Luminous Darkness

See the real St. Nicholas at Canterbury!

The following was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 this morning at 07:45 as part of their ongoing “Thought for the Day” series. It was written and delivered by His Grace, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams.

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Good morning.

About three weeks ago, I sat and listened to two visitors from the Holy Land, both of them with harrowing stories to tell me of how the people they most dearly loved had been killed in the conflict raging there – a woman who had lost her son, a young man who had lost his brother. Stories that you could multiply by the thousand in the Holy Land today. But what was different was that the woman was Jewish and the young man an Arab Muslim; and they were travelling the world to tell their stories side by side.

Well there’s plenty of challenge still in the news from the Holy Land and the talks in coming weeks will have some hard business to transact, but I hope that they don’t forget brave people like these and others who belong to the Families Forum – that’s a network for those who have been bereaved through violence in Israel and Palestine and who are committed to joining together to work for peace. There are several such groups – as indeed there were in Northern Ireland in the darkest days there: people who are able to say, ‘I know the worst that war can do, and I am turning my back on revenge’.

Few statements could be more powerful. What my visitors were saying was that grief and desperate loneliness aren’t political things but human things. It’s that only when we can get to the humanity can we begin to get beyond the sterility of historic racial and religious conflicts. Facing the abiding realities of the human condition, facing death; your own, or that of someone you love, is something that puts everything else into perspective.

Change, real change, happens when we’re ready just to be human – not to use our suffering as another weapon against each other, not to argue about whose sufferings are worse, but just to recognise the same love and the same loss. Which is why my Jewish and Muslim visitors have been for me this year’s most important preparation for Christmas.

Christians believe that the most radical and total change in the history of the world happened when God began to speak to us in the voice of a human being – not the voice of a monarch or a philosopher or even a prophet, but the inarticulate voice of a child in need. When we start hearing the voice of God in the cries of the newborn child in the manger, we start being able to hear that voice in the raw humanity of other people. We can’t any longer write off the suffering of others on the grounds that they’re not really like us – because they’re Israeli and not Arab, Catholic and not Protestant or whatever.

Hard political talk can’t be avoided but God help us if that’s the only focus; we need the embodied signs of hope as well. And my two visitors from the land of Christ’s birth and death and resurrection were ambassadors for the freedom to listen without fear and anger and the freedom to act together. And that freedom – deepened and made universal and lasting – is what Jesus was born to achieve for us. This is the new humanity that is born with him on Christmas Day.

Today is the feast of St. Nicholas, one of the oldest and best known saints in the history of the Church. With all of the current controversy surrounding the over-commercialization of Christmas at this time of year, I think that a good comparison can be made between St. Nicholas and Santa Claus. This sentiment is explored at the website of the St. Nicholas Center:

It’s been a long journey from the Fourth Century Bishop of Myra, St. Nicholas, who showed his devotion to God in extraordinary kindness and generosity, to America’s jolly Santa Claus. However, if you peel back the accretions he is still Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, whose caring surprises continue to model true giving and faithfulness.

There is growing interest in reclaiming the original saint in the United States to help restore the spiritual dimension of this festive time. For indeed, St. Nicholas, lover of the poor and patron saint of children, is a model of how Christians are meant to live. A bishop, Nicholas put Jesus Christ at the center of his life, his ministry, his entire existence. Families, churches, and schools are embracing true St Nicholas traditions as one way to claim the true center of Christmas—the birth of Jesus. Such a focus helps restore balance to increasingly materialistic and stress-filled Advent and Christmas seasons.

It is worth remembering that the traditions of the church year can help us here. Just as Advent is a full season of four weeks, Christmas is also a season of the twelve days until Epiphany, not just a one-day blow out. My friend Nick Knisely has recently explored this idea in his post ‘Christmas as a Season and not as an event…’ Among other things, he comments on the post-Christmas letdown:

The other, more practical concern, is that trying to compress two months worth of expectations into a frenzied hour of observance almost always leads to a sense of disappointment, an emotional letdown, and the inevitable question “Is this all then?” People who suffer from depression and anxiety during the holidays are often reacting to the particular experience of emptiness and exhaustion that follows the long long buildup. Helping people manage the post-holiday letdown is one of the most common tasks of the clergy in January and February.

