Rowan
Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, former Master of Magdalene College,
Cambridge, theologian, linguist, poet, Welsh Druid, Baron Williams of
Oystermouth, attended St Clement’s, one of the smaller parish churches of
Cambridge -- a rather useful parishioner, one might think. When the long Covid lockdown came, Dr
Williams started to write regular brief items for the St Clement’s newsletter. Some of these have been published[1]…
…and in one
he writes about “face”, the face we present to the world. When you think about it… we do talk about
losing face, saving face, putting a brave face on things, facing up – as though
face is something we work on and polish until it shows what we want it to show.
Face is there, we think, in case we need
to conceal the reality. Some people will not go out the door until they have
put on their face, what they wish the world to see. The trouble is that, if we take notice of the
Bible, God is seriously unimpressed by Max Factor or mascara, Botox or braids,
or silly baseball caps on back to front.
The self that we put on display is at least in part a construct, a
demonstration model… reaching its nadir, one might think, in the posturing on
the red carpet of the Oscar awards and the like. One of the cruellest items I have seen in the
media was a comment on a woman who had spent eye-watering sums on her gown and
shoes, her jewellery, her makeup and her coiffure… and the writer said it was a
triumph of the embalmer’s art. But
appearance is paramount for many. It can
also be arranged to have negative impact, to shock us, to be aggressive… with
bodily mutilation, or resident dirt, or T-shirts with offensive slogans…
All of this
is wasted on God, according to the Hebrew scriptures. God tells Samuel to choose one of the sons of
Jesse to be king; he was about to choose the most presentable one, and we read:
But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or the height of
his stature… for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward
appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart”.[2] Jesus informs us that even Solomon in all his
glory was not arrayed as well as a single lily.[3] For Paul it is a matter of, eventually, being
transformed until with unveiled face – he means, as we really are
without masks or adornment – we become the true self God always intended.[4]
“Transformed”
in the Greek is a passive verb formed from the word metamorphosis… it is a
process. It is easy for us to stall or
inhibit this process, over the years, or even to make change itself the
enemy. But in the disciplines of silence
and stillness we are opening the door to this metamorphosis, and the masks, the
persona, begin to attenuate. We
regard their vestiges with amusement – they may even disappear.
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