A powerful lesson on friendship from Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard::

Christ’s love for Peter was boundless in this way: in loving Peter he accomplished loving the person one sees. He did not say, “Peter must change and become another person before I can love him again.” No, he said exactly the opposite, “Peter is Peter, and I love him. My love, if anything, will help him to become another person.” Therefore he did not break off the friendship in order perhaps to renew it if Peter would have become another person; no, he preserved the friendship unchanged and in that way helped Peter to become another person. Do you think that Peter would have been won again without Christ’s faithful friendship? But it is so easy to be a friend when this means nothing else than to request something in particular from the friend and, if the friend does not respond to the request, then to let the friendship cease, until it perhaps begins again if he responds to the request. Is this a relationship of friendship? Who is closer to helping an erring one than the person who calls himself his friend, even if the offense is committed against the friend! But the friend withdraws and says (indeed, it is as if a third person were speaking): When he has become another person, then perhaps he can become my friend against. But truly we are far from being able to say of such a friend that in loving he loves the person he sees.

– Works of Love (translated by Howard V. Hong & Edna H. Hong)

In The Lord, Catholic priest and author Romano Guardini (1885-1968) writes:

If anyone should ask: What is certain in life and death — so certain that everything else may be anchored in it? The answer is: The love of Christ. Life teaches us that this is the only true reply. Not people — not even the best and dearest; not science, or philosophy, or art or any other product of human genius. Also not nature, which is so full of profound deception; neither time nor fate. . . . Not even simply “God”; for his wrath has been roused by sin, and how without Christ would we know what to expect from him? Only Christ’s love is certain. We cannot even say God’s love; for that God loves us we also know, ultimately, only through Christ. And even if we did know without Christ that God loved us — love can also be inexorable, and the more noble it is, the more demanding. Only through Christ do we know that God’s love is forgiving. Certain is only that which manifested itself on the cross. What has been said so often and so inadequately is true: The heart of Jesus Christ is the beginning and end of all things.

Theologian Rowan Williams:

I long for the Church to be more truly itself, and for me this involves changing its stance on war, sex, investment, and many other difficult matters. I believe in all conscience that my questions and my disagreements are all of God. Yet I 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.

What if the project in question is myself, and not some larger social question such as war? At the end of the day, it is the central concern for most of us. We long to change and to grow, and we are rightly suspicious of those who are pleased with the way they are and cannot seem to conceive of changing any further. Yet the torture of trying to push away and overcome what we currently are or have been, the bitter self-contempt of knowing what we lack, the postponement of joy and peace because we cannot love ourselves now — these are not the building blocks for effective change. 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.

So we come back, by a longish detour, to the point to which Mark’s narrative brought us: the contemplative enterprise of being where we are and refusing the lure of a fantasized future more compliant to our will, more satisfying in the image of ourselves that it permits. Living in the truth, in the sense in which John’s Gospel gives it, 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 that kingdom where Jesus rules, the kingdom that has no frontiers to be defended. Our immersion in the present moment which is God’s delivers the world to us — and that world is not the perfect and fully achieved thing we might imagine, but the divided and difficult world we actually inhabit. Only, by the grace of this living in the truth, we are able to say to it at least an echo of the ‘yes’ that God says, to accept as God accepts.

– Christ on Trial: How the Gospel Unsettles Our Judgment

George Herbert (1593-1633) is arguably the greatest religious poet in the English language. I wrote a short commentary on his famous pattern poem, “Easter Wings,” for the April issue of Christianity Today. My goal was two-fold: to introduce a wider audience to this 17th century Anglican pastor-poet and to articulate his beautiful vision of our shared resurrection in Jesus Christ.

Read the PDF.

