leaving behind a sense of innocence. not that the academic world is all that innocent, but as a bishop you have to make decisions that need to be clear and can be hard or hurtful. You are a public person in a way that means you will be misunderstood and you can't explain yourself; if you try, you are into teh heavy burden of self-justification with a vengeance. Put bluntly, I think I was being asked to leave behind an environment where I could feel more pleased with myself than bishops normally can. That is one of the bittersweet gifts of this job, which you must get used to. But of course it's true for anyone in various ways. The gospel may lead you into a role where you can have a life in other people's fantasies and you can't do anything about it. It can hurt and feel imprisoning, yet this is part of the price you pay for the reality you are trying to minister or mediate as a pastor. Perhaps i was being pushed into another level of understanding my priesthood in becoming a bishop - even more in becoming an archbishop." p.115

Proclamation of faith and calligraphy from Wythenshawe

Over on Breadbreaker Kate Gray has posted the text below and titled it "A 21st century proclamation of faith in Jesus?"
Kate and her husband Mike Walsh wrote the text for the service of dedication of their son Zebedee.

Our faith is about our whole life lived in the company of God
Our faith says life is precious, to be nurtured and celebrated
Our faith is about living gently with the earth

Our faith is inspired by Jesus and many other people
Our faith is about love and hope for everyone no matter what’s happened
Our faith calls us to mix and mingle with all sorts

Our faith calls all people to get involved in something bigger than ourselves
Our faith encourages us to be ourselves and make room for others
Our faith energises us to make a positive difference

Our faith values people over profit
Our faith is intuitive, sensuous and honours our bodies
Our faith is dynamic and open to challenge and change

Our faith is about creativity over consumerism
Our faith brings healing where there is suffering
Our faith should be seen and heard and obvious to people around us

Our faith has drawn us to and away from and back to church
Our faith inspires us like fantastic music
Our faith dares us to dream of a future with wild imagination

God’s faith in us never stops.
God wants us to make the most of things.
God never fails to surprise, challenge or love us all.

copyright (c) Kate Gray and Mike Walsh

I also have to thank Kate for linking to Stephen Raw's amazing calligraphic oeuvre I've just spent about an hour looking through his website, an artist fascinated by words and letters and inspired by the religious. His work is wonderful, I may have to treat myself or just get inspired to do some work myself.

Terrible news from Congo

A few months ago I was asked rather at the last minute to interpret into French for a fascinating planning meeting for human rights campaigners. The person I interpreted for was the director of a human rights organisation in Congo called La Voix des sans Voix. His name Floribert Chebeya Bahizire. A delightful committed man who knew he was working in desperately difficult circumstances but who seemed calm in the face of the undoubted difficulties. I spent most of an afternoon and day whispering interpretation for him into French. He was very gracious.
Today I discovered he is dead.
Meanwhile I am attending a conference with the theme witnessing to Christ today.
The price of doing what is right can be very high.
So I ask what did I do for justice today? Where did I speak truth? How did I witness to the costly gospel?

To bear witness does not always mean to be a martyr or a saint ...

