October 11, 2012
(Romereports.com) (-ONLY VIDEO-) Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan
Williams, the main leader of the Anglican Communion, shared his ideas
on the New Evangelization with the Pope and 262 Catholic bishops from all over the world gathered in Rome to participate in the synod.
“A
true enterprise of evangelisation will always be a re-evangelisation of
ourselves as Christians also, a rediscovery of why our faith is
different, transfiguring - a recovery of our own new humanity”, said Rowan Williams.
Your Holiness,
Reverend Fathers,
brothers and sisters in Christ
dear Friends
I
am deeply honoured by the Holy Father's invitation to speak in this
gathering: as the Psalmist says, “Ecce quam bonum et quam jucundum
habitare fratres in unum”. The gathering of bishops in Synod for the
good of all Christ's people is one of those disciplines that sustain the
health of Christ's Church. And today especially we cannot forget that
great gathering of “fratres in unum” that was the Second Vatican
Council, which did so much for the health of the Church and helped the
Church to recover so much of the energy needed to proclaim the Good News
of Jesus Christ effectively in our age. For so many of my own
generation, even beyond the boundaries of the Roman Catholic Church,
that Council was a sign of great promise, a sign that the Church was
strong enough to ask itself some demanding questions about whether its
culture and structures were adequate to the task of sharing the Gospel
with the complex, often rebellious, always restless mind of the modern
world.
The Council was, in so many ways, a rediscovery of
evangelistic concern and passion, focused not only on the renewal of the
Church's own life but on its credibility in the world. Texts such as
Lumen gentium and Gaudium et spes laid out a fresh and joyful vision of
how the unchanging reality of Christ living in his Body on earth through
the gift of the Holy Spirit might speak in new words to the society of
our age and even to those of other faiths. It is not surprising that we
are still, fifty years later, struggling with many of the same questions
and with the implications of the Council; and I take it that this
Synod's concern with the new evangelization is part of that continuing
exploration of the Council's legacy.
But one of the most
important aspects of the theology of the second Vaticanum was a renewal
of Christian anthropology. In place of an often strained and artificial
neo-scholastic account of how grace and nature were related in the
constitution of human beings, the Council built on the greatest insights
of a theology that had returned to earlier and richer sources - the
theology of spiritual geniuses like Henri de Lubac, who reminded us of
what it meant for early and mediaeval Christianity to speak of humanity
as made in God's image and of grace as perfecting and transfiguring that
image so long overlaid by our habitual 'inhumanity'. In such a light,
to proclaim the Gospel is to proclaim that it is at last possible to be
properly human: the Catholic and Christian faith is a 'true humanism',
to borrow a phrase from another genius of the last century, Jacques
Maritain.
Yet de Lubac is clear what this does not mean. We do
not replace the evangelistic task by a campaign of 'humanization'.
'Humanize before Christianizing?' he asks - 'If the enterprise succeeds,
Christianity will come too late: its place will be taken. And who
thinks that Christianity has no humanizing value?' So de Lubac writes in
his wonderful collection of aphorisms, Paradoxes of Faith. It is the
faith itself that shapes the work of humanizing and the humanizing
enterprise will be empty without the definition of humanity given in the
Second Adam. Evangelization, old or new, must be rooted in a profound
confidence that we have a distinctive human destiny to show and share
with the world. There are many ways of spelling this out, but in these
brief remarks I want to concentrate on one aspect in particular.
To
be fully human is to be recreated in the image of Christ's humanity;
and that humanity is the perfect human 'translation' of the relationship
of the eternal Son to the eternal Father, a relationship of loving and
adoring self-giving, a pouring out of life towards the Other. Thus the
humanity we are growing into in the Spirit, the humanity that we seek to
share with the world as the fruit of Christ's redeeming work, is a
contemplative humanity. St Edith Stein observed that we begin to
understand theology when we see God as the 'First Theologian', the first
to speak out the reality of divine life, because 'all speaking about
God presupposes God's own speaking'; in an analogous way we could say
that we begin to understand contemplation when we see God as the first
contemplative, the eternal paradigm of that selfless attention to the
Other that brings not death but life to the self. All contemplating of
God presupposes God's own absorbed and joyful knowing of himself and
gazing upon himself in the trinitarian life.
To be contemplative
as Christ is contemplative is to be open to all the fullness that the
Father wishes to pour into our hearts. With our minds made still and
ready to receive, with our self-generated fantasies about God and
ourselves reduced to silence, we are at last at the point where we may
begin to grow. And the face we need to show to our world is the face of a
humanity in endless growth towards love, a humanity so delighted and
engaged by the glory of what we look towards that we are prepared to
embark on a journey without end to find our way more deeply into it,
into the heart of the trinitarian life. St Paul speaks (in II Cor 3.18)
of how 'with our unveiled faces reflecting the glory of the Lord', we
are transfigured with a greater and greater radiance. That is the face
we seek to show to our fellow-human beings.
