Archbishop Williams: contemplation is key to evangelisation
The Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, addressed the Synod of Bishops
in the Vatican on Wednesday about the central role of contemplation in helping people
rediscover the beauty of the Christian faith. Drawing deeply on the writings of
some of the great Catholic authors and theologians from the time of the Second Vatican
Council, the archbishop said contemplation is the only real “answer to the unreal
and insane world that our financial systems and advertising culture…..encourage us
to inhabit”. Those who “know little and care less about the institutions and hierarchies
of the Church” today, he continued, are often attracted and challenged by lives that
show justice and love reflected in the face of God. In particular he pointed to the
crucial work and witness of communities like Taizé and Bose, or networks like St Egidio,
the Focolare or Communion and Liberation, who bring fresh expressions of faith and
transcend the historic divisions between Christians. Vatican Radio’s Philippa
Hitchen talked to Dr Williams about his address to the Synod, about his advise to
his successor (expected to be announced over the coming weeks) and his message to
Pope Benedict XVI….
Listen to the second part of Philippa's interview:
Below you
can read Dr William's address to the Synod of Bishops:
Your Holiness, Reverend
Fathers, brothers and sisters in Christ – dear Friends
I am deeply honoured
by the Holy Father’s invitation to speak in this gathering: as the Psalmist says,
‘Ecce quam bonum et quam jucundum habitare fratres in unum’. The gathering of bishops
in Synod for the good of all Christ’s people is one of those disciplines that sustain
the health of Christ’s Church. And today especially we cannot forget that great gathering
of ‘fratres in unum’ that was the Second Vatican Council, which did so much for the
health of the Church and helped the Church to recover so much of the energy needed
to proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ effectively in our age. For so many of
my own generation, even beyond the boundaries of the Roman Catholic Church, that Council
was a sign of great promise, a sign that the Church was strong enough to ask itself
some demanding questions about whether its culture and structures were adequate to
the task of sharing the Gospel with the complex, often rebellious, always restless
mind of the modern world.
The Council was, in so many ways, a rediscovery
of evangelistic concern and passion, focused not only on the renewal of the Church’s
own life but on its credibility in the world. Texts such as Lumen gentium and Gaudium
et spes laid out a fresh and joyful vision of how the unchanging reality of Christ
living in his Body on earth through the gift of the Holy Spirit might speak in new
words to the society of our age and even to those of other faiths. It is not surprising
that we are still, fifty years later, struggling with many of the same questions and
with the implications of the Council; and I take it that this Synod’s concern with
the new evangelization is part of that continuing exploration of the Council’s legacy.
But one of the most important aspects of the theology of the second Vaticanum
was a renewal of Christian anthropology. In place of an often strained and artificial
neo-scholastic account of how grace and nature were related in the constitution of
human beings, the Council built on the greatest insights of a theology that had returned
to earlier and richer sources – the theology of spiritual geniuses like Henri de Lubac,
who reminded us of what it meant for early and mediaeval Christianity to speak of
humanity as made in God’s image and of grace as perfecting and transfiguring that
image so long overlaid by our habitual ‘inhumanity’. In such a light, to proclaim
the Gospel is to proclaim that it is at last possible to be properly human: the Catholic
and Christian faith is a ‘true humanism’, to borrow a phrase from another genius of
the last century, Jacques Maritain.
Yet de Lubac is
clear what this does not mean. We do not replace the evangelistic task by a campaign
of ‘humanization’. ‘Humanize before Christianizing?’ he asks – ‘If the enterprise
succeeds, Christianity will come too late: its place will be taken. And who thinks
that Christianity has no humanizing value?’ So de Lubac writes in his wonderful collection
of aphorisms, Paradoxes of Faith. It is the faith itself that shapes the work of
humanizing and the humanizing enterprise will be empty without the definition of humanity
given in the Second Adam. 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. St Edith Stein
observed that we begin to understand theology when we see God as the ‘First Theologian’,
the first to speak out the reality of divine life, because ‘all speaking about God
presupposes God’s own speaking’; in an analogous way we could say that we begin to
understand contemplation when we see God as the first contemplative, the eternal paradigm
of that selfless attention to the Other that brings not death but life to the self.