So, with these things in mind, let me leave you with this prayer from the St. Nicholas Society:

Good St Nicholas,
Help us prepare for the miracle of the coming of Jesus.
Help us not to be blind to the gifts of getting ready.
Help us be sincere in the greetings we send and receive, with love and prayer.

Kind St. Nicholas, protect us from shoppers’ fatigue, stress, overspending, yet help us to be kind and generous of heart to all, especially those who are alone, financial poor and fearful.

May our celebration of your feast lead others to see the true meaning of giving and receiving and to guide all people to

The greatest of all gifts, even Jesus Christ, prince of peace and child of Mary, Our Lord and only saviour.

Amen.

What are the values that we are allowed to profess in American society today? According to this Op-Ed piece by Tom Krattenmaker in USA Today, the answer might be different than we tend to think. He says:

I am a values voter. Given my progressive political and religious beliefs, some might find this a dubious claim — especially members of the Christian right, who with their rhetoric about “values voters” suggest that only those who share their positions on abortion and same-sex couples possess something deserving of the term “values.”

He goes on to describe a number of values that come straight out of Christian gospel principles including social justice, peace-making, poverty relief, environmental preservation, and tolerance. These are values that I, for one, certainly hold deeply and they do come in large part from my Christian faith and belief in following the way of Jesus. The public perception of Christianity has been hurt in our country by idea that only a fundamentalist has the right to use the language of ‘values’ in public discourse, but nothing could be further from the truth. Towards the end of his article, Krattenmaker concludes:

As progressives wield language that once belonged solely to conservatives, may we do so fairly, in a way that acknowledges that the other side of the debate also has values. In so doing, we’ll model other core values of ours: inclusiveness and respect for differing viewpoints.

Amen to that.

I recently read the book The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It – How To Get It Back by Andrew Sullivan. I had picked it up on the advice of a review in the New York Times Book Review, and found is fascinating. In the book, Sullivan outlines the case for the difference he perceives between traditional conservatism, to which he adheres, and the fundamentalism that has of late taken over the Republican Party in the United States.

The book describes the risks inherent in creating the first fundamentally religious political party in America. Sullivan discusses the many ways that Bush and his compatriots have moved far away from traditional conservative government: they have increased the government’s size and reach to new heights, have boosted government spending and the national debt to record levels, have condoned torture, have ignored laws passed by Congress, and have been indicted for bribery. In his view, traditional conservatives (after the model of Ronald Regan or Margaret Thatcher) support the idea of limited government, balanced budgets, individual liberty, and the rule of law.

A significant part of the book deals with his own religious beliefs as a Roman Catholic who is at odds with the current climate of fundamentalism prevalent in the Vatican. He says that doubt is at the heart of Christianity (and conservatism), and that this leads to a healthy skepticism. On the other hand, fundamentalism teaches that there is only black and white Truth – a gray area is unacceptable, based on natural law. This exists in any kind of fundamentalist state, Christian or Muslim. Sullivan argues in opposition:

…our religion, our moral life, is simply what we do. It is how we are. it cannot be reduced to a doctrine or a book, although it may find intermittent or even continual inspiration from both. A Christian, in other words, is not a Christian simply because he agrees to conform his life to some set of external principles or dogmas; or because at one particular moment in his life, he experienced a rupture and changed himself entirely. He is a Christian primarily because he acts like one. He loves and forgives; he listens and prays; he contemplates and befriends; his faith and his life fuse into an unself-conscious unity that both affirms a tradition of moral life and yet also makes it his own.