And we seek this not
because we are in search of some private 'religious experience' that
will make us feel secure or holy. We seek it because in this
self-forgetting gazing towards the light of God in Christ we learn how
to look at one another and at the whole of God's creation. In the early
Church, there was a clear understanding that we needed to advance from
the self-understanding or self-contemplation that taught us to
discipline our greedy instincts and cravings to the 'natural
contemplation' that perceived and venerated the wisdom of God in the
order of the world and allowed us to see created reality for what it
truly was in the sight of God - rather than what it was in terms of how
we might use it or dominate it. And from there grace would lead us
forward into true 'theology', the silent gazing upon God that is the
goal of all our discipleship.
In this perspective, contemplation
is very far from being just one kind of thing that Christians do: it is
the key to prayer, liturgy, art and ethics, the key to the essence of a
renewed humanity that is capable of seeing the world and other subjects
in the world with freedom - freedom from self-oriented, acquisitive
habits and the distorted understanding that comes from them. To put it
boldly, contemplation is the only ultimate answer to the unreal and
insane world that our financial systems and our advertising culture and
our chaotic and unexamined emotions encourage us to inhabit. To learn
contemplative practice is to learn what we need so as to live truthfully
and honestly and lovingly. It is a deeply revolutionary matter.
In
his autobiography Thomas Merton describes an experience not long after
he had entered the monastery where he was to spend the rest of his life
(Elected Silence, p.303). He had contracted flu, and was confined to the
infirmary for a few days, and, he says, he felt a 'secret joy' at the
opportunity this gave him for prayer - and 'to do everything that I want
to do, without having to run all over the place answering bells.' He is
forced to recognise that this attitude reveals that 'All my bad
habits…had sneaked into the monastery with me and had received the
religious vesture along with me: spiritual gluttony, spiritual
sensuality, spiritual pride.' In other words, he is trying to live the
Christian life with the emotional equipment of someone still deeply
wedded to the search for individual satisfaction. It is a powerful
warning: we have to be every careful in our evangelisation not simply to
persuade people to apply to God and the life of the spirit all the
longings for drama, excitement and self-congratulation that we so often
indulge in our daily lives. It was expressed even more forcefully some
decades ago by the American scholar of religion, Jacob Needleman, in a
controversial and challenging book called Lost Christianity: the words
of the Gospel, he says, are addressed to human beings who 'do not yet
exist'. That is to say, responding in a life-giving way to what the
Gospel requires of us means a transforming of our whole self, our
feelings and thoughts and imaginings. To be converted to the faith does
not mean simply acquiring a new set of beliefs, but becoming a new
person, a person in communion with God and others through Jesus Christ.
Contemplation
is an intrinsic element in this transforming process. To learn to look
to God without regard to my own instant satisfaction, to learn to
scrutinise and to relativise the cravings and fantasies that arise in me
- this is to allow God to be God, and thus to allow the prayer of
Christ, God's own relation to God, to come alive in me. Invoking the
Holy Spirit is a matter of asking the third person of the Trinity to
enter my spirit and bring the clarity I need to see where I am in
slavery to cravings and fantasies and to give me patience and stillness
as God's light and love penetrate my inner life. Only as this begins to
happen will I be delivered from treating the gifts of God as yet another
set of things I may acquire to make me happy, or to dominate other
people. And as this process unfolds, I become more free-to borrow a
phrase of St Augustine (Confessions IV.7)-to 'love human beings in a
human way', to love them not for what they may promise me, to love them
not as if they were there to provide me with lasting safety and comfort,
but as fragile fellow-creatures held in the love of God. I discover (as
we noted earlier) how to see other persons and things for what they are
in relation to God, not to me. And it is here that true justice as well
as true love has its roots.
The human face that Christians want
to show to the world is a face marked by such justice and love, and thus
a face formed by contemplation, by the disciplines of silence and the
detaching of the self from the objects that enslave it and the
unexamined instincts that can deceive it. If evangelisation is a matter
of showing the world the 'unveiled' human face that reflects the face of
the Son turned towards the Father, it must carry with it a serious
commitment to promoting and nurturing such prayer and practice. It
should not need saying that this is not at all to argue that 'internal'
transformation is more important than action for justice; rather, it is
to insist that the clarity and energy we need for doing justice requires
us to make space for the truth, for God's reality to come through.
Otherwise our search for justice or for peace becomes another exercise
of human will, undermined by human self-deception. The two callings are
inseparable, the calling to 'prayer and righteous action', as the
Protestant martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, writing from his prison
cell in 1944. True prayer purifies the motive, true justice is the
necessary work of sharing and liberating in others the humanity we have
discovered in our contemplative encounter.
Those who know little
and care less about the institutions and hierarchies of the Church these
days are often attracted and challenged by lives that exhibit something
of this. It is the new and renewed religious communities that most
effectively reach out to those who have never known belief or who have
abandoned it as empty and stale. When the Christian history of our age
is written especially, though not only, as regards Europe and North
America-we shall see how central and vital was the witness of places
like Taizé or Bose, but also of more traditional communities that have
become focal points for the exploration of a humanity broader and deeper
than social habit encourages. And the great spiritual networks, Sant'
Egidio, the Focolare, Comunione e Liberazione, these too show the same
phenomenon; they make space for a profounder human vision because in
their various ways all of them offer a discipline of personal and common
life that is about letting the reality of Jesus come alive in us.
