Luminous Darkness

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.

Some interesting news out of Botswana today. Apparently there was an article stating that the diocese had passed a vote of no confidence in their bishop, but a letter from the Diocesan Secretary states that this is in fact not true. Although the discussion of another bishop holding meetings within Botswana without consent is of concern from an ecclesiological point of view, to me the more interesting quote backs of what I have believed about many Anglicans in Africa for some time:

…the Bishop still stands by his position that Africa has too many problems (poverty, HIV and AIDS, poor governance, unemployment, etc) to sort out than to spend a lot of time and energy on homosexuality issues, which do not impact on the day-to-day lives of many struggling African people.

I have heard this point of view expressed by others I have met at international events in the past, and I feel strongly that it relates pretty closely to my own views on the issue as well.

Thanks to my friend Jen for pointing out FreeRice.com, a website where you can build your vocabulary and, with each word you correctly define, allow the website to donate ten grains of rice to help end world hunger. How cool is that! The test is adaptive, so you are actually learning new words and constantly being challenged out on the edge of your vocabulary.

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.

Today I read Kurt Vonnegut’s newest book, A Man Without A Country, and was amazed yet again at his command of the English language, sense of humor, and intuitive understanding of humanity. The book is short enough to be read in one sitting so I will not describe it extensively, other than to post this quote from the opening pages:

There is no reason good can’t triumph over evil, if only angels will get organized along the lines of the mafia.

Go to your local library and read it!

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.

This has nothing to do with politics which is why I have waited so long after the election to post it. Instead, I want to mention the issue of results and how quickly we seem to want them in here in the United States. As is well known, we live in a culture based in many ways on instant gratification. We are unwilling to wait for anything, and certainly not something as import as the results of an election. In the last two presidential elections this caused some problems, with news networks making calls in very close races that were then overturned multiple times, and eventually ended up in prolonged recounts.

Our age of electronic communication makes us feel that we deserve to have all the information we can handle (and more than we can handle in some cases) instantly as soon as it is available. I do not think that this is necessary when it comes to our elections. If the price we pay for mistakes in counting votes is months of uncertainly, then I think that we perhaps should be willing to wait a few days, and give the process time to work itself out correctly.

On Sunday I had the opportunity to worship at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. I was there in part to reconnect with an old friend of our family whose son was a close friend of mine in elementary school. She is currently priest-in-charge at the parish, and although I had not seen her in fifteen years, we had a very nice visit and shared our stories. The service was what I would call ‘relaxed Anglo-Catholic’ worship, by which I mean that many catholic elements were present, but not in a particularly focused or directive way. The worship space was fairly modern, but done in a clean, simple way that made one feel very welcome in the sanctuary.

On the other hand, one place where I did not feel particularly welcome was in the coffee hour after the service. I walked around, looking somewhat ‘new’, for about fifteen minutes before anyone said anything to me. Now, I should make a brief confession here. During the service, newcomers and visitors were invited to take a ‘newcomers’ bag. I chose not to do that, and so did not mark myself out obviously as someone who should be officially ‘talked to’. With that said, though, I was surprised that nobody in coffee hour seemed to notice me in the least. Now, I am fairly self-sufficient, and not particularly bothered about introducing myself to people, but I decided in this case to see what would happen if I just sort of hung around looking lost. Eventually, a very nice man did come up to me and ask if I wanted a newcomers bag, and when I explained that I was just visiting for the day, we had a pleasant, although brief, conversation.*

This issue being welcoming is something that I wish to write about for a bit. I think that we are called to welcome each other in Christ, for example in Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapter fifteen, verse seven:

Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.

This can be our ideal, but what does it mean in practice? Simply put, our churches should be welcoming to all, especially to strangers.

Now, I am certainly aware that, for many people, even for those with the best best intentions at heart, it can be very difficult to actually make that initial move. For example, you might be worried about not knowing if the person you want to talk to is actually ‘new’ or is in fact someone who has been at the parish for some time that you have simply don’t know! Or, perhaps you are afraid that by saying something, you might get dragged into a long and involved conversation with someone who needs to tell their story. Perhaps you simply aren’t very extroverted and can’t bring yourself to talk to a complete stranger. All of these reasons are perfectly valid in my opinion, and there is nothing wrong with feeling that way.

Despite them, though, we still have that biblical instruction to welcome one another. How can we make this process easier so that people don’t get left behind and never come back to visit again? One suggestion that I made at St. Mark’s was based on the fact that they had several tables in the middle of their parish hall at coffee hour. There were a few people at each whilst I was wandering around the room, and I suggested that one easy way to get around the difficulty in being welcoming was to simply invite someone to sit down at your table. There is no implication in that statement that they are a ‘new’ person or an ‘old’ person, and in either case, you have opened the door for them to introduce themselves.

This just one suggestion, and I’m not going to go on at length about others, but being welcoming in our churches is ever more important at the current time. We face a secular culture that perceives Christians as an exclusivist group of people who have no interest or desire in encountering anyone other than ourselves. In order to work towards changing that perception, I believe that we must take the first step of being more welcoming to the people who actually walk in our doors. It is not easy for anyone, but it is part of our calling in Christ.

* I should add that when I pointed out this lack of welcome to some of the clergy and vestry members at St. Mark’s, they were very welcoming of my comments, and really gave some serious thought to ways to improve this part of their parish life.

Mark Harris has a very thoughtful post commenting on the fact that the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq has today reached 2,804 which is more than the 2,801 people killed in the towers on September 11, 2001. He says:

These numbers mean nothing by themselves. The numbing and stunning death of so many on that one day, and the death of the firefighters who tried to save them, stands as a single terrible event. The slow agonizing trickle of news of deaths in Iraq has taken years. Yet for everyone who knew of someone who died in New York that day, there are equally people who know of someone who has died in Iraq. The news is devastating either way.

I encourage you to read his full reflection at Preludium.