From Rowan Williams’ Anglican Identities:

But perhaps there is a distinctive constellation in Anglican history: the Reformed Church of England emerges in revolt against a medieval map of the world in which the Church was in danger of becoming a political entity alongside others; it develops in tandem with a fantastically inventive period in the use of the English language, producing both a profusion of metaphor and a quick, critical sense of the possibilities and dangers of rhetoric; it discovers both a language for Scripture and a Scripture that shapes secular language, so that its biblical fidelity is deeply bound up with a feel for the riches and the traps of speech. The result is a mixture of poetry, reticence, humility before mystery, local loyalties and painful self-scrutinies. It is not a formula for being Anglican; simply a description of how and where some kind of recognizable historical identity came to exist (p. 7).

From Rowan Williams’ Anglican Identities:

The word ‘Anglican’ begs a question at once. I have simply taken it as referring to the sort of Reformed Christian thinking that was done by those (in Britain at first, then far more widely) who were content to settle with a church order grounded in the historic ministry of bishops, priest and deacons, and with the classical early Christian formulations of doctrine about God and Jesus Christ – the Nicene Creed and the Definition of Chalcedon. It is certainly Reformed thinking, and we should not let the deep and pervasive echoes of the Middle Ages mislead us: it assumes the governing authority of the Bible, made available in the vernacular, and repudiates the necessity of a central executive authority in the Church’s hierarchy. It is committed to a radical criticism of any theology that sanctions the hope that human activity can contribute to the winning of God’s favor, and so is suspicious of organized asceticism (as opposed to the free expression of devotion to God which may indeed be profoundly ascetic in its form) and of a theology of the sacraments which appears to bind God too closely to material transactions (as opposed to seeing the free activity of God’s sustaining and transforming certain human actions done in Christ’s name) (pp. 2-3).

From Rowan Williams’ Anglican Identities:

Anglicans have always been cautious about laying too much stress on formula over and above the classical creeds; and that has proved both a strength and a weakness. A strength because it has at best focused attention on the fundamentals of Christian orthodoxy in a way that allows people to ‘inhabit’ this tradition without too much defensive anxiety about contemporary battles; a weakness because this makes rather a lot depend on the capacity of individual theologians and teachers to orchestrate the central themes of the tradition in a satisfactory way at times when the lack of external norms and boundaries has become a serious worry (p. 1).

In Anglican Identities, Rowan Williams writes about “the lives and the ideas (and the prayers) of some of those who, for various reasons, are recognized as in some way credible representatives of Anglicanism over the centuries,” individuals such as William Tyndale, Richard Hooker, George Herbert, and Michael Ramsey. If there is a shared sensibility among these writers, it may be called “passionate patience.” This sensibility is not uniquely Anglican, but it is decidedly Anglican – and one of the reasons I find myself more and more at home in this tradition. Williams writes:

The writers discussed here in their different ways are apologists for a theologically informed and spiritually sustained patience. They do not expect human words to solve their problems rapidly, they do not expect the Bible to yield up its treasures overnight, they do not look for the triumphant march of an ecclesiastical institution. They know that as Christians they live among immensities of meaning, live in the wake of a divine action which defies summary explanation. They take it for granted that the believer is always learning, moving in and out of speech and silence in a continuous wonder and a continuous turning inside-out of mind and feeling (p. 7).

ABIDING
by Ben Quash

Description
Abiding is not a word we have much use for in everyday conversation. Yet Ben Quash shows that this one concept is central to the Christian life. Abiding, as Quash demonstrates, has the sense of full personal commitment, a quality of solidarity that ‘waiting’ just cannot convey. It speaks of the centrality of order, consistency and continuity in the Christian tradition, of God’s commitment to us and ours to our communities. On the other hand, the kind of ‘abiding’ that Jesus calls his followers to is one of relinquishment, openness and change, living a life out of one’s own control so as to ‘abide’ in Him. Drawing on the wisdom and imagery of modern fiction, film and art, as well as examples of key figures in the classical Christian tradition, Quash skilfully and creatively explores the implications that ‘abiding’ has for our bodies and minds, our relationships and communities, and our spiritual lives.

