Over the course of a turbulent year the Archbishop of Canterbury had a series of meetings with James Macintyre during which he spoke about sharia law, capitalism, the disestablishment of the Church, and his love of The West Wing.
On a bleak afternoon in November, a delegation of senior religious leaders from Britain filed out of an exhibit room at Ausch witz in Poland. One man stopped, and stayed staring intently through the glass. Before him was a mass of human hair from those killed in the gas chambers. This man was Dr Rowan Williams and he was praying, silently.
Asked to write an inscription at the memorial, he chose words from Psalm 130: "Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice!" Dr Williams walked around the former Nazi extermination camp, a remote figure, keeping a ring of space around him. After the first round of exhibits, one of the party tried to speak to him. He merely shrugged and shook his head; there was nothing adequate to say.
Williams was on a trip to the site, organised by the Holocaust Educational Trust, with nine other faith leaders, including the Chief Rabbi, Jona than Sacks, with whom he talked intensely on the plane on the journey out from London while almost every other passenger slept. The two men have become good friends, and the Chief Rabbi compares their relationship to that of their predecessors, William Temple and Joseph H Hertz, who co-founded the Council of Christians and Jews in 1942. "I have the greatest respect for the Chief Rabbi - a public intellectual," the Archbishop said. "And because he has sometimes found his own community hard work . . . we do occasionally compare notes, dot dot dot."
That "dot dot dot" is something of a characteristic understatement. Several weeks later, we are in a private room at Lambeth Palace reflecting on what has been not just the most testing year in his term at Canterbury, but arguably one of the most difficult for Anglicanism since the Reformation.
Read the rest here.
Human beings, left to themselves, have imagined God in all sorts of shapes; but – although there were one or two instances, in Ancient Greece and Ancient Egypt, of gods being pictured as boys – it took Christianity to introduce the world to the idea of God in the form of a baby: in the form of complete dependence and fragility, without power or control. If you stop to think about it, it is still shocking. And it is also deeply challenging.
God chose to show himself to us in a complete human life, telling us that every stage in human existence, from conception to maturity and even death, was in principle capable of telling us something about God. Although what we learn from Jesus Christ and what his life makes possible is unique, that life still means that we look differently at every other life. There is something in us that is capable of communicating what God has to say – the image of God in each of us, which is expressed in its perfection only in Jesus.
Hence the reverence which as Christians we ought to show to human beings in every condition, at every stage of existence. This is why we cannot regard unborn children as less than members of the human family, why those with disabilities or deprivations have no less claim upon us than anyone else, why we try to makes loving sense of human life even when it is near its end and we can hardly see any signs left of freedom or thought.
And hence the concern we need to have about the welfare of children. As we look around the world, there is plenty to prompt us to far more anger and protest about what happens to children than we often seem to feel or express. In the UK this year there have been several public debates about childhood, as research has underlined the lack of emotional security felt by many children here, the high cost of divorce and family breakdown, the disproportionate effect of poverty and debt on children, and many other problems. We look forward to the publication here in the New Year of a nationwide survey about what people think is a ‘good childhood’ – sponsored by the Children’s Society, with its long association with the Anglican Church.
Elsewhere we see far more horrendous sights – child soldiers still deployed in parts of Africa and in Sri Lanka, the burden laid on children in places where HIV and AIDS have wiped out a whole generation, leaving only the old and the young, the fate of children in areas of conflict like Congo and the Middle East and the insensitive treatment that is so often given to child refugees and asylum seekers in more prosperous countries.
‘Though an infant now we view him, He shall fill his Father’s throne’ says the Christmas hymn. If it is true that the child of Bethlehem is the same one who will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, how shall we stand before him if we have allowed his image in the children of the world to be abused and defaced? In the week I write this, the British public is trying to cope with the revelation of the shocking killing of a very small child. Recently I accompanied a number of students and British faith leaders on a pilgrimage to the extermination camps at Auschwitz, where some of the most unforgettably horrifying images have to do with the wholesale slaughter of Jewish children – their toys and clothes still on display, looted by their killers from their dead bodies.
Christmas is a good time to think again about our attitudes to children and about what happens to children in our societies. Christians who recognise the infinite and all-powerful God in the vulnerability of a newborn baby have every reason to ask hard questions about the ways in which children come to be despised, exploited, even feared in our world. We all suspect that in a time of economic crisis worldwide, it will be the most vulnerable who are left to carry most of the human cost. The Holy Child of Bethlehem demands of us that we resist this with all our strength, for the sake of the one who, though he was rich, for our sake became poor, became helpless with the helpless so that he might exalt us all through his mercy and abundant grace.
With every blessing and best wish for Christmas and the New Year.
+Rowan Cantuar
The following is a sermon I preached at a friend of mines parish about three years ago. Since the Annunciation story is this Sunday's Gospel reading according to the RCL, I thought I would dust this off again and share it. A not quite so clear version of the painting I refer to is here.
