'Where God Happens:' Rowan Williams' Handbook on Christian Mysticism

The Desert Fathers would not have blogged.

Pre-modern technical limitations aside, the blogger ethos of immediate self publishing and self promotion contradicts the anonymity, humility, patience and self-forgetting espoused in the sayings of these ancient Christian monks. That's my conclusion after reading Where God Happens by Rowan Williams.

Since I haven't read Williams' source material, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers (which I must now put on my reading list), I can only assume he "got them right." Further, my lack of familiarity with the Fathers (and Mothers too, Williams stresses), turns my attention to Williams himself. In writing about ancient monasticism and the ensuing tradition of Christian meditation, Williams seems to be in his element -- a contemplative contemplating contemplation.

Some of the themes are monastic classics, expected and wise. There is obedience as a pathway to humility and a greater trust in silence than speech. The stark stability of a monk is coupled with his extreme hospitality to the one who travels to him. Asceticism in various forms is how the monk flees from ephemeral carnal pleasures to the reality of God. In one way or another in the sayings, masters training novices to parry devilish attacks of pride.

(For my own walk, I note that ordination is one such source of pride which the Fathers sought to ward off.)

A theme of the book is a philosophical distinction between the personal and the individual. Citing a theologian named Vladimir Lossky, Williams says the person is unique, a product of God's limitless creativity and a source of holy diversity. The individual is a unit, one of many of a perceived kind. From this Williams crafts a prism of Christian spirituality: contemplation of God leads us away from understanding ourselves as an isolated example of some ideal or fantasy and towards knowing ourselves as utterly particular in our being and our relationship with the Father and one another. He says:

There is no general type of Christian holiness. There is an infinite variety of different relationships to Jesus Christ, which also become relationships with each other.

This territory of Christian mysticism which Williams explores is, for me, charged. My own conscious relationship with Christ came via a path that wound through a type of generalized mysticism with an Eastern flavor (what I would now called gnosticism). Much of my thinking after my conversion was along the lines of, What is "Christian" about Christian mysticism? I can't say I came to a conclusion, although I'm sure it has something to do with the fully enfleshed particularity of Jesus of Nazareth. (I can also say the writings of Father Thomas Keating were immensely helpful.)

So, as I read Where Go Happens, I considered again these questions of self knowledge versus self delusion, cataphatic versus apophatic spirituality, commonalities of human experience versus the particularity Christ. (The specifics of Christ's life seem to be mentioned infrequently in the Sayings; how does that matter?) And again no answer has come in a form that fits neatly in a blog post, but I have found a wise guide in Williams. Because of that wisdom I could, in closing, choose any one of the many profound quotations in Where Go Happens. Hmmm, out of my unique personhood in this particular place and time with constraints of my given relationships, I think I'll choose ... this one:

If the heart contains the love of God, one may wonder where is the danger of being guided by it? It is confusing on the surface, but there is something intelligible behind this contradiction. It was Abba Isidore who expressed strong reservations about being guided by the heart. These reservations have to do with listening to what you think are the promptings of your feelings. He wants us to be clear that listening to these promptings is not a guarantee of getting it right. "How can I be wrong if I am so sincere?" is not a Christian principle.

Giving to God in the Gospel of Luke

Our Bible study recently finished studying the Gospel of Luke. Going in to the study I knew Luke’s reputation as the Gospel for the gentiles and the outcasts. And sure enough in our readings I saw how so many of its heroes – in the narrative in Jesus’ parables -- are women, Samaritans, cripples and others on the fringes of Israelite society.

I also had in mind that Luke is the dreaded (for those of us with wealth) “Give Up Your Money Gospel.” It is. Not only does Luke contain the parable of the rich young ruler (“sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor”) and the encounter with Zacchaues (“half my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor”), it also has this blanket mandate: “None of you can become my disciples if you do not give up all your possessions” (14:33).

One twist I discovered in our reading of the Give Up Your Money Gospel was in a parable at its midpoint. Jesus is pulled into an inheritance dispute and responds with what my Bible calls the parable of the rich fool. “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed,” Jesus begins; “for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.”

Then comes the brief story of a rich man whose harvest produced more crops than he could store. Instead of giving away the excess he built more storehouses only to have God tell him, “You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you.” Next, Jesus delivers the punch line: “So it is with those who store up treasure for themselves but are not rich toward God.”

What does it mean to be “rich toward God?” This is the question we considered for an evening in our study, and it is the one that sticks with me still.

I’m sure the answer is inexhaustible but where I’d begin is with a kind of holy giving. Zachariah and Elizabeth, to their astonishment, are given John. Jesus is given to Mary and Joseph, and “for all the people,” as the angels tell the shepherds. The marks of Jesus’ ministry – healings, exorcisms and miracles – can be considered gifts. His sermon on the plain could be seen as a list of gifts for those who seem not to get many.

More fundamentally, Jesus’ whole life is as a gift given back to his father into whose hands he commends his spirit. Then after his resurrection, Jesus promises the giving of the Spirit.

The economy of love among the Trinity, overflowing to the church, is its own inexhaustible mystery. My touching upon it is only to show a connection I made in reading Luke these past months with brothers and sisters. The “Give Up Your Money” messages found so frequently in Luke – e.g., the widows mite and Lazarus and the rich man, in addition to those mentioned above -- is woven in with the rest of Jesus’ life and ministry. Giving to the poor is not an isolated obligation. It is an essential part of giving one's life to God as Jesus showed to do. It is a way of being rich toward God.

Fatherly Fondness Amidst Hollywood Kitsch

At around page 200 of the novel Everything Matters! I was thinking how I could pan it: "Ron's Currie's book reads like the fourth season of sitcom with all the wit and pathos used up, he resorts to secret agents, a cancer cure and drug culture references."

What moved the book from "pretty stinky" to "OK" was a vignette in its waning pages when the protagonist John Thibadeau Jr. gets a call from his mother that his elderly father is too weak to get up from the toilet. In the book's second-person voice (a key to its conceit), John Jr.'s encounter with his father is described.

You crouch in front of your father and look into his eyes and what you see there very nearly breaks you. "Dad," you say. "I'm going to pick you up, all right?" He drops his gaze and nods. You slide your hands under his arms and try gingerly to find the best purchase, though there is no gentle way to lift a grown man. Your mother's still on her haunches to the left side of the toilet, ready to pull your father's pants up once he's on his feet. She swipes at her eyes with the back of her hand.

John Sr. was moved and so was I. Fatherhood is a theme of this blog and this little moment revealed a little something about it -- the loyalty, the messiness, the heartache and the love.

Outside of that little scene, the book reads something like a screenplay for a stereotypical Hollywood movie. There's a comet coming to destroy the earth. Only one man can save it: the protagonist who from birth is addressed in the second person by an omniscient voice. But, oh no, his foibles lead him into drug addiction and heartbreak; he's lost his way.... But wait, now he's reunited with his old girlfriend and sleeps with her -- there's hope! Then she dies. He's already found a cure for his father's cancer, only to have the father die days later, but the comet is still coming. Cue the special effects ... the multiverse is allowing our hero and his family and second chance!

The whole end-of-the-earth thing is supposed to add a philosophical dimension to the story. What is the purpose of life if it is all going to come to an end some day? John Jr.'s response mostly plays out as addiction and rehab, culminating with the profound conclusion that "Everything Matters!"

Well, OK, that's fine for a sitcom or summer flick, but I'm going to go back to being a dad.