All contemplating of God presupposes God’s own absorbed and joyful knowing of himself
and gazing upon himself in the trinitarian life.
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 the face we need to show
to our world is the face of a humanity in endless growth towards love, a humanity
so delighted and engaged by the glory of what we look towards that we are prepared
to embark on a journey without end to find our way more deeply into it, into the heart
of the trinitarian life. St Paul speaks (in II Cor 3.18) of how ‘with our unveiled
faces reflecting the glory of the Lord’, we are transfigured with a greater and greater
radiance. That is the face we seek to show to our fellow-human beings.
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. In the early Church, there was a clear understanding
that we needed to advance from the self-understanding or self-contemplation that taught
us to discipline our greedy instincts and cravings to the ‘natural contemplation’
that perceived and venerated the wisdom of God in the order of the world and allowed
us to see created reality for what it truly was in the sight of God – rather than
what it was in terms of how we might use it or dominate it. And from there grace
would lead us forward into true ‘theology’, the silent gazing upon God that is the
goal of all our discipleship.
In this perspective, contemplation
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. To put it boldly, contemplation is the only ultimate answer to the unreal
and insane world that our financial systems and our advertising culture and our chaotic
and unexamined emotions encourage us to inhabit. To learn contemplative practice
is to learn what we need so as to live truthfully and honestly and lovingly. It is
a deeply revolutionary matter.
In his autobiography
Thomas Merton describes an experience not long after he had entered the monastery
where he was to spend the rest of his life (Elected Silence, p.303). He had contracted
flu, and was confined to the infirmary for a few days, and, he says, he felt a ‘secret
joy’ at the opportunity this gave him for prayer – and ‘to do everything that I want
to do, without having to run all over the place answering bells.’ He is forced to
recognise that this attitude reveals that ‘All my bad habits…had sneaked into the
monastery with me and had received the religious vesture along with me: spiritual
gluttony, spiritual sensuality, spiritual pride.’ In other words, he is trying to
live the Christian life with the emotional equipment of someone still deeply wedded
to the search for individual satisfaction. It is a powerful warning: we have to be
every careful in our evangelisation not simply to persuade people to apply to God
and the life of the spirit all the longings for drama, excitement and self-congratulation
that we so often indulge in our daily lives. It was expressed even more forcefully
some decades ago by the American scholar of religion, 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.
Contemplation
is an intrinsic element in this transforming process. To learn to look to God without
regard to my own instant satisfaction, to learn to scrutinise and to relativise the
cravings and fantasies that arise in me – this is to allow God to be God, and thus
to allow the prayer of Christ, God’s own relation to God, to come alive in me. 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.
Only as this begins to happen will I be delivered from treating the gifts of God as
yet another set of things I may acquire to make me happy, or to dominate other people.
And as this process unfolds, I become more free—to borrow a phrase of St Augustine
(Confessions IV.7)—to ‘love human beings in a human way’, to love them not for what
they may promise me, to love them not as if they were there to provide me with lasting
safety and comfort, but as fragile fellow-creatures held in the love of God. I discover
(as we noted earlier) how to see other persons and things for what they are in relation
to God, not to me. And it is here that true justice as well as true love has its
roots.
The human face that Christians want to show
to the world is a face marked by such justice and love, and thus a face formed by
contemplation, by the disciplines of silence and the detaching of the self from the
objects that enslave it and the unexamined instincts that can deceive it. If evangelisation
is a matter of showing the world the ‘unveiled’ human face that reflects the face
of the Son turned towards the Father, it must carry with it a serious commitment to
promoting and nurturing such prayer and practice. It should not need saying that
this is not at all to argue that ‘internal’ transformation is more important than
action for justice; rather, it is to insist that the clarity and energy we need for
doing justice requires us to make space for the truth, for God’s reality to come through.
Otherwise our search for justice or for peace becomes another exercise of human will,
undermined by human self-deception. The two callings are inseparable, the calling
to ‘prayer and righteous action’, as the Protestant martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer put
it, writing from his prison cell in 1944. True prayer purifies the motive, true justice
is the necessary work of sharing and liberating in others the humanity we have discovered
in our contemplative encounter.
