Baptism is ‘being led to where Jesus is’, which, in apparent
contradiction, places you both ‘in the middle of human suffering and muddle’
(not marked out as a member of a superior group) and in the heart of God.
The Bible is like ‘God telling us a parable or a whole
sequence of parables’. It is the word of God because it is what God wants us to
hear, not because everything it contains, including a call to genocide, is his
direct word. God is saying, ‘This is how people heard me, saw me, responded to
me; this is the gift I gave them; this is the response they made… Where are you
in this?’
The heart of the Eucharist is illustrated in the story of
Zacchaeus, when Jesus says to him, ‘Aren’t you going to ask me to your home?’
In the Eucharist, Jesus not only exercises hospitality, he draws hospitality
out from others, makes people open to God, open to each other, and able to see
all things as ‘demanding reverent attention, even contemplation’.
Prayer is something to grow into, which is always about
growing in Christian humanity. Essentially, to pray is to let Jesus pray in
you. It’s not so much about chatting to Jesus, still less about trying to
persuade God to listen. We make room, we say ‘Our Father’, and Jesus prays in
us. All this is considered with help from Origen, Gregory of Nyssa and John
Cassian.
New readers of Rowan Williams will be introduced to his
thinking more gently than in most of his other works, though even here, because
it is so distilled, it will need to be taken slowly, or re-read. Being so
short, that is made easy - don’t measure value for money by the number of
pages.
Those familiar with Rowan Williams will find the most
novelty in chapter 2 on the Bible, especially the helpful analogy of parable.
It is here where I also have a minor quibble. I fear it is possible to come
away with the impression that only in the Old Testament do we sometimes find internal
tension, historical inaccuracy, God portrayed as acting in a morally
questionable way, or a risk of the text being used to justify ‘violence,
enslavement, abuse and suppression of women, murderous prejudice against gay
people’. Or, to put it crudely, we can be fundamentalist about the New
Testament but not the Old. This is absolutely not what Rowan Williams believes
or intends, but it would have helped to say so.
Bishop Richard Harries wrote in Art and the Beauty of God (p.11): ‘People sometimes ask for simple
gospel truths. Too often, however, what they have in mind are the pious
platitudes of a previous generation. True simplicity is indeed a highly prized
virtue. But it does not come by opening a packet. After a lifetime of thinking,
struggling, loving and praying we might, through the grace of God, have
achieved true simplicity’. Being
Christian is a model of such profound simplicity.
