One of the memorable events of this past week, it seems to me, is the resignation of Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. He is to go back to academia, to be Master of Magdalene College at Cambridge. This gentle and brilliant scholar will distance himself from the bruising maelstrom of church politics, crises and schisms.
My personal memory of Rowan Williams was listening to him each day for a week, in Sydney in 2001. He was leading a seminar for meditators, on the Desert Fathers and Mothers of the 4th and 5th centuries, and I have never forgotten the impression of a truly wise and spiritual man, a natural and humble scholar.
It was interesting to me that Dr Williams, Primate of Wales but about to become Archbishop of Canterbury, spoke feelingly about the role of contemplative people in the church. Of course we are not any kind of elite, and I doubt that anyone here is remotely tempted to imagine we are. But some people in the church wonder what on earth we are for, anyway. Extended periods of silence... and then we go home...! That’s not a proper meeting! We don’t even have food.
In our discipline of silence and stillness, Rowan Williams thought, people of contemplative life and prayer are helping to purify the language of the tribe (those are T S Eliot’s poetic words). Our attention to God and to what is real and now, without asking for anything, somehow witnesses to the tribe a language as free as it can be from the games of control, fantasy and evasion that take up so much room in the church and the world. Another English poet, G K Chesterton, saw it too, and wrote of all the easy speeches that comfort cruel men. The spirit in our hearts in the stillness starts to teach us another speech that is loving rather than aggressive or competitive. Let your yes be yes and your no be no, teaches Jesus -- simple and truthful speech. St Paul writes about speaking the truth in love. St Benedict taught his monks what he called Restraint of Speech. We begin to learn it in a discipline of contemplative life and prayer.
I think I am at a point -- one might say a cultural crisis -- where I will find Coronation Street simply unbearable after some 48 years, simply because of the vile ways they speak to each other, confrontational, in-your-face as we say, violent words. And yet so many think this is normal communication or appropriate reaction to events. It is much the same in wide areas of NZ society, including much of our press and TV.
Well we are living and learning another language for the tribe.
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