Table of Contents
Foreword by the Archbishop of Canterbury \ Note to Readers \ Introduction \ 1. Abiding in Body \ 2. Abiding in Mind \ 3. Abiding through Care \ 4. Abiding in Relationships \ 5. Abiding in Exile \ 6. Wounds that Abide \ 7. The Peace that Abides \ Epilogue: Who May Abide?

Author
Ben Quash is Professor of Christian Theology and the Arts at King’s College London, UK.

I’m attending a Sunday School class at Church of the Incarnation taught by Fr. Matthew Olver. His class is entitled, “A Sacrifice of Prayer: A Beginner’s Guide to Anglican Worship and the Book of Common Prayer.” He started the class with an apologia for liturgy, which derives from the Greek word leitourgia, often translated “work of the people” (laos “people” + ergos “work”). He quoted a few sources that I want to share.

In Lord, Teach Us: The Lord’s Prayer and the Christian Life, William Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas address how habit is essential to Christian formation and why worship of God is too important to be left up to spontaneous desire.

Habit is good. Most of the really important things we do in life, we do out of habit. We eat, sleep, make love, shake hands, hug our children out of habit. Some things in life are too important to be left up to chance. Some things are too difficult to be left up to spontaneous desire – things like telling people that we love them or praying to God. So we do them “out of habit.” Thus, in the church we generally do the same things over and over again, week after week, telling the same stories and singing the same songs.

Some complain that this makes church boring. While we do not defend boredom (for it is a sin against the joyful adventure of following Jesus), we do say that habits are important, particularly in a faith that is so against our natural inclinations, a faith that is so at odds with many of the deeply ingrained and widely held assumptions of this culture. We therefore must do things “out of habit” as Christians because it is so difficult for us to pay attention to God in a society that offers us so many distractions. As we have said, prayer is bending our lives toward God. Habit it one way we do that.

In Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, C.S. Lewis discusses why the “long familiarity” of liturgy is preferable to “incessant brightenings, lightenings, lengthenings, abridgements, simplifications, and complications of the service.” Speaking about the majority of Anglicans who favor conservatism in worship over innovation, Lewis writes:

Novelty, simply as such, can have only an entertainment value. And they don’t go to church to be entertained. They go to use the service, or, if you prefer, to enact it. Every service is a structure of acts and words through which we receive a sacrament, or repent, or supplicate, or adore. And it enables us to do these things best – if you like, it “works” best – when, through long familiarity, we don’t have to think about it. As long as you notice, and have to count, the steps, you are not yet dancing but only learning to dance. A good shoe is a shoe you don’t notice. Good reading becomes possible when you need not consciously think about eyes, or light or print, or spelling. The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God. 

But every novelty prevents this. It fixes our attention on the service itself; and thinking about worship is a different thing from worshipping. The important question about the Grail was “for what does it serve?” “‘Tis mad idolatry that makes the service greater than the god.”

A still worse thing may happen. Novelty may fix our attention not even on the service but on the celebrant. You know what I mean. Try as one may to exclude it, the question “What on earth is he up to now?” will intrude. It lays one’s devotion waste. There is really some excuse for the man who said, “I wish they’d remember that the charge to Peter was Feed my sheep; not Try experiments on my rats, or even, Teach my performing dogs new tricks.”

Thus my whole liturgiological position really boils down to an entreaty for permanence and uniformity. I can make do with almost any kind of service whatever, if only it will stay put. But if each form is snatched away just when I am beginning to feel at home in it, then I can never make any progress in the art of worship. You give me no chance to acquire the trained habit – habito dell’ arte.

And finally, the Latin maxim lex orandi, lex credendi (“the law of prayer is the law of belief”) emphasizes that you can see a Christian mostly clearly when he or she is worshipping. The desert monk Evagrius famously put it this way: “A theologian is one who prays, and one who prays is a theologian.” I am learning that the liturgy of the Anglican Church, which comes from The Book of Common Prayer, unites prayer and belief with enough “permanence and uniformity” to make worship my second nature.