Through the Ecumenical Prayer Cycle Christians are encouraged this week to pray for Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. In the Ecumenical Centre chapel this morning Carla Khijoyan and Tamara Grdzelidze led prayers with a simple Orthodox form and some glorious Armenian chanting. They each shared a story from their own culture about what it is to bear witness to faith. Carla, who works with the WCC's migration programme, spoke powerfully of the Armenian genocide, how to be Armenian is intrinsically to be Christian but also to be part of a people driven into the desert, persecuted and today scattered across the nations of the world, but with a strong identity which still seeks to bear witness to essential truths in the present.
Tamara, who works in Faith and Order - among other things on the Cloud of Witnesses project - spoke about the witness of a Georgian Orthodox priest and theologian who lost his life in 1943 in the gas chambers. Not technically a martyr to the faith but someone whose life story speaks volumes of where it is that faith may lead some of us in extreme circumstances.
Each of our cultures has stories of the lives of witnesses: individuals and sometimes groups of people whose tenacity, goodness, powerful words, faith, standing up for what was right, prayerfulness, generosity and much more, speak to others across borders of time and place. We need someone else's story to make sense of our own sometimes. For those stories to speak to us the people do not need to be saints or martyrs to faith, their story has in some way to touch our own. We need to be open to receive from the past and to recover sometimes forgotten stories from the past.
Early in November All Saints and All Souls' days approach and in my Protestant, feminist and certainly not very saintly way I'm beginning to think about how I might meaningfully remember stories that touch my own. Perhaps I need to begin gently making lists of those - both dead and alive - whose witness to the gospel and whose life-stories have touched mine. From year to year if I made such a list it would also chart my personal and spiritual changes perhaps, some parts of the list would remain the same, it would change or be added to in other areas. Theologically this idea speaks to me not of fixed immoveable tradition but of open and evolving tradition.
So who would be the first five women, the first five men and the first five groups of people whose witness have touched your story and spoken to you deeply of gospel faith?

"I love you and there's nothing you can do about it" - Kagina's story

Off the cuff, our colleague Rogate Mshana told a wonderful story today as part of our chapel service this morning as we prayed for Tanzania and Kenya. We listened to the passage from John's gospel where Jesus calls his disciples to love one another and assures them that they are his friends if they fulfill his commandments.

Rogate reflected on this by saying it is by our doing rather than by our thinking that we fulfill the commandment to love. After telling us the story of Kagina he invited us to turn to our neighbours and say "I love you and there is nothing you can do about it". It made us all laugh and smile but it was a powerful way to begin the week at work, several of us were saying it to each other throughout the day.

I should add that Rogate didn't know he was going to be saying anything until I cornered him as he walked into chapel and said wouldn't you just like to say a few words ... I'm so glad I dared to ask.

Kagina’s passion to be loved
A long time ago when I was young in Tanzania we used to see a man who was living alone in our village. This was not normal. His name was Kagina and people knew him by only this one name because there was no other person with such a name in the village. Kagina worked on his small farm and cooked for himself. As children we never asked why he was not married and raising children like us. We were, however, curious to know how he could be happy without connecting himself with others. Then we realized that he was talking to someone in his house. He would prepare his food and then put it on the table. But instead of eating the food right away, he first stretched himself on his bamboo bed and then imitated a sound of another person calling Kagina to come and eat because the food was ready and would get cold. Kagina would reply to himself that he was a bit sleepy but then the other Kagina would say, “My friend even if you are tired and sleepy it is good to eat together, you know that I cannot eat without you, I love you, please come.” Kagina would then sit up and go to eat, pretending he was eating with someone. He did this every day till he was old with age and died.
The story of Kagina is about loving one another especially around sharing a meal together. He wanted passionately to be loved and share a meal with someone else as an expression of this love.

Liturgy, informality and remembering water

I could tell this morning at Oullins that I wasn't in Switzerland. We didn't start the service on time - in a Geneva Protestant Church this would not go down well, it's quite a big difference when you cross the border.(Think Swiss watches and clocks and you begin to understand why!)
Sometimes we talk about the "liturgy after the liturgy" but this morning we had a great lunch after the service but before the service we also had a sort of "gathering before the liturgy". It was spring time, the sunshine was out, the garden was in flower, people were having fun chatting and meeting up, and it was difficult to get people to move in to the worship space. In the end we managed to gather in the worship space and the worship flowed between formality and informality. Holding that together is quite a challenge for a visiting worship leader but it was fun remembering water in the Bible with them and reflecting on Jesus washing his disciples feet.
When I first started working in the French Reformed Church I sometimes used to feel frustrated at the inability of anything to actually start - not entirely suprising given that I trained at the more high church end of the low church spectrum. I used to feel the need to shape things and get things going - these days I just try to make sure that the notices don't last twice as long as the sermon!
Nowadays I understand better that the informality comes from the community gathering, the chatter and noise is part of the holy preparation and I imagine that in Jesus' time it was not so different. The synagogues and sycamore trees were almost certainly informal community times and not ritualistic well-behaved occasions ressembling middle class dinner parties with people being on their best behaviour.
In Switzerland where Protestants don't feel in a minority they seem to like things to be on time and not last too long. In France Protestants are in the minority and tend to be willing to take a bit more time.
I'm still not sure what Calvin would make of any of this - nor how any of our churches today would cope with his style of preaching and leading worship! Back in the 1600s Sunday worship was not supposed to be the perfect 55 minute pearl of poetic perfection which "busy" professionals seem to impose as a norm on the Genevan church.