When Tim asked me if I would like to preach this afternoon I agreed readily. I then, with out really thinking, asked what the texts are. When I got home and looked them up in the Prayer Book I was under whelmed. These are texts that have been handled so much that they have become slippery from their use. They’ve become so familiar that they’re like an ice cube: squeeze to hard and they shoot right out of our hand. Unable to get any in on the Gospel, I turned to look at art depicting the event. For the most part I was left cold. In general, the pictures were of a sheepish Angel Gabriel, often holding flowers standing at a distance from Mary who is sitting at a window reading an improbably illuminated Librium, often in Latin. I even saw one that depicts Our Lady holding a Rosary. Eastern Icons are often of the same idea: Gabriel paying homage to a pure Madonna. The emphasis is on the holy and transcendent. Then I stumbled upon the work of a Venetian artist named Jacopo Robusti, called Tintoretto. His depiction is very, very different.
First the setting is different. Far from a little room or a walled garden, we are presented with a room that can only be described as messy. The plaster has cracked, with the bricks behind showing through. There is a motley collection of broken furniture and there are signs of half completed carpentry. Instead of a window out of which Mary has been looking, or a prayer book Mary has been spinning. Out of the portal we see a man busily at work with a saw, presumably Joseph. You see “betrothed,” meant at this time that they may have been living together in a, presumably chaste, arrangement to see if she was acceptable to him. They are both hard at work in a decaying house as the sun slides down into night. We see a couple laboring until they are unable to see any more. They are like Adam and Eve after the fall, laboring in a world of decay and death. Then something altogether unexpected happens. An angel of the Lord comes in.
Rather than a sheepishly coy angel, we have a Gabriel who swoops in, with an entourage of Cherubs. He’s looking a little apologetic. Mary is far from a passive presence. Her body is twisted to face the onrushing Angels and her face is a mixture of fear and marvel. The Holy Spirit is depicted in the traditional form of a Dove, but it’s far from some innocuous pidgin with a halo. The Holy Spirit manifests as a being of pure light. It illumines the air above the Virgin and the light casts the world in which she has lived in stark relief and rivals the dying light of the Sun. This very human Mary is confronted with God in the most direct way imaginable.
I emphasize that this is a human Mary because it is Tintoretto’s very Realist depiction of Mary and her condition that drew me to it. She is no plaster saint in this painting. She is an ordinary woman, a girl by today’s standards, confronted by the disconcerting God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And it is her humanity that is key in our celebration today. As the poet says:
“Of Her Flesh, he took flesh.”
It is from Mary that Jesus gains his humanity. It is through Mary that he enters the world. Our humanity is what we have in common with Mary. It is in our common human condition, shared by both, that we come to have Mary as our sister and Jesus as our brother. To put it differently, when the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us it is from Mary that the Logos receives flesh, and the Incarnate Word first dwells in her. It is a long while until the child is born, and we are confronted with the idea of being with Mary as we contemplate the child growing with in her. There is no room here for a porcelain figure or alabaster statue. All through out the rest of her life she must live with and meditate upon the words of the Angel, even when they make no since. Life would not be easy for the Mother of God. She must live with a son given to terrific acts of power and who dies the death of a thief or bandit. She is one of the models of contemplation, not because we know that she is given to it, but because she is caught up in the Mysteries in a way that no one else is. She is an active participant in them. When she looks down at the child in the feeding trough she comes into the realization that “This is my body, this is my blood.” We do her, and ourselves, a disservice when we make her into a semi-divine Queen at the expense of her history and reality as a human being.
My Carmelite bias may be showing. For us Mary is our sister. After all she appeared to St. Simon Stock in Aylesford wearing our Habit. It is her Humanity in which we first find our devotion to her. If our King reigns from a manger and cross, his Mother is just that, a mother. As the legend under the image of Our Lady of Mt Carmel at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception says, “Mary is more Mother than Queen.” In may ways several of the later Marian devotions and doctrines run counter to the Carmelite Spirit of her as our Mother and Sister. I would go so far as to say that dogmatic proclamations aimed at cleaning up our discomfort at Mary being a normal person with a body like ours, and the implications that holds for Jesus plays runs counter not only to the Spirit of Carmel, but of Anglicanism. She is our friend, and she prays for us. She is our Mother, and loves us. She is our Sister and supports us.
What I would leave us with today is a call to join with Mary in her pondering and meditation. As she felt the child grow within her womb, let us feel the risen Christ in our selves. Let us contemplate with her the words of the Angel and what they mean for us. Let us enter into the mysteries with her as a signpost and guide. Finally, let us commend ourselves to her in prayer, so that at the last she may show us the blessed fruit of her womb, Jesus.
Pray for us, Oh Holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.
