Living well in ordinary time: A tribute to Rowan Williams

http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2013/03/20/3719969.htm

Stanley Hauerwas ABC Religion and Ethics 20 Mar 2013

Rowan Williams taught us that we have to face down our boredom, our expectation that the world will always give us satisfying roles to play. In other words, we have to make an art of ordinary living.

"The hardest thing in the world is to be where we are," observes Rowan Williams in his Lent book, Christ on Trial: How the Gospel Unsettles Our Judgment. Enigmatic though it may be, I think Williams's remark is one worth pondering if we are to negotiate faithfully the current challenges before church and world. By reflecting on this remark, I hope to show why we were so fortunate over the past decade to have had Rowan Williams as our Archbishop of Canterbury. He is an extraordinary theologian whose work is an invaluable resource for helping the church "to be where we are."

The anthropologist David Scott has described our time as "damaged." By "damaged," he means we live in a time in which the once familiar characterizations of time no longer seem compelling. 

According to Scott:

"inerasable residues from the past stick to the hinges of the temporality we have come to rely on to secure our way, and consequently time is not quite as yielding as we have grown to expect it to be."

The persistence of racism and war name the "inerasable residues from the past" that make the time in which we live seem damaged. We live after civil rights and after the cold war - but nothing, it seems, has fundamentally changed. In fact, the problems of race and war seem even more intractable because the past now seems useless for helping us discern any hope for the future.

In a damaged time we might expect - or at least hope - the church would be a beacon of hope, but instead we find ourselves consumed by debates about sexual conduct. That we are captivated by issues surrounding something called "sexuality" is an indication of the captivity of the church to money, class and liberal political arrangements. Nothing makes such captivity more apparent than the relegation of the church to the "private." Sex becomes the issue before the church because sex constitutes the realm of the "private." Watching Christians tear themselves apart over sexual conduct not only must entertain the secular powers, but also assure them that they will face no challenge from Christians. If we live in a damaged time we fear the church is part of the wreckage.

But I believe that living in damaged times and in a damaged church is where God would have us be. "The hardest thing in the world is to be where we are" is Rowan Williams's way to remind us that the time we have been given, our confusing and damaged time, is all the time we need to attend patiently to what seems to be the intractable and contingent problems that beset us. The name for that time, a name that has always been at the heart of Williams's work, is ordinary time.

The art of ordinary living

Animating Williams's work and ministry has been the conviction that through the cross and resurrection we have been given the time, in a world that believes it has no time, to participate patiently in the conversation necessary for the discovery that we swim in the sea of God's love. To learn to live well in ordinary time requires the recognition that time, and the speech that constitutes time, is a gift.

In his book Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement, Williams observes that we have been given speech so that we might learn to honour God through the recognition of our dependency on the "unchosen truths about the universe, and ultimately with the most comprehensive 'fact' of all, the dependent condition of the universe and everything in it." Look at the birds of the air and consider the lilies of the field and see the love that moves the sun and the stars. Only such a love makes it possible to live where we are recognizing that today's trouble is enough for today.

By calling attention to the sheer gratuity of speech, Williams is trying to help us recognize the miraculous character of ordinary time. For to live well in ordinary time is no easy achievement because we are tempted to the dramatic in the desperate attempt to make our lives significant, if not heroic. We are the church of the martyrs, who Williams observes in Christ on Trial, overcame the imperatives of violence by paying the most dramatic cost imaginable. Compared to the martyrs, Williams asks how can our lives - our ordinary lives, lives that will never have to face the violence the martyrs faced - express the truth that violence has been overwhelmed and silenced by Christ?

Williams argues that we cannot and should not try to make our lives more authentic by dramatic gestures. Rather, we must learn to engage in everyday tasks as common as learning to speak the truth and - perhaps, even more demanding - to hear the truth through the time-consuming work of patient conversation. For when we are no longer able to speak and hear the truth, language decays making it impossible to trust ourselves or our neighbour. We lose the ability, as Wendell Berry puts it, to "stand by our words." But "if there is no presence in words," Williams reminds us in Lost Icons, then there will be "no presence in speakers. If you can't trust the contract between word and world, speech and what it's trying to respond to, you can't trust what you may think you perceive 'within' either."

That we no longer trust ourselves or our language is the breeding ground of violence. Another way of putting this is that learning to speak the truth, learning to hear the truth, is the work of peace. It is hard and slow work requiring the overwhelming of the distrust of ourselves and one another. To be in conversation requires that we see ourselves with the eyes of others in a manner that our stance toward the world is put into question. It requires that "I have to face, and face down, my boredom, my expectation that the world will always give me satisfying roles to play. To put it more positively. I have to make an art of ordinary living."

Living with complexity

The art of ordinary living, according to Williams, requires that we learn to live without fear of the complexity of everyday life. Learning to live with the complexity of everyday life means the church cannot fear having the conflicts necessary for peace. Moreover, if the church is capable of such conflict, the church cannot help but be deeply threatening to the world's systems of power, based as they are on the fear of the other. A church constituted by peace, moreover, far from withdrawing from the world, reveals that the world is the realm of the private.

Therefore, in contrast to the oft made suggestion that a commitment to nonviolence means the church must be apolitical, Williams argues in his book The Truce of God that it is the cloister which abandons the privacy of the world for "a solitude which forces people to confront their fear and evasiveness and so equips them for involvement by a stripping-down of the will."

