miniZibaldone

Being Disciples by Rowan Williams [T]here is no contrast, no tension really, between holiness and involvement in the world. On the contrary, the most holy, who is Jesus, is the most involved, most at the heart of human experience. And we really misunderstand the whole thing very seriously if we think that holiness means being defended from our own humanity or other people’s humanity: quite the opposite. To understand this, we need to bear in mind an all-important distinction between being holy and simply being good. There’s a fine phrase in one of Evelyn Waugh’s novels, when a character is described by another: ‘She was saintly, but she wasn’t a saint.’ The character in question is indeed saintly, very strict, devout and intense, but the effect she has on those around her is to make them feel guilty, frustrated and unhappy. They feel inadequate, and I suspect that many of us experience this when we encounter people we think are saintly or Very Good—they make us feel rather worse ... In...

Open to Judgement by Rowan Williams The dark night is God’s attack on religion. If you genuinely desire union with the unspeakable love of God, then you must be prepared to have your ‘religious’ world shattered. If you think devotional practices, theological insights, even charitable actions give you some sort of a purchase on God, you are still playing games. On the other hand, if you can face and accept and even rejoice in the experience of darkness, if you can accept that God is more than an idea which keeps your religion or philosophy or politics tidy – then you may find a way back to religion, philosophy or politics, to an engagement with them that is more creative because you are more aware of the oddity, the uncontrollable quality of the truth at the heart of all things. This is what ‘detachment’ means – not being ‘above the battle’, but being involved in such a way that you can honestly confront whatever comes to you without fear of the unknown; it is a kind of readiness for th...

[I]n Advent, in that day, we all become – as it has been said – Jews once more. We relearn the lessons of the first covenant: that we cannot make God, however we long for him; that we must be surprised, ambushed and carried off by God if we are to be kept from idols. [...] The Christian in Advent needs to listen to that, listen to such a degree that this season becomes both a season of joyful expectancy and a season of ‘poverty’ – of the knowledge that we cannot talk and touch ourselves into life; of that deep poverty of the imagination which can only stand helplessly before the outrages and miseries of our world, utterly at a loss for a word of meaning or hope to speak. We are here at all, celebrating Advent (as the Jew celebrates the Passover) because there has been a word spoken, a word of unexpected interruption, a word that establishes for good the difference between the God we expect and the God who comes, a word that shows us once and for all what an idol looks like in face of t...