Those who know little
and care less about the institutions and hierarchies of the Church these days are
often attracted and challenged by lives that exhibit something of this. It is the
new and renewed religious communities that most effectively reach out to those who
have never known belief or who have abandoned it as empty and stale. When the Christian
history of our age is written especially, though not only, as regards Europe and North
America—we shall see how central and vital was the witness of places like Taizé or
Bose, but also of more traditional communities that have become focal points for the
exploration of a humanity broader and deeper than social habit encourages. And the
great spiritual networks, Sant’ Egidio, the Focolare, Communione e Liberazione, these
too show the same phenomenon; they make space for a profounder human vision because
in their various ways all of them offer a discipline of personal and common life that
is about letting the reality of Jesus come alive in us.
And,
as these examples show, the attraction and challenge we are talking about can generate
commitments and enthusiasms across historic confessional lines. We have become used
to talking about the imperative importance of ‘spiritual ecumenism’ these days; but
this must not be a matter of somehow opposing the spiritual and the institutional,
nor replacing specific commitments with a general sense of Christian fellow-feeling.
If we have a robust and rich account of what the word ‘spiritual’ itself means, grounded
in scriptural insights like those in the passages from II Corinthians that we noted
earlier, we shall understand spiritual ecumenism as the shared search to nourish and
sustain disciplines of contemplation in the hope of unveiling the face of the new
humanity. And the more we keep apart from each other as Christians of different confessions,
the less convincing that face will seem. I mentioned the Focolare movement a moment
ago: you will recall that the basic imperative in the spirituality of Chiara Lubich
was ‘to make yourself one’ – one with the crucified and abandoned Christ, one through
him with the Father, one with all those called to this unity and so one with the deepest
needs of the world. ‘Those who live unity … live by allowing themselves to penetrate
always more into God. They grow always closer to God … and the closer they get to
him, the closer they get to the hearts of their brothers and sisters’ (Chiara Lubich:
Essential Writings, p.37). The contemplative habit strips away an unthinking superiority
towards other baptised believers and the assumption that I have nothing to learn from
them. Insofar as the habit of contemplation helps us approach all experience as gift,
we shall always be asking what it is that the brother or sister has to share with
us – even the brother or sister who is in one way or another separated from us or
from what we suppose to be the fullness of communion. ‘Quam bonum et quam jucundum
…’.
In practice, this might suggest that wherever initiatives
are being taken to reach out in new ways to a lapsed Christian or post-Christian public,
there should be serious work done on how such outreach can be grounded in some ecumenically
shared contemplative practice. In addition to the striking way in which Taizé has
developed an international liturgical ‘culture’ accessible to a great variety of people,
a network like the World Community for Christian Meditation, with its strong Benedictine
roots and affiliations, has opened up fresh possibilities here. What is more, this
community has worked hard at making contemplative practice accessible to children
and young people, and this needs the strongest possible encouragement. Having seen
at first hand—in Anglican schools in Britain—how warmly young children can respond
to the invitation offered by meditation in this tradition, I believe its potential
for introducing young people to the depths of our faith to be very great indeed.
And for those who have drifted away from the regular practice of sacramental faith,
the rhythms and practices of Taizé or the WCCM are often a way back to this sacramental
heart and hearth.
What people of all ages recognise
in these practices is the possibility, quite simply, of living more humanly – living
with less frantic acquisitiveness, living with space for stillness, living in the
expectation of learning, and most of all, living with an awareness that there is a
solid and durable joy to be discovered in the disciplines of self-forgetfulness that
is quite different from the gratification of this or that impulse of the moment.
Unless our evangelisation can open the door to all this, it will run the risk of trying
to sustain faith on the basis of an un-transformed set of human habits – with the
all too familiar result that the Church comes to look unhappily like so many purely
human institutions, anxious, busy, competitive and controlling. 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. So I wish you
joy in these discussions – not simply clarity or effectiveness in planning, but joy
in the promise of the vision of Christ’s face, and in the foreshadowings of that fulfilment
in the joy of communion with each other here and now.