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.
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