And,
as these examples show, the attraction and challenge we are talking
about can generate commitments and enthusiasms across historic
confessional lines. We have become used to talking about the imperative
importance of 'spiritual ecumenism' these days; but this must not be a
matter of somehow opposing the spiritual and the institutional, nor
replacing specific commitments with a general sense of Christian
fellow-feeling. If we have a robust and rich account of what the word
'spiritual' itself means, grounded in scriptural insights like those in
the passages from II Corinthians that we noted earlier, we shall
understand spiritual ecumenism as the shared search to nourish and
sustain disciplines of contemplation in the hope of unveiling the face
of the new humanity. And the more we keep apart from each other as
Christians of different confessions, the less convincing that face will
seem. I mentioned the Focolare movement a moment ago: you will recall
that the basic imperative in the spirituality of Chiara Lubich was 'to
make yourself one' - one with the crucified and abandoned Christ, one
through him with the Father, one with all those called to this unity and
so one with the deepest needs of the world. 'Those who live unity …
live by allowing themselves to penetrate always more into God. They grow
always closer to God … and the closer they get to him, the closer they
get to the hearts of their brothers and sisters' (Chiara Lubich:
Essential Writings, p.37). The contemplative habit strips away an
unthinking superiority towards other baptised believers and the
assumption that I have nothing to learn from them. Insofar as the habit
of contemplation helps us approach all experience as gift, we shall
always be asking what it is that the brother or sister has to share with
us - even the brother or sister who is in one way or another separated
from us or from what we suppose to be the fullness of communion. “Quam
bonum et quam jucundum…”.
In practice, this might suggest that
wherever initiatives are being taken to reach out in new ways to a
lapsed Christian or post-Christian public, there should be serious work
done on how such outreach can be grounded in some ecumenically shared
contemplative practice. In addition to the striking way in which Taizé
has developed an international liturgical 'culture' accessible to a
great variety of people, a network like the World Community for
Christian Meditation, with its strong Benedictine roots and
affiliations, has opened up fresh possibilities here. What is more, this
community has worked hard at making contemplative practice accessible
to children and young people, and this needs the strongest possible
encouragement. Having seen at first hand-in Anglican schools in
Britain-how warmly young children can respond to the invitation offered
by meditation in this tradition, I believe its potential for introducing
young people to the depths of our faith to be very great indeed. And
for those who have drifted away from the regular practice of sacramental
faith, the rhythms and practices of Taizé or the WCCM are often a way
back to this sacramental heart and hearth.
What people of all
ages recognise in these practices is the possibility, quite simply, of
living more humanly - living with less frantic acquisitiveness, living
with space for stillness, living in the expectation of learning, and
most of all, living with an awareness that there is a solid and durable
joy to be discovered in the disciplines of self-forgetfulness that is
quite different from the gratification of this or that impulse of the
moment. Unless our evangelisation can open the door to all this, it will
run the risk of trying to sustain faith on the basis of an
un-transformed set of human habits - with the all too familiar result
that the Church comes to look unhappily like so many purely human
institutions, anxious, busy, competitive and controlling. In a very
important sense, a true enterprise of evangelisation will always be a
re-evangelisation of ourselves as Christians also, a rediscovery of why
our faith is different, transfiguring - a recovery of our own new
humanity.
And of course it happens most effectively when we are
not planning or struggling for it. To turn to de Lubac once again, 'He
who will best answer the needs of his time will be someone who will not
have first sought to answer them' (op. cit. pp.111-2); and 'The man who
seeks sincerity, instead of seeking truth in self-forgetfulness, is like
the man who seeks to be detached instead of laying himself open in
love' (p.114). The enemy of all proclamation of the Gospel is
self-consciousness, and, by definition, we cannot overcome this by being
more self-conscious. We have to return to St Paul and ask, “Where are
we looking?” Do we look anxiously to the problems of our day, the
varieties of unfaithfulness or of threat to faith and morals, the
weakness of the institution? Or are we seeking to look to Jesus, to the
unveiled face of God's image in the light of which we see the image
further reflected in ourselves and our neighbours?
That simply
reminds us that evangelisation is always an overflow of something else -
the disciple's journey to maturity in Christ, a journey not organised
by the ambitious ego but the result of the prompting and drawing of the
Spirit in us. In our considerations of how we are once again to make the
Gospel of Christ compellingly attractive to men and women of our age, I
hope we never lose sight of what makes it compelling to ourselves, to
each one of us in our diverse ministries. So I wish you joy in these
discussions - not simply clarity or effectiveness in planning, but joy
in the promise of the vision of Christ's face, and in the foreshadowings
of that fulfilment in the joy of communion with each other here and
now.
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