The previous Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan
Williams, has this luminous passage in his book, Silence and Honeycakes:
God
does not stop working in the church when we Christians are wicked, stupid and
lazy. The church is not magic, much as
we should love it to be – a realm where problems are solved instantly and
special revelations answer all our questions and provide a short-cut through
all our conflicts. It is rather – pre-eminently
and crucially – a community of persons…, a place where holiness takes time, and
where the prose of daily faithfulness and yes, sometimes, daily boredom, has to
be faced and blessed, not shunned or concealed.
Perhaps in many ways the church has always been
a community whose people are, in the phrase from the desert fathers we used
last week, pledged to the walls. The “local church”, we call it. This is even more visible in places like
Manila or Johannesburg, Buenos Aires or the slums of Rio – most recently of all
perhaps in those Philippine cities and towns flattened by the typhoon. People living and believing their faith in
the best ways they know how. Naturally we
welcome any miracles that come along, but we know better than to expect them or
rely on them. Among us are always some
who do want to live by miracles and excitement and instant solutions, but most
of us know that reality is otherwise – and it is right there, in reality, in
the present, that we are to love God and our neighbour. The church is stodgy and boring only if we
expect it to be separate from stodgy and boring life and reality.
The trick, the spark of wisdom, the leap of
faith, is to see God right there. It is
the secret of the Eucharist. Jesus is
bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh – like us, pledged to the walls.
The desert fathers and mothers teach us what
the Benedictines came to call stability.
It means not running away. It
means that acedia may be temporarily relieved by a new kitchen, or a cruise
around Iceland, but we will return to what we wanted to escape. One of the ancient Greeks said, you will have
a change of air but not a change of heart.
The hardest lesson… I am the one who has to change, here where I
am, among these people I didn’t choose, in these circumstances, with all these
memories and unresolved issues. It is my
ego I bring into the silence and the stillness, simply by being still and
repeating the mantra I have chosen. It
is not that my ego is bad – in fact it is necessary – but it may not occupy the
place that belongs to God.
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