Conservatives allow people to live their lives with true freedom of choice, and it is not government’s job to impose a particular moral framework. The intention of the founding fathers was for the constitution to keep the government weak and also separate from religious morals and values. This separation is not acceptable to a fundamentalist because he:

…is always positing an external moral ideal that he must necessarily fail to attain – because he is human. it is outside himself and his job is to internalize it. Fundamentalism as a way of life is therefore as series of ruptures and reforms. It is a cycle of attempts to conform to an external, eternal ideal, and to repeat the process of sin, redemption and sin again indefinitely … For the fundamentalist, a human being’s internal compass, what he has absorbed simply by being who he is, is always suspect – because the self is sinful and must always be subject to correction from the outside. And so the fundamentalist learns to distrust himself, to wrest himself from certain habits, to conform what might have been his personality into a persona that is a vessel for something far greater than himself. Rather than learning from others, he may regards others a moral dangers, who themselves need constant monitoring and correction. And so he does what he can to lose himself in God, or rather in an idea of God, buried in an ancient text, or upheld by an infallible pope, imposed by other humans, and monitored by them.

That is not to say that morals and values have no place in society, but that they should be taught privately. Government’s primary job is to guarantee personal security so that that all citizens can equally enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Conservatives focus on means rather than ends, unlike a fundamentalist, and the key is the progress that we are making along a path that always has many different choices, and we need to have the freedom to choose from among them.

Of course, there are some of his arguments that I would take issue with. One of them is outlined here:

“There are many who often invoke the rhetorical bromides of “freedom” but, when pressed, acknowledge that no such thing really exists. The fundamentalist believes that humans have freedom – but only to choose the good; and he believes that a government dedicated to upholding that good, whether deduced from God or his own version of “nature,” has every right, and, in fact, a duty to ensure that as many citizens as possible achieve that good. And so laws are designed to encourage virtue and discourage vice. Freedom is limited and conditional. A socialist will argue that freedom is an illusion to those people who begin with a material disadvantage, and that the state must act to remedy such a disadvantage before freedom can truly exist. The poor are not free, he argues. Those who are at the bottom of the heap of human inequality deserve substantive aid to equalize the system. And so he wants a system of redistributive justice to ensure “real” freedom.

A conservative, in contrast, will be skeptical of both arguments. he’ll want to know from the fundamentalist who exactly came up with this “good.” He’ll ask why he should adhere to a view of virtue which is deduced from a religion he doesn’t share or from a “nature” he doesn’t recognize as his own. He’ll ask the socialist, in turn, why he is being forced to give up his own money and property for the sake [of] an ideal of substantive equality that sounds like a surreal fantasy to him … So what is freedom for a conservative? It rests, as Hobbes intuited, on being secure in one’s own physical existence, and in accepting the fact that others exist who are just as human as we are, and, in political life, deserve equal treatment under the law.

I would take much more of the socialist approach that he seems to regard as a fantasy land. Interestingly, my socialism comes directly from my own Christian faith, and a belief that a better world for all human beings is possible. In fact, I see it as a gospel imperative. Despite differences such as this, I do feel that he is someone that I could have a productive conversation with. This is certainly not a feeling I get from Republican fundamentalists, but also others in both parties serving in politics today.

I’ve read several things by Richard Dawkins, the well-known British atheist scientist, and had heard about his new book, The God Delusion last week on The Colbert Report. I’ve never been particularly impressed by his arguments, but hadn’t been able to fully articulate why until I saw this article in the Church Times (pointed out by the daily episcopalian). The author, Giles Fraser, notes that

The root of the problem is that too many modern atheists adopt a position that is a photographic negative of a sort of Christianity believed only by the most conservative. God is X, says the modern atheist, giving a short definition that allegedly captures what all believers believe. This means that the God they reject doesn’t look anything like the God that most of us meet in our prayers.

This encapsulates pretty closely the way that I feel about Dawkins and his compatriots. There are any number of my atheist friends over the years with whom I have discussed my Christian faith at great length and in significant intellectual depth. I have never seen this kind of real understanding of the issues from Dawkins.