Rowan Williams preaches on John Milton

It is rather wonderful when an Archbishop who is himself a poet preaches for the 400th anniversary of another poet's birth. His beautifully crafted sermon for John Milton's anniversary is about politics, witness, passion and, of course, poetics. I only wish I could have actually been there rather than catching up on it over the weekend - I know that Annie wanted to be there too, as her choir were singing at St Giles' Cripplegate for the service. You can find the full text of Rowan Williams' sermon here but I include the beginning and end as an encouragement to read the rest. Do also visit the Darkness Visible site put together to create an interactive space for the study and appreciation of Paradise Lost by members of Christ's College Cambridge. I wonder whether I will manage to re-read Paradise Lost during this anniversary year?

Now this as a taster from Rowan Williams:

To begin with a resoundingly obvious remark: Milton believed profoundly in words. He worked out of a pervasive confidence that his language could sound the depths of truth and communicate them in such a way as to change human hearts. In his long writing life, he found very diverse ways of expressing this: beginning with the musical, extravagant idioms of the earliest poems with their rich classical allusiveness and dancing rhythms, he goes on to establish himself as a prose polemicist of immense - sometimes scurrilous - vigour, and writes what is probably the greatest apologia in any European language for free debate in the public
arena. He becomes a servant of the revolutionary government, using his skills for the wholesale reformation of a society (and incidentally laying himself open to many of the charges he had so unforgettably formulated in his own polemics against censorship). And then, already shaken by personal and political disaster and by his irreversible blindness, he embarks on the most ambitious project of all, 'to justify the ways of God to man': in a startlingly different poetic style, severe, insistent, but with even more metaphorical abundance than before, he dramatises the fall of the angels, the inner counsels of the Trinity and the first disobedience of the human heart
...

The poet cannot finally avoid the summons from confident speech to the brokenness and harsh linguistic economy of witness; the disciple cannot avoid the summons from heroism to silent fidelity, knowing only that this has been God's way of transforming the world. 'If we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him'. Milton, poet and disciple, faces this as reluctantly as any great or heroic figure ever did. Yet face it he does – patchily and reluctantly, but truthfully; and so must we.

Pax - giveaway art as a sign of God's grace?

I was intrigued by Maggi Dawn's post about Michael Radcliffe's PAX art project and the whole concept of Free Art Friday. PAX (part of which is pictured) was the artist's response to having witnessed an act of violence outside his house, trying to put something with a different message back into the community.
I found reading about the project very moving. Putting art freely into a troubled local community over the summer months spoke quite deeply to me of God's grace; allowing it to get kicked around and roughly used and hoping that somehow some of the essence of its message might get through speaks of real commitment to witness - and also of Christ's own passion.
Through reading I discovered that Michael belongs to Moot which describes itself as creative and explorative Christian activity in the city - just shows I need to get out online more.
The other reason I was interested in putting artwork with the word PAX on it out in the community is that most of my recent calligraphy has been of the word peace in various languages. Now I'm inspired to try and do something a bit more creative both with my own daubings and with the many works of art colleagues painted as part of our international day of prayer for peace service last year, now I know why I couldn't bear to throw those precious pieces of paper away. I't's also good inspiration as today is one year on and once more the international day of prayer for peace.
Thank you Michael for this creative approach to practical theological witness and art, good luck to you and to Moot. And hattip to Maggi Dawn once more.
You can see more of the Free Art Friday works here.
Photo by Michael Radcliffe.