The art of ordinary living as the art of learning to live with complexity obviously has implications for learning to live with the complexity of a confused and confusing church. In Christ on Trial Williams reports, having returned to England after working in the Anglican Church in South Africa for some months, he found he was overwhelmed by a nostalgia for the church he had left. In South Africa, the central questions seemed clear. In South Africa you knew where you should stand because the choices seemed dramatically clear. Returning to Britain meant facing a context in which the central questions were not clear, nor did one know what kind of "resistance" was possible or constructive. He was painfully aware that it was no easy task to translate what he had learned in South Africa into the "more confused and weary environment" of England.

Williams confesses that he longs for a Church more true to itself. Such a church would be one more determined to oppose war, a church capable of offering hospitality to resident aliens who may be gay, a church that can challenge the economic practices that perpetuate poverty. Williams believes his desire for such a church is Godly yet he believes he

"must also learn to live in and attend to the reality of the Church as it is, to do the prosaic things that can be and must be done now and to work at my relations now with the people who will not listen to me or those like me--because what God asks of me is not to live in the future but to live with honesty and attentiveness in the present, i.e., to be at home. We constantly try to start from somewhere other than were we are. Truthful living involves being at home with ourselves, not complacently but patiently, recognizing that what we are today, at this moment, is sufficiently loved and valued by God to be the material with which he will work, and that the longed-for transformation will not come by refusing the love and the value that is simply there in the present moment. Living in the truth involves the same sober attention to what is there - to the body, the chair, the floor, the voice we hear, the face we see--with all the unsatisfactoriness that this brings. Yet this is what it means to live in the kingdom where Jesus rules, the kingdom that has no frontiers to be defended."

The hard work of living in peace

By now, readers must surely be thinking: Is Stanley Hauerwas, who has spent a life criticizing the complacent church, becoming mellow in his old age? Has becoming an Anglican given him the delusion that he is now part of the establishment? Is he going to do the unimaginable - that is, say something nice about liberals? Let me assure you I do not think I am becoming mellow, I have always been part of the establishment but I have tried not to justify that placement, and I am certainly not going to say anything nice about liberals.

Yet it is my conviction that Rowan Williams's understanding of the time in which we must live as Christians, of how we must live in the world as we find it, shares much with what I learned first from John Howard Yoder. An Anabaptist and a former Archbishop of Canterbury are, to be sure, an odd couple, but confusing times can help us discover friends we did not know we had.

At the heart of Yoder's work has been the attempt to teach us the difficult task of living where we are. Yoder's defence of Christian nonviolence depends on an account of time very similar to that of Rowan Williams. For Christian pacifism does not promise to give us a war-less world, but rather Christian pacifism depends on the presumption that in a world of war, a people exist who have the time to engage in the slow and painful work of living in peace with one another. They have the time to so such work because they have learned to sing:

"You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals,

for you were slaughtered and by your blood you ransomed for God
saints from every tribe and language and people and nation,
you have made them to be a
kingdom and priests
serving our God,
and they will reign on earth." (Revelation 5:9-10)

Yoder observes to "rule the world" in fellowship with the Lamb

"will sometimes mean humbly building a grassroots culture, with Jeremiah. Sometimes (as with Joseph and Daniel) it will mean helping the pagan king solve one problem at a time. Sometimes (again with Daniel and his friends) it will mean disobeying the King's imperative of idolatry, refusing to be bamboozled by the claims made for the Emperor's new robe or his fiery furnace."

We are able to live so in the time "where we are" because we believe to so live is the shape of the work of Christ. Yoder further points out that when Jesus washed the feet of his disciples, he did not make a lasting contribution to the hygiene of Palestine. "Similarly, when Christians devote themselves to the care of the seriously ill, of the mentally retarded, of the unproductive aged, the fruitfulness of this service cannot be measured by any statistical index of economic efficacy." Rather the meaning of the deed is what it signifies, namely, in a damaged time and in a damaged church we have learned to live "where we are" because that is the way of peace. In short, we have been given all we need to endure.

Recently, two of my friends were discussing the decision of one of them to make an "ecclesial transition" to another church. The friend who was arguing against making such a move pointed out that there are many rooms in God's kingdom. This elicited the response that while that is certainly true some of the rooms are better furnished than others. I think we Anglicans are extremely fortunate to live in a church that is well furnished. We have all we need to live where we are. At the very least, we have had an Archbishop who exemplifies what it means to live patiently in time by refusing to let us isolate ourselves from one another. The name Anglicans give to that refusal is "communion."

The patience exemplified through the work and ministry of Rowan Williams is also be required of all those called into ordained ministry. Ministers spend most of their lives dealing with the ordinary work of caring for the sick and dying, disputes between people who should know better, the failure of marriages, the child or youth who has done something really stupid, the celebration of a life of someone you do not like, questions of whether you still need an eight o'clock service for those who will not let go of Rite One.

In short, ministers live in ordinary time, undramatic time, in which their lives seem to dribble out one grain of sand at a time. But at least ministers know where you are: they are in the time God has made possible, kingdom time, and the work they do is the peace of God. Hence they are called to be patient, practice word-care, keep the conversation going, and may God help them even learn to love our damaged church; which is the only hope we have if we are to endure this damaged time.