Thanks to One Thing I Know, I was led to an article about church shopping in the evangelical Christian community: iChurch: All We Like Sheep. The author makes a number of interesting points about how following a Christian lifestyle in the United States has become in many ways synonymous with the consumerist culture that we have here. He points out that Christianity for many has become simply another product that we buy in order to continue on our journey of making ourselves happy and fulfilled:

Approaching Christianity as a brand (rather than a worldview) explains why the majority of people who identify themselves as born-again Christians live no differently than other Americans. According to George Barna, most churchgoers have not adopted a biblical worldview, they have simply added a Jesus fish to the bumper of their unregenerate consumer identities. As Mark Riddle observes, “Conversion in the U.S. seems to mean we’ve exchanged some of our shopping at Wal-Mart, Blockbuster, and Borders for the Christian bookstore down the street. We’ve taken our lack of purchasing control to God’s store, where we buy our office supplies in Jesus’ name.

He rightly goes on to point out that:

Consumers demand options, but this poses a problem. Formation into the likeness of Christ is not accomplished by always getting what we want.

For me, as a member of a so-called ‘mainline’ denomination and not an independent church, this is important in the way that I have to commit to going to the church of my denomination which happens to be geographically near me. Although as Episcopalians we do not quite have the cannonical parish structure of the Roman Catholic church, unless one lives in a city, there is usually not a whole lot of choice about what church to go to if ones considers onself to be a member of that specific denomination. This means that I have to make that choice to commit to something greater than simply a local expression of the church.

This, in turn, is one of the reasons why I value our worldwide Anglican Communion. Despite the problems inherent in being in relationship with people across the world who differ from my views about Christianity, we are still members together in somethin greater than any of our own local expressions of it. That is what the Church (big ‘C’) is all about — being part of that community of belivers who follow Jesus and serve him together in community. The community is both local and global, and I believe that we throw that off to our long-term peril.

I have not read this book, but I certainly agree with its author’s theme; the idea that science and religion could be powerful allies in moving the environmental movement forward. An article from Reuters discusses it:

Scientist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author E.O. Wilson is out to save life on Earth — literally — and as a secular humanist has decided to enlist people of religious faith in his mission.The Harvard professor sees science and religion as potential allies for averting the mass extinction of the species being caused by man, as he argues in his latest book, “The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth” (W.W. Norton).

Although I disagree with the article’s characterization of science and religion as having ‘clashing world views’, I certainly agree that the environment could be a good area of common ground where those who disagree about other issues could come together to work for change.

According to this article in the Christian Science Monitor, a recent study shows that many Americans are looking for a ‘middle way’ (sound familiar?) regarding the role of religion in public life in the United States. The article says:

A national survey released by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life on Aug. 24 shows ambivalence about the relationship of religion to politics and social issues, and unhappiness with extreme positions. The public is not polarized into liberal and conservative camps, the poll suggests, but yearns to find middle ground on contentious social issues. There is distress about both ends of the political spectrum: 49 percent of American adults say conservatives are too assertive about trying to impose their religious values on the nation, yet 69 percent say liberals go too far in trying to keep religion out of schools and government.

I find this to be encouraging in showing that the American people are perhaps beginning to recognize that allowing our society to become so polarized is not the way that we are going to accomplish any long-terms goals about the issues that we face for the future. This is of course the same point that I was trying to make in my previous post about the Anglican Communion. The end of the article discusses some feelings about ‘hot button’ issues of the day, and is well worth reading.

I returned to the United Kingdom from Brazil yesterday, and got back to Durham late last night. While I will want to post some more in the next few weeks reflecting on the overall experience, I thought that for now I would point in the direction of the articles that I have written for the Anglican Communion News Service as part of my job at the Assembly. There is still one more to complete, but these will give you some idea of one particular side of my time there. There are also a few speeches and sermons from other Anglican participants. Please click on the links below:

• Anglicans have strong presence at WCC Brazil
• Archbishop addresses World Council of Churches
• Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams visits WCC General Assembly
• Sermon by Revd Canon Kenneth Kearon
• Desmond Tutu: ‘We can only be human together’
• Strong Anglican voice in future WCC work